Factorio - a factory building game - now with Space Age expansion

[Andnjord]

Congratulations. Now you can start on deep space science, the one that requires gigabrain

I have seen The Future (also known as the research tree) so I know what you mean. That plus whatever the fuck is the Foenestra Anomaly and how it relates to the pyramids, but we’ll get there when we get there.

 

[Jaedar]

Congratulations. Now you can start on deep space science, the one that requires gigabrain

I have seen The Future (also known as the research tree) so I know what you mean. That plus whatever the fuck is the Foenestra Anomaly and how it relates to the pyramids, but we’ll get there when we get there.

I will be incredibly impressed if you figure out the pyramids. I looked up the answer, and still don't actually understand it.
I kinda regret not trying to figure it out, but I was also pretty sick of the game by that point, and the time investment to be allowed be able to try seemed too high.

 

[deama]

For anyone that likes the game but thinks the constant grind for resources, having to worry about them running out etc... is annoying, there's a mod called cloning vat:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/cloning-vat

Anything you put in (except for very certain items), it will double the output. It uses energy ofc to do this.
I think the power usage is too low, just 300kW, but in the mod itself you can easily customize it, just open up
cloning-vat > prototypes > entity.lua
and modify the "energy_usage" to 2000kW. I think 2000kW works best, not too much, but also not too little.

Works for space age too!

 

[Average Manatee]

I thought if anything the resource problem was made too easy in Space Age. Big Drills are just OP. 50% resource drain means everything is worth 2x as more multiplicative with productivity. Fast mining speed means even small deposits still have a fast mining rate, you need vastly less modules to upgrade them, and if you really want to not worry about mining forever then quality improves resource drain even further. I don't think I really exhausted any deposits outside my starting area when it comes to the important resources, aside from the first small one on fulgora and the first tungsten on Vulcanus. In fact I think the resource I had to go the furthest for to satisfy my needs was oil, though I could have done coal liquefaction in hindsight.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

A new player will probably go trough a few patches before getting to vulcanus unless they are following a guide, way back when my biggest concern was having to set up the entire mining outpost again the initial one can be a bit discouraging since it's so small, a mod to make it like oil fields or bigger area drills could be helpful.

 

[deama]

I just started the space age and don't really like it. It feels like they added inconveniences just to make it more of a time waste.
Like, why can't I take my inventory with me? I need to keep posting rockets until I get enough resouces? Seriously?
The UI on the space age is also annoying, I donno why you have to use this psuedo item picker isntead of being able to use the items in the inventory directly. It's really annoying cause now you have to keep switching between the station inventory and this psuedo item picker so you know what you actually got.

 

[Andnjord]

By the way Jaedar, how far along did you go with productivity modules in your SE run? I’ve filled the labs and the naquitite production chain with tier 7 but it seems like any further would be prohibitively expensive and not worth it anymore.

 

[Jaedar]

I thought if anything the resource problem was made too easy in Space Age. Big Drills are just OP. 50% resource drain means everything is worth 2x as more multiplicative with productivity. Fast mining speed means even small deposits still have a fast mining rate, you need vastly less modules to upgrade them, and if you really want to not worry about mining forever then quality improves resource drain even further. I don't think I really exhausted any deposits outside my starting area when it comes to the important resources, aside from the first small one on fulgora and the first tungsten on Vulcanus. In fact I think the resource I had to go the furthest for to satisfy my needs was oil, though I could have done coal liquefaction in hindsight.

I've been researching mining productivity faster than my deposits on nauvis run out, and I haven't had to move the walls at all since I first made them before going to another planet. And I haven't even upgraded with better drills, foundries or electromagnetic plants.

By the way Jaedar, how far along did you go with productivity modules in your SE run? I’ve filled the labs and the naquitite production chain with tier 7 but it seems like any further would be prohibitively expensive and not worth it anymore.

The best way to get t9 modules is to plunder the pyramids. I put t9 in my one and only research lab, my naquitite was whatever stuff I had lying around (so mostly a mix of T6s and T7s with a handful of T9s sprinkled in). I didn't actually mass produce anything above T5s iirc.

I just really hated the vitamelange production chain, no matter what I did I never got a decent flow, so I never had the slack to make a lot of productivity modules. Speed and efficiency I had limited mass production of all the way to T8 iirc.

 

[Andnjord]

The best way to get t9 modules is to plunder the pyramids. I put t9 in my one and only research lab, my naquitite was whatever stuff I had lying around (so mostly a mix of T6s and T7s with a handful of T9s sprinkled in). I didn't actually mass produce anything above T5s iirc.

Yeah, I have two already from the pyramids that were in my system. The plan is to rush antimatter engines and then go on a cruise and gather all those outside my system (plus taking screenshots of the insides of the pyramids), without those engines I’ll have to constantly fly back and forth to Nauvis to refill the rocket fuel tanks and even with the Foenestra anomaly that’s more flying time than I care for.

 

[Average Manatee]

Like, why can't I take my inventory with me? I need to keep posting rockets until I get enough resouces? Seriously?

The player's inventory is the most OP chest in the game, you can carry hundreds if not thousands of rockets worth of items in your pockets. So that's the reason. I think there's also the idea that the player should be somewhat encouraged to start anew on the first three planets, if you airdrop everything you can pretty much just bulldoze all difficulty and threats. Rockets are surprisingly cheap now so just get used to automating production to launch consistently, eventually on 4+ silos.

The UI on the space age is also annoying, I donno why you have to use this psuedo item picker isntead of being able to use the items in the inventory directly. It's really annoying cause now you have to keep switching between the station inventory and this psuedo item picker so you know what you actually got.

It can get annoying but the point is that you can put down ghost buildings to have the station automatically request whatever it needs from the surface.

 

[Andnjord]

I just really hated the vitamelange production chain, no matter what I did I never got a decent flow, so I never had the slack to make a lot of productivity modules. Speed and efficiency I had limited mass production of all the way to T8 iirc.

I make about 6k extract per minute, so mass producing tier 6 is alright. It’s making tier 7 that’s painful on my production, but I still have 150 in storage on top of the ones already used (having 250% productivity bonus in total on the Naquitite production is pretty nice ).


On the other hand I can’t see the need for any speed or efficiency higher than 6, even beyond 5 I tend to run into belt throughput problems.

 

[deama]

Like, why can't I take my inventory with me? I need to keep posting rockets until I get enough resouces? Seriously?

The player's inventory is the most OP chest in the game, you can carry hundreds if not thousands of rockets worth of items in your pockets. So that's the reason. I think there's also the idea that the player should be somewhat encouraged to start anew on the first three planets, if you airdrop everything you can pretty much just bulldoze all difficulty and threats. Rockets are surprisingly cheap now so just get used to automating production to launch consistently, eventually on 4+ silos.

The UI on the space age is also annoying, I donno why you have to use this psuedo item picker isntead of being able to use the items in the inventory directly. It's really annoying cause now you have to keep switching between the station inventory and this psuedo item picker so you know what you actually got.

It can get annoying but the point is that you can put down ghost buildings to have the station automatically request whatever it needs from the surface.

I'm wondering why they didn't scale up the threats in general on the other planets? If player is so OP he should be able to handle higher level and more interesting threats like bigger monsters, larger swarms, more evolution specialisations from the monsters, lava floor, special atmosphere changes, robotic artificial enemy entities? etc...
It just seems pretty cheap and artificial the difficulty they've added by just doing a soft restart per planet.

 

[Average Manatee]

It just seems pretty cheap and artificial the difficulty they've added by just doing a soft restart per planet.

You don't HAVE to restart, you can airdrop whatever you want. Even the things you can't put in a rocket you can just load the components, meaning you can throw down a full nuclear setup and bot network with hundreds of bots if you want. Hell, airdrop the barrels of water you need if you want (it's actually fairly efficient now).

If player is so OP he should be able to handle higher level and more interesting threats

Gleba absolutely has this but it gets annoying since its hard to have a hands-off defense before very advanced tech, meaning your attention is pulled there with every major attack even if you're on a completely different planet.

 

[Jaedar]

On the other hand I can’t see the need for any speed or efficiency higher than 6, even beyond 5 I tend to run into belt throughput problems.

I used high tier speeds for data reformatting and research mainly. Also some other places where I didn't feel like rebuilding it to increase throughput, so I just put down a compact beacon.
Some of the lategame buildings (especially lategame buildings + high productivity) are so expensive that I think this is actually pretty viable, and not just lazy.

You don't HAVE to restart, you can airdrop whatever you want.

Yeah. They make it a bit tedious since you have to check the research to see what materials you will need to make stuff, but it's pretty easy to construct everything you need for a planet in 3 hours or something (including building a silo and rockets), even with few materials.

I have more or less finished Aquilo (this spaghetti might be the worst build I've ever made. But it works). In terms of challenge I think this was a good planet, the need to put heat piping everywhere and bots consuming crazy amounts of power forces you to build differently. Even something as simple as pumpjacks becomes a challenge.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Christ Fulgora is complicated. Vulcanus was nothing in comparison. Fulgora was supposed to be the first or second planet and it's got problems that are so hard to solve programmatically, people literally haven't solved them on reddit. I'm bringing in junk from another island, but trying to recycle everything on mine and produce blue-quality holmium plates. There's simply not enough holmium ore to scale it up, I'm making one blue holmium plate per 5 minutes.

To scale it up, I imagine bringing in junk from MANY islands, while also exporting junk to MANY other islands. I've been here for 3 days and I'm still in awe of how much work it'll all require. 134 hours played so far.

 

[Tyrr]

I also just arrived on Fulgora, after doing Vulcanus. I'm doing things slowly, building up one planet before moving to the next.
So far I use long belts and lots of splitters to filter stuff. I filter items with the splitter from a main belt (you can also filter by quality) and either box it or recycle it again. It's like a big loop of endless recycling.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Figured it out, made a blue mech armor.

 

[Average Manatee]

The way to do Fulgora is pretty easy once you systematize it. Every ingredient lane goes through a splitter with the low priority output going into a storage that refills the main line when it's low. The chests are them wired and a recycler recycles them if they get close to the storage limit.

I think I posted an example earlier. The other easy way is to use bots everywhere

 

[Tyrr]

I found this on 4chan yesterday, its similar to what I'm doing. Just also with added quality.
That's what I'm going for next.

Spoiler

 

[Jaedar]

Not really enjoying the endgame stretch of building a spaceship that can reach end of solar system.

Spoiler

The stupid railguns keep shooting things that are way off to the side, which causes them to splinter into smaller pieces that are actually dangerous since some of them will get a lot of sideways momentum. This is very annoying and not that much fun.

Making the circuits for optimal thrust profiles, filtering collection of rocks and recycles rock types was ok. But I feel like the final bit I need to actually win is just "lol put lots more railguns and turrets everywhere". It's also pretty easy to buffer things in space once you get stacked belts.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I found this on 4chan yesterday, its similar to what I'm doing. Just also with added quality.
That's what I'm going for next.

Spoiler

Just two belts of scrap - tiny throughput.

 

[Tyrr]

Just two belts of scrap - tiny throughput.

Nothing stops you from copy/paste another next to it. But you need 24 recyclers for every belt. So you can't just add bets.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I know, but I did a scheme for 4 belts at the same time, and I worked my ass off, so now I subjectively value my 4-lane design more.

 

[Average Manatee]

I found this on 4chan yesterday, its similar to what I'm doing. Just also with added quality.
That's what I'm going for next.

Spoiler

I don't get that design. Lets take iron plates. The inserter pulls each quality of plate off the bus. That's bad, it means you can't use iron until either that chest fills up or the inserter's swing throughput is lower than the plate throughput.

If you want to manage quality on Fulgara you should use some kind of design like this :

Everything quality goes into containers. Everything normal gets prioritized being sent out but will buffer in chests when the bus is full, and is then used to refill the bus if it runs dry. Of course you can make slightly more complex designs if you want to refill both lanes of the bus rather than just the far lane but this is minimalist.

That said I would not be doing a full quality setup on Fulgara w/o bots.

 

[Jaedar]

Well, I reached the edge of the galaxy. If someone should happen to be interested, my galaxy entry is here https://factorio.com/galaxy/Calcite III: Zeta1-3.B5W3 (there's actually some pretty cool statistics and map views in this). Took 60 hours, so quite a lot more than the true speedrunning achievement, but also a ridiculous margin to the 100hour one.

I did kind of limp onto the finish line, I really don't like the asteroid splintering mechanics.

I feel a bit bad, because I kinda half assed every planet. I never upgraded Nauvis with anything from the other planets (except biolabs), I didn't even place a single green belt. My final ship couldn't even be stationary anywhere other than Nauvis for more than 30s, becuase it had no side facing guns. Aquilo is particularly bad, the spaghetti was absolute, there is no way I could fit in duplicates of any building (but you also only need like 3000 cold science packs and 1k quantum procs to beat the game so.... you don't need throughput).

But worst of all, I had an assembler working on making a blue mech suit, and it did actually succeed, but at that point I had accepted I was never going to leave aquilo, because there was nowhere to go.

Planet ratings: Fulgora>>Gleba>Aquilo>Vulcanus.