"okay bro the transport belt doestn even require power who caaaaaaares!444!" i do obsiously

With the advice from the sub, specifically playing my own way and learning the systems, I got a rocket off. I learned a lot, but probably my own piece of advice for newer players would be to not rush, you are rewarded when you take the time to do your own problem solving.

Thanks all, keen to get into Space Age and just mellow my way through.

Hey yall

For some reason one of the train cars has a slight blue hue on it. Noticed it a while back but kept ignoring it. Thought maybe its because i was messing around locomotive colors way back. Today i tried to see if i can do this to other cars, found no way of doing it. Did i do it, if not why is it like that? Can i do this on other cars?

Its not an issue, If i take the car out and place it again it will look normal. but was just wondering.

Thanks
Cheers!

EDIT: Seems like the color was set way before version 2.0. I can copy the color of the blue colored car, using Shift Right-Left click. But can't copy locomotive color to cars using the same method anymore.

So I thought I'd start using the landing pad unloading bays to replace the 40k of bots I had unloading all my deliveries. Watching Nauvis made my computer want to launch into orbit.

I discovered that you cannot load onto a landing pad or the unloading bays - I manufacture green/red/blue science on Nauvis. So to escape the potential 24ish belts needed to mess things up I decided I'd launch red/green/blue science into space then drop it down.

To do this each science pack needed a basic platform requesting x number of packs from Nauvis, then another basic platform requesting all 3 of the packs - this is needed otherwise they're not launched back down to the planet. Nauvis requests packs and they're launched. Problem solved.

However the real problem is now I can't have any of my other silos set to automatically request from platforms because my bots start to take red/green/blue science out of the landing pad! Red/green/blue science are directly fed into other silos.

Is there any circuit wizardry I can use to stop this from happening?

Update. Thanks for all the advice, I've gone with what many of you have advised and created a separate logistics network for my red/green/blue science production + the silos they feed into. A requester chest on the border in the main network requests all the rocket parts which feeds into a buffer chest in the science network. It works!

Thank you very much!

what can i change about my city block design to make it work better? i end up with deadlocks that don't seem to make sense a lot of the time, and i have a hunch it might be due to the extreme amount of chain signals i'm using. the trains will end up on either side of the paths (L and R), but even though they wouldnt crash they still refuse to move.

this is the first time i've made a city block, so i dont really know what to do or check for to make sure crashes or deadlocks dont happen.

i was thinking of using 1-2-1 RHD trains for this, but it might have to be smaller because of the left and right block borders being so small.

blueprint:
https://factorio-blueprints.com/blueprint/hex-city-block

edit: thanks yall for the tips! i think im just gonna redesign the whole thing with all the advice I got, starting with only using two lanes and making each side equally spaced to make more room for the trains to fit between blocks. i can update with a new blueprint once i'm done, but im not sure that this post will be relevant by then. thank you!

second edit: i have a revised design done now, it's a lot different and there are some flaws (eg. the stations take up way too much room, the rails are WAY too dense and there are too many of them overall), but it works for now i think. thank you to everyone who gave me advice! if anyone has any extra tips on the design i would appreciate it, but for now i think im just adding this to the people invested.

updated blueprint:
https://factorio-blueprints.com/blueprint/hex-block-v3

I don't know why it's never occurred to me to put little radar outposts out before? Just a single solar panel is enough to let me know if the biters have expanded in to my pollution cloud.

Worked a few hours off the sprite and realized I got the mouth completely wrong.

Legs are still a bit funky too but the base forms are done so just have to refine the shapes.

Had requests from people asking me to make a book for DWM focused starter builds. I think I am satisfied with it for now, everything is normal quality and production is nothing spectacular, however it is also cost efficient for electricity and resources and very low on pollution for Nauvis and Gleba, in addition to being compact. Also included are simple rail network and mining outposts blueprints.

Will eventually update with a promethium science platform, but that is going to take a very long time for my tech research to be ready for. Going to be fun engineering a no quality promethium platform!

Blueprint Book

I keep loosing Construction Bots, that bravely try to repair a defense wall during an ongoing biter attack. Is there any way to avoid this? Any fancy kind of circuit logic that releases bots only a minute after the damage was detected? I have artillery outposts with one single Roboport. Putting the chest with the repair tools far away does not work, my bots are way too fast and the large groups of biters that come when I knock on a new nest takes its time...

In actuality it took ~250h, a loooot of idle time when game was running in the background is artificially iflating IGT. At first very daunting, later on very satisfying, and run a bit out of steam in the end, with imo needless bloat of bio sciences. I really liked the clever voiding of material and how useless byproducts became bottlenecks later on. What I didn't like is how every upgrade of the machine was needing previous iteration, creating stupidly complicated supply chains, I don't think making flotation cell out of crushers and hydro plants added anything meaningful to the gameplay, except forcing you to do some stupid spaghetti, making them manually or later on turning your brain off when you have The Mall. It takes away from logistical challenge early which is soon null and void by existence of bots. Also physics science is just stupid. What the fuck is this recipe.

When you pass into the organic science the mod loses a bit of it's luster. It's a lot of copying very similar builds to increase troughtput. It's fun to do twice or thrice, not 7-8 times. But getting there is VERY fun. Unlocking new power source is always a mini celebration. In the endgame you can just spam nuclear with stirling engines for easy GWs.

I'm not a competent factorio player by any means, but I finished it (with over 1000 TRAINS, ll hail nuclear trains). As much as I enjoyed my time with it I dont think I'll ever play it again.

Also I hate the symbols for propene, methane etc. they are so similar, it's hard to tell what goes where.

I hadn't seen much on this so was messing around with designing a pulsed system to try to get agricultural towers to harvest every n ticks.

It seems that when they receive a signal to harvest they don't immediately get a target tree - it needs to stay on for about 50-100 ticks to consistently get a harvest operation to start. Once a harvest operation starts it always finishes.

So if you want to send a pulse of 'harvest this plant', that pulse needs to stay on for a while.

It's kinda unique behaviour - I was expecting it to work more like an inserter where a single tick pulse is enough to trigger a full operation.

me and my brothers first run through space age, any opinions on the red circuit set up?

were 70hrs in and he a lil stuck on gleba

I wanted the clean hands and rush to space achievements and decided the best way to do it was to simply leave Nauvis ASAP, abandoning it entirely before coming back with artillery. Did that successfully - but at that point was already comfortably set up on Vulcanus, so I decided to see if I could win the game without coming back. You can see here that the natives moved back in pretty readily - with my original crash-landing site being within spitting distance of a new biter base.

They actually never attacked my former Nauvis base because I simply disconnected the power from most of it - except I had left the boilers running initially to allow for Uranium mining, so one biter did eventually go after the boilers until I cut that final power connection. You can see the destroyed section of the boiler array.

Otherwise, you can see my map, including the total of three oil pumpjacks I got in the upper right (hey, it was enough to get me off planet! They're down to 70% total yield now). You can also see on the kill screen the times I came back to the planet - once to unlock uranium and get "keeping my hands clean", second time to grab a bit more uranium after I unlocked my mech suit and needed more fission reactors.

Finally, you can see that I managed to win in 96:18 despite the handicap I set for myself - first time I actually beat Space Age - and it ends with my little Aquilo Hauler that made it to the system edge. Pretty proud of that one actually - I used no outside blueprints so that brick is all mine. It's almost all rare/epic parts that I scrounged off my Fulgora quality island and got me there pretty comfortably.

Next steps? Land on Nauvis, grab the cargo landing pad, move far enough away to find some rich, rich resources, and clear the area with a few thousand artillery shells. Time to move back in!

With Tier 2 modules, the layout produces 350/min.
With Tier 3 modules, the exact same layout produces 550/min.
I built both factories using the same idea. But I built the one on Nauvis later, after unlocking the Biolab. Because of this, the design and layout of the Nauvis factory are much better and cleaner than on Vulcanus.

I built this based on that idea.
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1qyoflj/vulcanus_all_science_1617kmin/

Did i do any good lol?

In a recent Dosh stream he was saying that placing buildings matching to a blueprint would be much easier if all buildings worked like power poles. A specific example would be dragging an assembler and it only dropping on ghosted locations instead of anywhere it fits. So I thought about how to do it and how easy it would be to implement.

The amount of coding required is actually very small.
1. When a player places an entity over a matching ghost set a ghost placement flag. That type of placement is already checked for in order to set recipes or some rotation things.
2. The flag once set stays set as long as the player holds the mouse button.
3. When the flag is set do not place the entity the player is holding unless the location under it is a matching ghost. This is the only step that requires more than 1 line of added code. Ideally in this step the placed building would placed according to the ghost rotation and not the cursor rotation.

Optionally it could be added as an interface option so old players aren't confused by the new behavior. Also in step 1 above it would probably be good to exclude buildings that already have a drag placing behavior.

i've been factorying as hard and quick as i can, but on default settings i had to search far and wide for enuf ore to get off planet in a reasonable amount of time..

it took me 15 hours to have a self sustaining base on nauvis.. is that bad? what am i doing wrong

Part 1, Part 2

2.1 features inserter flipping and inserters always targeting the input side of a splitter. This lets us greatly simplify some of the previous approaches.

N: Small, cheap way to move deconstructed items back onto a bus/belt without full saturation. Replaces old 'B-D'.

F: No sideloading or splitters. Unchanged from last time.

O: Minimum inserters, but adds splitters and sideloading. Note the last inserter has input priority. Replaces old 'I'.

P: No sideloading or splitters in a thinner profile than F, but adds a fifth inserter. Replaces old 'H'.

Q, Q4: Very high throughput in a small profile, but more bot activity. The requester chests simply read the (filtered) storage chest and request the same thing. As bots move items from storage to requester, the signal decreases and the connected chests end up pretty close to even. Replaces old 'J-M'

As a reminder, bulk inserters and blue belts are a bit strange and require hand size of 11 and 7 for the upstream and downstream inserter targeting a particular lane. 12 and 7 was the norm at one point, but now that only works if both inserters target within the same transport line segment. Don't ask me why, it's just what I learned through testing.

See Part 2 for other belt speeds, inserter types, and inserter quality.

Hello everyone! I’m a new Factorio player and I’ve only played for about 30 hours so far. This is my automated research setup, and I’m currently playing Tutorial 5 in Factorio: Space Age. :D

I’m really happy to share it with everyone! Hope you enjoy it! ❤️

I’m doing this already and we’re having a blast, though I just read about a ton of mods that seem to be potential options so I can’t be sure 100% sure to write here what I have installed vs. what I just read about. I love Ultracube and Py with biters off to give pure engineering puzzles. But to give you an idea what we’re after with this, we want something playable and balanced but sort of crazy like Rampant Fixed + Enhanced Enemy Ai + Enemy Factions, Real Rain + Water is Not Infinite + Terrain Evolution 2 (incompatible with each other, sadly, I think), Power Overload + Realistic Reactors Reborn, Resource Spawner Overhaul, Angel/Bob’s stuff to increase types of ore and diversify recipes. The idea being that landing on this planet, like in real life, isn’t guaranteed to be safe for life at all so you *may* be doomed off spawn; you will depend on a little bit of RNG, and have to decide how to build your “economy” based on what resources you happen to land near (or be able to navigate past dense enemy nests to get to). Your pumps can deplete the lakes but the rain can refill them but the rain blocks solar but it also puts out fires, enemy factions hunt each other so you need to be careful not to wipe out a natural predator allowing another to proliferate unchecked, etc. but you can use pheromones to bait one closer to another; maybe you need to depend on explosives for weaponry because you need the nickel to replace steel instead of using it on weaponry because there isn’t enough copper where you are to support the path you would have taken normally and you may have no choice but to argue over what to use to make what; basically stacking anything that can create more of the sort of emergent stories you get in Rimworld, and that force the players to argue over hard decisions together while under time pressure (while making survival and victory less likely, but hopefully possible in at least a majority of spawns). A chunk of mods I named here aren’t compatible with each other, which is a big reason I’m coming here to ask: someone may have a good idea what is or isn’t compatible; and even once we know the compatible set, there may be different combinations and we’d still want to know what set we could combine to get the most dynamic possible result. It sounds like we might want to load it through 2.0 and not 2.1?

First, let me apologize for no images. I'm on switch 2, and do not have the switch app.

Next, here's the issue: at some point, I need to clear biters, sometimes lots. In the current save, I'm spending time off-planet, my factory on nauvis is about where it needs to be, and I'd rather not have to babysit. So I walled off to the edge of my pollution cloud, but laziness until now resulted in loads of nests within the perimeter. I want to clear them, ideally relatively quickly and without constantly dying. Also, I really don't care for the controls of the vehicles, hate dodging trees and rocks, and it's just another thing to load out and keep track of.

So what I do is pretty simple.

* MK2 Power armor
* Five personal lasers
* Two portable reactors
* Three exoskeleton
* Two energy shields
* Personal roboport
* Stack of lasers
* Stack of large power poles
* Construction robots
* Large power pole and lasers blueprint
* Rocket launcher and rockets
* Stack repair kits

With this, I run power out to wherever I'm going, since I'll need it there anyway. Once I start to encounter biters, if it's a particularly big nest, I'll plop down lasers and pole print. If they are damaged or die, the bots fix or replace them. Otherwise, I just run around, avoiding spit where possible, and my lasers torch everything. Typically, I'll zoom out and hit the large spitters with rockets if they get too annoying. But yeah, I can outrun everything, and they just disappear. It's easy and entertaining.

It's truly a lazy man's technique. Took me a while to iterate through strategies, so I thought someone might find this useful.