Vic plays Factorio

[Vic]

Procrastinating on learning about trains by laying out a blue belt of iron ore back to my smelters. Please don't look at the balancing on this.

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[Vic]

One blue belt wasn't enough. The factory is starting to become quite demanding.

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[Andnjord]

One blue belt wasn't enough.

Oh you sweet sweet summer child.

 

[Vic]

So, umm, I just discovered that if you press L you can see your logistic storage... *facepalm*

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I'm also trying to make my production "smarter" and only produce an item when there's a need. I think that's cleaner than simply limiting chest slots.

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And now I learned that you don't even have to connect them by wire and can instead use a wireless connection. That's very cool.

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[Vic]

That's quite a bit of work linking up all inserters to the network. I'm having a large cup of tea and listening to my favorite music albums while doing the busy work on my "smart" base.

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[Vic]

Hooking up inserters to the logistic network is a must! I've been doing it wrong all along by limiting chest slots. This way I can simply over-build assemblers and they'll only activate when the item they're producing goes below X amount. Watching this is pretty cool.

I built a bunch of plastic chemical plants to keep plastic at 1k in my network. They are active around half of the time, which gives me a good idea that I can probably double my plastic consumption without worrying about a shortage. Also got the achievement for researching all tech. Now only space science remains. I think I'll be busy optimizing my base with my newly found knowledge for a while before going for rockets and space science.

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[Vic]

Today I have been dreaming about Factorio. I think I'm doing it right.

 

[Vic]

Finished hooking up my factory to the logistic network. No more over-production. Stuff only gets produced when it's needed. I'm still impressed by how nifty this is.

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[Hellraiser]

Why is overproduction even a problem? If you don't need stuff belts or logistics chests will naturally clog up anyway.

 

[Vic]

Why is overproduction even a problem? If you don't need stuff belts or logistics chests will naturally clog up anyway.

It's not a problem per se. It just tickles my autism. However, there is a practical reason to this. Using logistic chests to control production results in only the closest chests relative to the roboport assigned for transport being emptied, with chests further away staying at full capacity and the assemblers not producing. This leads to skewed production data and it's hard to see what your actual max production is. I'm not using belts so I don't have a visual indicator of throughput. Seeing, for example, copper cable assemblers being active only half of the time gives me a good estimate of how much of my maximum production potential I'm tapping.

The other side to this is that I can simply build a lot of assemblers, and they'll only activate when needed. Using chests, even if only limiting to one chest slot, building more assemblers will also increase stored buffer.

It should also help with pollution by not having large buffers of unneeded resources.

But again, it's mostly just cool seeing your factory wake up and go to sleep when needed!

 

[Vic]

Starting on rocket production. Doing rocket control units. My factory is now easy to scale. If I need more red chips I just copy and paste more sets down somewhere within my logistic network radius. The only thing I need to worry about is keeping enough ores supplied to feed my factory. The screenshot shows only a part of my assemblers.

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[Vic]

So, productivity modules. I'm trying to wrap my head around them. For now I put them in the rocket silo but I'm trying to understand how it would benefit slotting them into everything else. I'll have to rebuild my base to accommodate for speed beacons for them to really shine, right?

 

[Average Manatee]

Why is overproduction even a problem? If you don't need stuff belts or logistics chests will naturally clog up anyway.

It can be a problem. Calculate out how much resources you have taken up when there's a 4 wagon train full of yellow science along with the loading and unloading chests for the train on both sides.

 

[Hellraiser]

Honestly the thought of shipping science by trains and with more than one wagon at that just seems alien to me. But that's also because I just build one mega factory and I only have train-connected outposts for raw resources, that seems to be enough to get the level 2 production rate cheevos.

For level 3 production rate achievements I guess you need to do things like say ship steel or copper wire or electronics or other finished/intermediatry goods from satellite factories with trains because the area footprint of the production blocks for those can get so big and you ran out of room unless you really had it all perfectly planned out in advance.

 

[Vic]

The factory grows. And I'm running out of copper. This is it. I have to build trains now. So I'll be figuring that out for the next couple hours.

Also increased my solar power to 750MW and moved all solar panels to the desert. Not that I need that much power now, but I already had them crafted so...

I'm also thinking about rebuilding my base using prod modules + beacons. I'll have to read up on that a bit more though.

Haven't launched a rocket yet.

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[Vic]

I lied about trains. Or rather, I found a copper deposit not far from my base and hooked it up to my smelters.

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[Average Manatee]

Literally my first game. "I'll do trains... on the next ore patch" deploys a mile of belts. Nowadays I go to trains almost immediately and never look back.

Prod modules + beacons with speed modules is a huge upgrade and almost feels like cheating, if you do it you probably have way more resources than you need since everything becomes so much more efficient with prod. It's also stupidly easy to set up if you're using bots. If you do the numbers it's actually not that much more power per item, around 2x I believe, assuming your assembler is always working. Even less once you consider production bonus means you need less inputs for the outputs. There's just a huge static power cost of beacons that can't turn off when the assembler isn't working.

 

[Vic]

Prod modules + beacons with speed modules is a huge upgrade and almost feels like cheating, if you do it you probably have way more resources than you need since everything becomes so much more efficient with prod.

Glad to hear it! Maybe I can avoid trains altogether if I go this route. I really can't be bothered. I have train PTSD from playing OpenTTD.

 

[Vic]

Holy cow. I increased my blue chip production by almost 8x using 5 assemblers with beacons compared to 20 unmodded assemblers and the setup is taking up around the same space too. Time to beacon all of my shit.

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[Vic]

The 12 beacon layout increases production by 9x. This assembler is producing 135 red science per minute. Not sure which design I should go for; 8 vs 12 beacons. Late game problems.

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Edit:
I think I like the 12 beacon design more. It looks more modular and meshes aesthetically better with a bot base in my opinion. Nevermind, 8 beacon design is much more compact, so I'll go with that.

 

[Andnjord]

Get ready for your ore demand to completely explode and start switching to trains.

 

[Average Manatee]

His ore demand will go down greatly per unit produced due to prod modules. Of course its very easy to scale up and increase overall production but just launching a rocket won't cost much.

 

[Vic]

In the process of beaconizing my factory, starting at the smelters. I'm able to reduce the space requirements by half and get an extra 20% plates. Great thing is the production modules stack throughout the production chain. By adding them to my copper cable assemblers, which take 4 modules for an extra 40% cable, this comes down to a total of +68% extra product if my math is correct. And the bonus only keeps increasing the further up the production chain it goes. That's pretty hefty.

Also, kind of funny how close the Biters are to my smelters but I'm too lazy to clear them out. Might keep them around as pets and torture them with my pollution. The challenge in Deathworld was over as soon as a passed a certain tech threshold. The Biters don't even bother me anymore.

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[Jaedar]

If you do the numbers it's actually not that much more power per item, around 2x I believe

Somehow I don't believe this?
A machine with 4 prod modules will have 40% prod bonus and 320% power consumption. Adding speed modules in beacons to that will only make it drain even more power, and even just with prods you are looking at a cost of 4.2/1.4 = 3, ie it drains 3 times as much power per item, while also being a lot slower.

Imo the power cost doesn't matter though, once you get nuclear reactors with kovarex processing it's easy to make infinity power. The real cost to modules is the initial material cost, as they are very expensive. Once you get over that hump though there's no reason not to put them everywhere.

 

[Average Manatee]

In the process of beaconizing my factory, starting at the smelters. I'm able to reduce the space requirements by half and get an extra 20% plates. Great thing is the production modules stack throughout the production chain. By adding them to my copper cable assemblers, which take 4 modules for an extra 40% cable, this comes down to a total of +68% extra product if my math is correct. And the bonus only keeps increasing the further up the production chain it goes. That's pretty hefty.

Also, kind of funny how close the Biters are to my smelters but I'm too lazy to clear them out. Might keep them around as pets and torture them with my pollution. The challenge in Deathworld was over as soon as a passed a certain tech threshold. The Biters don't even bother me anymore.

Spoiler

Don't start at the smelters, that's one of the worst ratios of production module to value of item produced. The best place to put modules on are:

Spoiler

(numbers shown are the time to pay back your investment)

If you do the numbers it's actually not that much more power per item, around 2x I believe

Somehow I don't believe this?
A machine with 4 prod modules will have 40% prod bonus and 320% power consumption. Adding speed modules in beacons to that will only make it drain even more power, and even just with prods you are looking at a cost of 4.2/1.4 = 3, ie it drains 3 times as much power per item, while also being a lot slower.

Imo the power cost doesn't matter though, once you get nuclear reactors with kovarex processing it's easy to make infinity power. The real cost to modules is the initial material cost, as they are very expensive. Once you get over that hump though there's no reason not to put them everywhere.

Spoiler

8 crafting speed * 1.4 productivity = 11.2 production. Energy usage is 4.73 MW for assembler and 0.48 MW *12 Beacons = 10.49 MW total. So 1.06 production per MW. But if assume this is tiled, we should discount the beacon energy usage by how many other assemblers they affect, so instead we use 1/4th of 4 beacons and 1/2 of 8 of them, which gives us 2.4 MW for the beacons + 4.73 for assembler = 7.13 MW total. This gives us 1.57 production per MW

Base assembler is 1.25 crafting speed / .388 MW = 3.22 production per MW. 3.22/1.57 = 2.05, or a 105% power cost increase per item.

When you consider that you also need less inputs thanks to +40% production (*drastically* less for later items), modules just get even closer. Probably even pulls ahead on a number of advanced items.