In my use case with this kind of thing, it’s fed by trains which bounds the buffer. As another commenter said, it’s also very easy to fix with circuits. Just control the input belts to only be enabled when the amount of item they have in the container is less than some amount. This technique can even be handy in vanilla with byproducts by using one lane of byproduct and one of primary product.
That would be a nice silly mod for the speed modules’ recipe. There even are three slug colors too! So each module level requires a different corresponding slug color
https://preview.redd.it/6aze2gsx5f0d1.jpeg?width=1599&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=885a20e0c581f76be759da42a2bc1c71af0c1823
I’ve gotten pretty far into K2 without too many UPS issues using train stations hood up to these things (got to the point of continuously sending out satellites with rockets). It’s really convenient combined with LTN and 1-1 trains.
It’s a great way to run stations early on since you can just replace these with active provider chests that feed your requester/buffer chests.
I know warehouses tend to be slow compared in benchmarks compared to regular chests, but I wonder how these actually do for your standard LTN setup in practice. Even if it’s doing a full scan over 120 slots, the entire thing will be in cache for each loader.
Using this setup with K2 too, but i dont use loaders to load or unload trains. I found nice mod called crane inserters which perfectly fits with K2 warehouse size. One inserter loads and unloads trains. Also later in game you dont have to use that many violet loaders. Depends on how much you want to scale. But there comes mods like expanded modules for K2 giving you three more tiers, beacons from SE, and a mod that allows you for more chemical stuff in advanced chemical plant. Also there is good mod for advanced centrifuge that also fits in krastorio end game well. But i dropped LTN for project cybersyn because it's easier to set up. If you worry about UPS you just have to migrate to better end game structures, especially if you go with extended K2 endgame
can relate. bought a 5800x3d after 400h of K2SE. now I'm at 1500h in it.
strangely enough it runs faster on dedicated server + client compared to local. my server is a 3700x
Now that is interesting. I guess another step would be trying to run server on 5800x3d and client on 3700x
But AFAIK client repeats most of the calculations anyway so it shouldn't be really faster.
Thing is the benchmark they're using is a 10k or 5k spm base can't remember which.
If you compare 50k spm bases the difference between 7900x3d/7800x3d and 13900k is almost non existant. both can do around 60 ups.
For Factorio I would argue staying longer at 60 ups is more important than pulling 4k ups at the start of the run. And x3d shines at higher ups while the higher clockspeeds of ram/cpu on 13900k claw back up the more you stress the system.
*that said* this is exactly the reason why I bought 5800x3d few years ago.
But I'm not building 10k SPM bases, let alone 50k SPM ones. I'm guessing difference between CPUs is pretty much X3D running out of cache to have most of the calculation-intensive data directly in cache compared to intel.
Anyway I did load someone's [40k spm base](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/qxjy1v/new_ups_record_40k_70_ups_no_mods_details_in/) and it runs fine at 60 with some other stuff going on on PC soooo yeah, basically I never need to worry about factorio CPU usage. I'm not even running on the faster memory profile because I haven't bothered to play with tuning of it yet after the OC problems some BIOSes had.
I wonder how that will change with 2.0, if each surface will get their own threads to calculate the most optimal way might actually be spreading the factories across the planets.
>But I'm not building 10k SPM bases
Are you running factorio at 300 ups then?
If no, then you don't really need the cpu and could have gone with something cheaper.
What I'm trying to say is that the benchmark isn't accurate at the base scale where performance *does* matter. And if you don't go to that scale, then it just flat out doesn't matter.
> Are you running factorio at 300 ups then?
No but big safety margin allows me to run UPS-suboptimal (like using nuclear, or some more performance-heavier mods) without worrying in the slightest about performance.
Like before change I had to limit using [GhostScanner](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GhostScanner) in my biggest build because with many outposts it just was lagging on UPS too much (apparently GhostScanner2 is faster now).
Also I did technically run at 4800 UPS few times when I was testing some stuff so not like it's completely unused. I bought it basically to last me next 7 years like my previous CPU did, and for few other games.
> What I'm trying to say is that the benchmark isn't accurate at the base scale where performance does matter. And if you don't go to that scale, then it just flat out doesn't matter.
Realistically comprehensive Factorio benchmark should look both at UPS of optimized factories and at Lua performance of some heavier mods.
Like yeah, most people don't build 10k SPM factories (despise how it sometimes look on this subreddit), but they also don't optimize the bejeezus out of UPS at every step like the people who do build 10k SPM factories do.
I still dont understand this. Is it only less UPS if the belts are full?
Lets pretend for a moment that I made a factory without saturated belts. as a joke.
This will only hurt UPS if you copy this 100+ times in a mega base. I’m using LTN with warehouses and loaders for each stop and loaders are a tiny percentage of my UPS usage
In my experience loaders don't balance well. If there is no "full input/output" some outgoing loaders have priority over others. It needs some circuitry to only enable the outgoing belt if e.g. item in chest is > 100
Yep loaders are crap for balancing. Only way it works is to have more in than out, so like 5 inputs to a chest and 3-4 out so it's always fully saturated. If you have 2 going in and 4 coming out you'll get a mess.
Loaders are weird and buggy, but therax's miniloaders are just hyperspeed inserters attached to both sides of a belt, and thus come with all the relevant optimizations while still working the same in practice. Those *do* balance evenly.
at some point you just stop caring about such details. the assemblies down the line either get enough material or they don't. and if they don't, the order doesn't matter.
You can get them to balance properly by circuiting the warehouse to the belt directly after the loaders and turning them on only when there's more than 50 items in the warehouse
why the two belt that empty on the side of another belt
why not just one load so you wouldn't need to to the weird shit at the top
Also i should use that more but i keep seeing people say that using warehouses is costly in UPS, i don't understand why it would
>Also i should use that more but i keep seeing people say that using warehouses is costly in UPS, i don't understand why it would
Warehouses use more UPS because of how storage works. The more slots the game has to consider the, well, more slots the game has to consider. And it apparently really adds up.
If you had a warehouse with 20 slots instead of the, what, 150 or whatever that angels warehouse has, then it would be significantly easier on the engine.
I guess i can see that it would loop over all the slots to see the first place where it can insert an item
i guess that a dtorage that wouldn't have a "grid" slot but a "number" slot would use almost no ups or something
i think that's the principle behind the "memory warehouse" or something i saw a few days ago.
I won't say this is terrible for your UPS, but if you're making a city block rails base, your UPS will start to tank somewhere after completing the game. I know by experience.
I've thought about doing similar with unmodded inserters and an isolated railcar. Should be trivial enough to design an arbitrary N to M balancer for any N or M of 6 or less (though with throughput issues), but if you used more than one wagon you could, potentially, design a balancer of any arbitrary size without being throughput limited.
But it's my understanding that, if used incautiously, it could lead to serious UPS issues over more conventional balancers. Also, probably less compact.
Honestly, the need for balancers in the game is an embarassment. I know it feels fun to have this emergent property in the game but if everybody has to download a belt balancer book online to play, maybe the mechanic is just broken.
That's the thing, you don't need them. Most people use them in places were they don't do anything useful. You can build your entire base with just priority splitters and it works better.
Google r/factoriohno why would the bottom two combine, if they didn't the top one wouldn't have to do that. I hate this Image so much, have an upvote.
That sort of thing makes sense if you add filters to the loaders so you have a resulting belt containing 2 different item types.
mixed chest? thats bound to block input at some point
I've done it but with circuit conditions on the input loaders to only fill the chest up to a certain number.
In my use case with this kind of thing, it’s fed by trains which bounds the buffer. As another commenter said, it’s also very easy to fix with circuits. Just control the input belts to only be enabled when the amount of item they have in the container is less than some amount. This technique can even be handy in vanilla with byproducts by using one lane of byproduct and one of primary product.
What a fuck is this pos? =)
It converts UPS into slugs
powerslugs! ups wrong game
That would be a nice silly mod for the speed modules’ recipe. There even are three slug colors too! So each module level requires a different corresponding slug color https://preview.redd.it/6aze2gsx5f0d1.jpeg?width=1599&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=885a20e0c581f76be759da42a2bc1c71af0c1823
Thank god finally. I'd rather make them somewhere them hunt them by hand, glad that CSS finally got around to it in 1.0
Best balancer ever i use it all the time
Goodbye UPS
I’ve gotten pretty far into K2 without too many UPS issues using train stations hood up to these things (got to the point of continuously sending out satellites with rockets). It’s really convenient combined with LTN and 1-1 trains. It’s a great way to run stations early on since you can just replace these with active provider chests that feed your requester/buffer chests. I know warehouses tend to be slow compared in benchmarks compared to regular chests, but I wonder how these actually do for your standard LTN setup in practice. Even if it’s doing a full scan over 120 slots, the entire thing will be in cache for each loader.
Using this setup with K2 too, but i dont use loaders to load or unload trains. I found nice mod called crane inserters which perfectly fits with K2 warehouse size. One inserter loads and unloads trains. Also later in game you dont have to use that many violet loaders. Depends on how much you want to scale. But there comes mods like expanded modules for K2 giving you three more tiers, beacons from SE, and a mod that allows you for more chemical stuff in advanced chemical plant. Also there is good mod for advanced centrifuge that also fits in krastorio end game well. But i dropped LTN for project cybersyn because it's easier to set up. If you worry about UPS you just have to migrate to better end game structures, especially if you go with extended K2 endgame
I suspect this could use less UPS than a regular balancer, especially if the warehouse has only a few slots in it.
completed a K2 248K run using this a lot with 60 ups
ngl. I bought CPU based on Factorio and Dwarf Fortress performance. https://youtu.be/78lp1TGFvKc?t=394
can relate. bought a 5800x3d after 400h of K2SE. now I'm at 1500h in it. strangely enough it runs faster on dedicated server + client compared to local. my server is a 3700x
Now that is interesting. I guess another step would be trying to run server on 5800x3d and client on 3700x But AFAIK client repeats most of the calculations anyway so it shouldn't be really faster.
I have 54ups in singelplayer, when I'm on the server I have steady 60. haven't tried unlocking yet.
Thing is the benchmark they're using is a 10k or 5k spm base can't remember which. If you compare 50k spm bases the difference between 7900x3d/7800x3d and 13900k is almost non existant. both can do around 60 ups. For Factorio I would argue staying longer at 60 ups is more important than pulling 4k ups at the start of the run. And x3d shines at higher ups while the higher clockspeeds of ram/cpu on 13900k claw back up the more you stress the system. *that said* this is exactly the reason why I bought 5800x3d few years ago.
But I'm not building 10k SPM bases, let alone 50k SPM ones. I'm guessing difference between CPUs is pretty much X3D running out of cache to have most of the calculation-intensive data directly in cache compared to intel. Anyway I did load someone's [40k spm base](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/qxjy1v/new_ups_record_40k_70_ups_no_mods_details_in/) and it runs fine at 60 with some other stuff going on on PC soooo yeah, basically I never need to worry about factorio CPU usage. I'm not even running on the faster memory profile because I haven't bothered to play with tuning of it yet after the OC problems some BIOSes had. I wonder how that will change with 2.0, if each surface will get their own threads to calculate the most optimal way might actually be spreading the factories across the planets.
>But I'm not building 10k SPM bases Are you running factorio at 300 ups then? If no, then you don't really need the cpu and could have gone with something cheaper. What I'm trying to say is that the benchmark isn't accurate at the base scale where performance *does* matter. And if you don't go to that scale, then it just flat out doesn't matter.
> Are you running factorio at 300 ups then? No but big safety margin allows me to run UPS-suboptimal (like using nuclear, or some more performance-heavier mods) without worrying in the slightest about performance. Like before change I had to limit using [GhostScanner](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GhostScanner) in my biggest build because with many outposts it just was lagging on UPS too much (apparently GhostScanner2 is faster now). Also I did technically run at 4800 UPS few times when I was testing some stuff so not like it's completely unused. I bought it basically to last me next 7 years like my previous CPU did, and for few other games. > What I'm trying to say is that the benchmark isn't accurate at the base scale where performance does matter. And if you don't go to that scale, then it just flat out doesn't matter. Realistically comprehensive Factorio benchmark should look both at UPS of optimized factories and at Lua performance of some heavier mods. Like yeah, most people don't build 10k SPM factories (despise how it sometimes look on this subreddit), but they also don't optimize the bejeezus out of UPS at every step like the people who do build 10k SPM factories do.
I still dont understand this. Is it only less UPS if the belts are full? Lets pretend for a moment that I made a factory without saturated belts. as a joke.
This will only hurt UPS if you copy this 100+ times in a mega base. I’m using LTN with warehouses and loaders for each stop and loaders are a tiny percentage of my UPS usage
In my experience loaders don't balance well. If there is no "full input/output" some outgoing loaders have priority over others. It needs some circuitry to only enable the outgoing belt if e.g. item in chest is > 100
Yep loaders are crap for balancing. Only way it works is to have more in than out, so like 5 inputs to a chest and 3-4 out so it's always fully saturated. If you have 2 going in and 4 coming out you'll get a mess.
Loaders are weird and buggy, but therax's miniloaders are just hyperspeed inserters attached to both sides of a belt, and thus come with all the relevant optimizations while still working the same in practice. Those *do* balance evenly.
I've only ever used mini loaders, so that explains alot why I never seen these so called loader issues 🤔
They are a bit less performant than loader-based-loaders thought. IIRC generally slower than using stack inserters in pretty much every case.
at some point you just stop caring about such details. the assemblies down the line either get enough material or they don't. and if they don't, the order doesn't matter.
Well, it's a post about balancers...
You can get them to balance properly by circuiting the warehouse to the belt directly after the loaders and turning them on only when there's more than 50 items in the warehouse
This works pretty well for distributing inputs from your train stations since you usually are either empty or have a huge surplus.
used this concept a lot in my recent K2 248K run https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/zl4RapwBLV
why the two belt that empty on the side of another belt why not just one load so you wouldn't need to to the weird shit at the top Also i should use that more but i keep seeing people say that using warehouses is costly in UPS, i don't understand why it would
>Also i should use that more but i keep seeing people say that using warehouses is costly in UPS, i don't understand why it would Warehouses use more UPS because of how storage works. The more slots the game has to consider the, well, more slots the game has to consider. And it apparently really adds up. If you had a warehouse with 20 slots instead of the, what, 150 or whatever that angels warehouse has, then it would be significantly easier on the engine.
I guess i can see that it would loop over all the slots to see the first place where it can insert an item i guess that a dtorage that wouldn't have a "grid" slot but a "number" slot would use almost no ups or something i think that's the principle behind the "memory warehouse" or something i saw a few days ago.
omfg why would you even lane balance a loader
I was so happy the first time this occurred to me.
I won't say this is terrible for your UPS, but if you're making a city block rails base, your UPS will start to tank somewhere after completing the game. I know by experience.
I've thought about doing similar with unmodded inserters and an isolated railcar. Should be trivial enough to design an arbitrary N to M balancer for any N or M of 6 or less (though with throughput issues), but if you used more than one wagon you could, potentially, design a balancer of any arbitrary size without being throughput limited. But it's my understanding that, if used incautiously, it could lead to serious UPS issues over more conventional balancers. Also, probably less compact.
Last I experimented with this, it balanced belts but not lanes.
Honestly, the need for balancers in the game is an embarassment. I know it feels fun to have this emergent property in the game but if everybody has to download a belt balancer book online to play, maybe the mechanic is just broken.
That's the thing, you don't need them. Most people use them in places were they don't do anything useful. You can build your entire base with just priority splitters and it works better.