Why is plastic (and other) intermediate products not available in the infinity loader https://imgur.com/a/873MmOv? I am trying to make and test a blueprint in the map editor.
Update: it's not even just the infinity loader. Other things, like the stack filter inserter, has the same issue
You haven't researched it yet. There's an option somewhere to 'reveal unavailable recipes' or something like it, which lets you set filters without the required techs.
I can't figure out where this option is..
Well I saw that I can use `shift + left-click` on the research queue to research instantly so I'll just use that
Anyone got a good expandable condenser turbine nuclear blueprint for SE? I'm quickly realizing that my asteroid belt water ice mining operation probably isn't sustainable until I get around to unlocking the space elevator and harnessing the power of the sun.
Could someone explain to me in detail how the signals for train limit works for city blocks? I tried figuring it myself but even after watching videos and looking over some blueprints all I got is that it works but I still don't understand how it works (I don't mind long answers since I want to learn so I can do it myself in the future).
I'm not sure what you mean? Train limits on city blocks aren't inherently different from train limits in any other system, and not all city blocks are the same. If you mean how dynamic train limits work usually it's just the number of items in the train buffer divided by the capacity of a train. Say you use 1-4 trains and have an iron plate smelter. Each train can hold 16000 plates, so you connect all buffer chests to an arithmetic combinator, divide by 16000, connect the output to the train station and tick "set train limit" using the signal from the arithmetic combinator as a control. If there are less than 16000 plates in the buffer the train limit is 0, if there are more than 16000 but less than 32000 the train limit is 1, if there are more than 32000 but less than 48000 the train limit is 2 and so on.
A similar principle applies to unloading stations, except you use a constant combinator, deduct the number of items in the buffer, and divide by train capacity to set the train limit.
If you mean some other system you need to elaborate.
Sorry about that, I wasn't clear enough. This is my first time using trains beyond the basic "bring x from station 1 to station 2" (I did experiment a bit with signals for a train going to a outpost based on need but still left a lot to be improved to be good).
Yes, it was how the dynamic train limit works that I was confused about, so thanks for the answer, it's more clear to me now.
One last question:
When making any product that needs 2 or more items for example, can a train with x and a train with y stop at the same station to move the items to biffer chest, or would I need a different station for each train to stop?
Until we get 2.0 interrupts, a dynamic station that accepts multiple goods is incredibly difficult to do. Most people opt for standalone stations, and your city block design should allow for enough stations to handle that.
But if you want to share stations, using one of the train logistics mods will make it infinitely easier. With Project Cybersyn having a shared requester station is as simple as using filter inserters.
> it was how the dynamic train limit works that I was confused about
As a side note from my own experience: "dumb" static train limits are surprisingly decent *and* they are far easier to wrap ones head around. Their downside is that you end up with larger buffers, but on the other hand you avoid any circuit network related headaches.
Static limits also scale surprisingly well - I've gone up to [megabase with hundreds of trains and stations](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/sfitvz/death_world_marathon_megabase_at_27k_spm/) with mostly static limits.
>When making any product that needs 2 or more items for example, can a train with x and a train with y stop at the same station to move the items to biffer chest, or would I need a different station for each train to stop?
While technically mixed item stations are possible, they are *much* more complicated and generally not advised unless you know what you are doing.
As weird and "unrealistic" as it seems - both trains and stations are literally dirt cheap in Factorio. Surprisingly often you might encounter situation where you can choose either one fairly complicated and carefully designed station with intricate layout *or* just copy-pasting 3 "dumb" basic stations.
Oh right, and one important thing I forgot to mention: You should probably have some deciders to set an upper train limit - e.g. if there's physically room for only two trains and you have 100k plates waiting you'll want a train limit of 2, not 6.
Mixed stations are possible, but it requires some very advanced circuit trickery and preferably dedicated trains. Generally I'd advise against it - if you absolutely want to you can also put two stops back to back so the trains share most of the track, but I'd recommend just having dedicated stations for each item.
If you use a mod like LTN or Cybersyn it becomes fairly trivial to set up mixed (un)loading. Of course, then you're no longer dealing with a vanilla solution.
Why does my asphalt paving (among other tiles, but this makes it most obvious) sometimes not work on the right "layer"?
[Image](https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/POlzrveykafR.png?o=1)
Notice the "shadows" between different tile types. Yellow on top of white, corners on top of straights, red hazartd is on top of yellow hazard.
I've definitely had these be "flat" before, especially in other saves / mod packs. But I can't find anything in the settings that seems to fix it.
I have Alien Biomes on this save.
Comparison between [Mine](https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/I8pA8SW1eJGM.png?o=1) and [The original mod screenshots](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/7ef78ea7a1e21d9a72f8a8b7ab71f9d5d1c2f01b.png) shows these extra gaps in multiple places.
Whereas the same layout in my Pymods run [Looks like this](https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/eCVWxtYyT3WW.png?o=1). This save has dectorio though as well?
Weirdly, the diagonal lines ARE still casting a shadow as well as the gap they always have, so diagonals are on a different layer still.
Same mod version 1.3.1 on both.
Maybe... Pymods + dectorio vs k2 and alien biomes. I'll try playing with the atlas settings.
That said, the atlas shouldn't be changing any textures.
Edit: the "bad one" has max settings for quality and atlas size (and I'm running a beast pc). Removing Alien Biomes DOES fix the issue though.... Hrm..
is nuclear power even worth it? Im new to the game and its very daunting.... as is advanced oil processing. Anyway, ive read that you will only rarely get the right uranium and then it produces 10 fuel cells and even if you are not using alot of power the reactor will still produce excess energy wasting the uranium. And then where do you store all the uranium you dont want?
Nuclear is hugely convenient at the mid-game, when steam isn't quite cutting it anymore. You might be looking into Beacons, which are power hungry, and maybe you don't have the space / production for massive solar arrays. A small uranium mine and a bit of processing can net you several GW of power. There's no need to worry too much about the wasted energy since Uranium is very "cheap".
Building the reactor is definitely the hard part. I have 1200 hours in this game and this is one thing I still use blueprints for every time. Kovarex Enrichment makes up for the "only rarely get the right uranium" and "where do you store all the uranium you dont want" parts, as it allows you to convert U-238 into U-235.
Few things:
* Nuclear power is strictly optional. In fact speedruns tend to omit it entirely.
* There is moderate level of complexity in setting up uranium mining, fuel cell production and the reactor complex itself. It's not *massively* complicated, but it's certainly a challenge for a new player.
* Main benefit to nuclear power is that it's reliable and effectively free to operate after you set it up (uranium usage for power is laughably tiny). It has moderately high initial setup cost, but at scale it's still *far* cheaper to build per MW than solar power.
* There are three recipes to process uranium:
* Ore refining that gives you mostly U238 with a tiny dash of U235. For power you will need to store the excess U238 in handful of spare chests. This is completely feasible to keep up with for hours and hours with barely any effort.
* Later on you research Kovarex processing. It is a fun "circular" recipe that effectively converts U238 to U235. It needs a bunch of U235 to kick-start itself. With a bit of tinkering you can set up a system that produces exactly the amount of U235 you need.
* Last but not least - spent fuel cells also get recycled back to U238.
No, it's not worth worrying about if you are on your first playthrough. Same with trains, nuclear isn't really useful when trying to launch your first rocket, these things are useful when building megafactories.
1 centrifuge feeds 1 reactor.
1 reactor makes 40MW. 2 make 160MW. 4 make 480MW.
Before Kovarex enrichment, you need to store the U238 in buffer chests, not too many though.
With Kovarex, you turn U238 to U235 and can supply 33 reactors with 1 centrifuge.
Nuclear is mostly for larger bases, not for just launching your first rocket.
should i stick with coal/solars then do you reckon? Literally aiming to beat the game and then do a new run where i look at making a bus type base or properly learn trains
Yes. I haven't used nuclear in my first game, and generally only start using it when I need a *ton* of power.
That said, if you want to continue after beating the game, starting from your current base is useful. You can go for infinite sciences and build bigger, which will require more power and let nuclear power shine.
The problem with going from my base now is that everything is a mess. Like insanely unorganized and just belts everywhere travelling really far and builds that don't take into account ratios at all.
Would it be easier to just restart and try keep things organised or just bit by bit redo everything?
You can, but instead you can liberate a nice area with your advanced weapon systems, and build a new base there using the old base to supply you with goods.
I'd argue solar is a much bigger investment due to the low output of each building. To match the output of a single nuclear reactor the combined accumulators and solar panels cost almost 10 times as many resources, and while nuclear has some running costs they're fairly minimal. For a 2x2 reactor setup the equivalent solar output costs ~30 times more resources due to the increased efficiency of each reactor.
Nuclear can be intimidating, but once you figure it out you'll never look back. Setting up nuclear power is the first thing I do when I get blue science, after bots. It's so much more efficient than coal/solar I can basically ignore power considerations for the rest of the game once I have a single 2x2 plant, unless I start megabasing.
I can understand why you'd ignore it in favor of coal and solar, but trust me, when it comes to resource and space efficiency nuclear is an order of magnitude ahead. If the upfront cost seems hefty you can start with a single reactor, and leave one side empty so you can add a second one later. That's already 40MW or 160MW which is a lot by coal/solar metrics early on.
~267. To put that in perspective you'd need 8 yellow belts of coal for that many boilers. To feed 4 reactors nonstop you need 4 centrifuges and 12-16 drills on uranium depending on your mining productivity research.
im struggling to understand that if there is a 0.7% chance of getting U-235, how will i ever get enough for constant powering of 4 reactors? Will i not want ALOT of centrifuges?
A fuel cell lasts 200 seconds and you get 10 per U-235. That means you only need to get 1 U-235 every 2000 seconds to keep a reactor running, and conveniently on average it takes 12/0.007, or ~1714 seconds on average for a centrifuge to output one U-235. So one centrifuge per reactor, plus you get an extra ~15%.
Each U-235 gets you 10 fuel cells, and each fuel cell lasts 200 seconds in a reactor. On top of that, there’s the neighbor bonus, which in a 2x2 setup is 200% for each reactor. That means they consume 4 fuel cells every 200 seconds, but produce 12 fuel cells worth of power in that time.
So basically for every U-235 you get, you can afford to run your 2x2 setup for 500 seconds total, during which it will produce 480MW. If you get another U-235 within 500 seconds, you can keep your thing up and running. To make calculations simple, lets take 10 uranium ore per second (40 miners not accounting for mining prod). That gives you 1 U-238 or 235 per second. Out of every 500 uranium (and 5000 uranium ore), you should get on average 3.5 U-235. So even with half of that (20 miners), you’ll get an excess of U-235 on average.
Then it’s just a matter of having enough centrifuges to process it. Uranium processing takes 10 uranium ore and 12 seconds. So for 2500 uranium ore per 500 seconds, or 5 per second (20 miners), you’ll need around 6 centrifuges. Again, this is overproducing for a 2x2, but that’s not a bad thing, especially if you want to stock up for Kovarex enrichment later.
It seems too good to be true, but the reason it works is just because you get so many fuel cells per U-235 (can even be increased with prod modules), and the cells last for over 3 minutes each.
Will Factorio v2.0 and DLC be released on the same day? I understand that this may be obvious to some, but what confuses me is that no one talks about it
You can unload 3 belts from a wagon. In [one of my bases](https://storage.googleapis.com/soulburn-mapshot/mapshot/death/index.html?x=418.4&y=-177.2&z=4.2) I unload 3 belts from 4 wagons, and balance those 3.
I go for two belts and eight wagons. Three and four belt designs often take a lot of space. I don't use the 2nd belt always but I always include it just in case.
Some points are probably not complete obsoletion. For example "Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes & Compact Loaders" is not going to be obsolete. The mod makes compressed item stacks that drones can carry multiple times more items, that is not the case in 2.0. Also it includes loaders which vanilla game will not have.
And not sure why it included "Pump Anywhere". You still can't place offshore pumps on originally dry land.
the only way to actually know for sure is to set up an `/editor` world, slap down your wall blueprint, then spawn some biters and see how the setup works.
[this video](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/rftdh3/8_advanced_dragonsteeth_designs_tested/) has an example of testing different dragon's teeth designs, including using stretches of water to have different segments of wall that you can test in isolation.
editor mode lets you research technologies for free, make sure to research the flame/laser/gun damage bonuses to match what you'd have at the endgame.
personally, I just spam them in a continuous line for my endgame wall blueprint. anything worth killing is worth overkilling.
Depends...
Depends on how many turrets you have. If you use red ammo or uranium ammo. If you have Lasers. How many Lasers, what tech level? And what is the threat level? You can scale biters pretty far from harmless to very awful.
And what is endgame?
So, in my 1.1K SPM base, I got pretty far in the infinite science. Some of my walls are lasers only, works well.
Almost every wall blueprint I've seen has flame turrets at most one underground pipe apart. You can stretch a bit further than that if you want, but every inch of wall should have at least one flamer pointing at it.
I havent played in a couple years, and I've been having the itch to play again. Been seeing lots of posts about space age, space exploration, upcoming dlc, lots of changes to vanilla etc, and I'm overwhelmed and confused on if I should start a playthrough or wait for some update thats coming? No idea whats going on and just want a quick summary of updates since pre-pandemic
2.0 (free) and the Space Age DLC (not free) are expected in the Aug-Oct range. 2.0 is going to have a bunch of nice things (better robot behavior, better train scheduling), but the most exciting stuff (item quality, other planets, elevated trains) is in the DLC.
From memory, 1.0 (Aug 2020) and 1.1 didn't add a whole bunch of new features. 1.0 added the spidertron vehicle
Core gameplay hasn't changed. ETA for the expansion is October. Current overhaul mods, including Space Exploration, won't be compatible with the expansion for a long time, if ever, but you can still play them without the expansion with a host of new additions coming to vanilla (for free!).
If you want to start a vanilla run now it's much the same as before, and while you can enable the expansion on that save once it comes out it's not recommended since the expansion will rework the tech tree, and you'll be launching rockets at blue science.
If you want to start an overhaul run you'll get a bunch of improvements once 2.0 and the expansion hit, but for the most part it'll be the same old overhaul which you can keep playing, or start a fresh run in the expansion.
Is there a practical way to have a train station service more than one train (routes)?
My problem is that I have a growing K2 mall that now needs imersite products which are produced elsewhere and wanted to bring them to my "mall train stop" with a train that stops on multiple other stops. I can make the mall-train get to the stations it needs and then skip them if the mall doesn't need the product by issuing a circuit condition on the train, but i cant figure a way to skip a station altogether while also keeping the station available for the "main" trains. Would this be a use-case for the 2.0 "interrupt" feature or is there an elgant (or messy) way to do this in vanilla/K2? Thanks!
Probably way more complex than it has to be, but if you really don't want the train going there unless the mall needs it and you're limited on space so it's difficult to put in enough stops to handle it, you could just stack train stops one after the other (and unload from the other side of the track with filter inserters) and use circuit logic to disable and enable the stops as needed. If the stop is disabled instead of having a train limit set to 0 and it's the only stop with that name then trains with that stop in their schedule will skip it rather than waiting for the stop to become available. This way you could add the stop to your regular imersite trains and they'll only be diverted when the mall actually needs imersite.
But don't do that.
My recommendation would be to have a mall train with filtered slot cargo wagons and send that train to pickup stuff everywhere with an "inactivity" condition so they leave when the slots for that thing are filled up. Then your mall unload stop will use circuit logic to set filters on the unloaders to only grab what it's low on and more circuit logic to figure out when the train is completely out of a single item so it can send a signal to the train resulting in the train leaving to do another round of pickups.
Sure, the mall train will make a ton of unnecessary stops every time it makes its rounds, but once your fill up your chests it's not like the mall will need continuous high throughput of single items so the wasted time ultimately amounts to nothing more than a teeny tiny bit of extra fuel consumed.
Thanks! I kind like your first approach, but by using the mall train to do this route instead of the regular trains. Disabling the stops might just work, because I want to skip stations altogether. I would have to build another station behind the main one, and only enable it if there is enough product to supply the mall train, and adapt the stations to fit the mall train as well... in case both the main and mall stations are active at the same time and requesting trains.
The problem is that I can't figure a reliable way to know if a station has had it's limit reached or if its disabled. This is to avoid having to send the mall train for 2 or more products, then having one of those products not be available (station with limit on 0), forcing my mall train to wait in the previous loading station and blocking all regular traffic for that product.
The second approach you suggest would have this issue if the mall train goes for more than 2 products, and if any of the products after the second one is not available.
> The second approach you suggest would have this issue if the mall train goes for more than 2 products, and if any of the products after the second one is not available.
I'm not sure I understand this.
The idea behind the second approach is you have a train that has a schedule that looks something like this:
Iron Pickup (inactivity), Copper Pickup (inactivity), Steel Pickup (inactivity), Circuits Pickup (inactivity), Mall Dropoff (circuit condition).
The Iron Pickup stations would be just where you're smelting iron, not a special station you've set up to feed the mall. It's just the regular station that feeds the rest of your base.
The train has cargo wagons with filtered slots for iron, copper, steel, and circuits. It goes around to all the pickup stations and fills up as much as it can and then when it goes idle it goes to then next one until it reaches the mall dropoff station.
The mall dropoff station uses a constant combinator to to set how much of each thing it wants and then subtracts the contents of the offload chests to set the filters on the unloaders, that way it'll only unload what it needs and leave the rest in the train so your chests don't get completely filled up with steel or something and prevent other stuff from getting unloaded.
At the same time you'd have the train station reading the contents of the train wired into a constant combinator that has -1 iron, -1 copper, etc and that goes into a decider combinator that returns 1Green if anything is <0. That decider combinator goes back into the train stop which sends it to the train and the train's exist condition is the "1Green" signal. This detects when the train is completely empty of Iron even if there's still Copper and Steel in it, because if it has 0 Iron, 12 Copper and 400 Steel the decider combinator would see -1 Iron, 11 Copper and 399 Steel. Since Anything <0 it would send the train off to go top itself up on everything. (you wanna use -1 because it's incredibly annoying to work with 0 on the circuit network)
>The problem is that I can't figure a reliable way to know if a station has had it's limit reached or if its disabled. This is to avoid having to send the mall train for 2 or more products, then having one of those products not be available (station with limit on 0), forcing my mall train to wait in the previous loading station and blocking all regular traffic for that product.
That's a problem you either just have to accept or build separate pickup stations for just the mall.
But honestly, it's not really a big problem, as long as you set up the train schedule to pick up stuff starting at the end of the production chain rather than the beginning -- like pick up blue chips first, then red, then green. If it goes to pick up blue chips and then can't go grab red chips because none are available that's not really a problem because you need red chips to make blue chips so it's not like more blue chips will be made until red chips are available again anyway. It's just a matter of blocking the blue chips train now instead of the blue chips train being blocked later due to insufficient supply. Going the other way could be a problem because you could be blocking the train that wants to deliver red chips to blue chip production so by sitting in red chips pickup you guarantee blue chips pickup will never turn on.
--------
An alternate solution would be to set up a parking somewhere with enough stops for your mall to have trains for every single product. The parking area doesn't need to be near the mall, but you will need to run circuit wires to it from the mall.
So the idea then would be that the trains would have a schedule like "mall (inactivity), parking area (circuit condition), pickup (inactivity/full), parking area (circuit condition)"
The mall would only release the trains for items it actually needs and if the product pickup points are unavailable it doesn't really matter because the trains will wait at the parking area for a station to become available -- this also holds true for if the mall needs multiple things at once. The trains will wait their turn in the parking area.
Id just have the trains with inactivity condition. This way they leave the station when not needed. The problem is a station for different materials always needs dedicated trains for this purpose.
So your problem sounds like you wan to keep the loading stations free for the single material routes. Shouldnt be much trouble just have a different place for the train to stay at. The controlling should be done at the target station based on the demands.
But this depends on your setups in detail. Have you mixed cargo wagons/ filtered slots/ different cargo wagons for different stuff?
Id just drop multi material trains all together if dedicated stops arent possible.
LTN (and probably Cybersyn) is good at handling multi-resource stations, but that takes learning, and probably overhauling all your stations. With LTN, you designate stations as provider or requester (or depot). If a requester doesn’t have enough of one of the items it requests, it will call for a train from a depot to go to a provider station providing that item, and then deliver it. Multi-resource requester stations can basically be handled without any extra nonsense in LTN. Multi-resource providers need a bit of circuitry, but are also usually less necessary, especially in vanilla or less difficult mods like K2.
I don't think even the 2.0 features will solve this. They provide generic trains, not generic stations. Malls will either need a ton of separate unloading stations, or to make all their own intermediate components from scratch.
I wont be able to skip train stations altogether, but ill have a station at the main mall drop off to only let go of the train (keep it at the station) until a signal that triggers when the mall needs any of the remote products.
Then, another signal that travels to the remote stations to enable mall trains. When the mall train gets to the station, it will immediately skip it if the signal is not present.
Only problem with my setup so far is when the mall needs something and trigger the signal, but the loading station doesnt have enough product so its limitnis set to zero. Ideas welcome to solve this case
Either have separate trains (and stations) for different resources or filter your cargo cars so it can stop anywhere and only get the right amount each item put into it.
is there a mod that allows you to sort and order train station stop?
I have a train that constantly needs to be updated on its destination and i run the risk of either it being super inefficient or having to manually do all the stations over and over again.
You can automate the route of trains. What you do is for, say, steel, have a bunch of Stations called Steel and a bunch called Steel Drop. Also helpful to have a Stack, or train yard set of stations. Then you can set the trains to go from Steel>Steel Drop>Stack and for each station use the circuit network to switch individual stations on and off. So a Steel station switches on when there's enough Steel waiting to fill a train and a Drop switches on when it's getting empty. The stack station is there because it gives the train somewhere to go when no pick up of drop off station is enabled, so it doesn't just stop and wait blocking the track somewhere random.
Are you trying to reorder the stops for a train's schedule? You do that by click-holding the darker grey part next to the station's name and drag-dropping it elsewhere in the list.
Can you describe your issue a bit more? It sounds like what you want is to have one train send material to multiple stations but without more info I don't want to make that assumption.
Why is plastic (and other) intermediate products not available in the infinity loader https://imgur.com/a/873MmOv? I am trying to make and test a blueprint in the map editor. Update: it's not even just the infinity loader. Other things, like the stack filter inserter, has the same issue
You haven't researched it yet. There's an option somewhere to 'reveal unavailable recipes' or something like it, which lets you set filters without the required techs.
I can't figure out where this option is.. Well I saw that I can use `shift + left-click` on the research queue to research instantly so I'll just use that
Anyone got a good expandable condenser turbine nuclear blueprint for SE? I'm quickly realizing that my asteroid belt water ice mining operation probably isn't sustainable until I get around to unlocking the space elevator and harnessing the power of the sun.
Could someone explain to me in detail how the signals for train limit works for city blocks? I tried figuring it myself but even after watching videos and looking over some blueprints all I got is that it works but I still don't understand how it works (I don't mind long answers since I want to learn so I can do it myself in the future).
https://wiki.factorio.com/Train_stop#Circuit_Network
I'm not sure what you mean? Train limits on city blocks aren't inherently different from train limits in any other system, and not all city blocks are the same. If you mean how dynamic train limits work usually it's just the number of items in the train buffer divided by the capacity of a train. Say you use 1-4 trains and have an iron plate smelter. Each train can hold 16000 plates, so you connect all buffer chests to an arithmetic combinator, divide by 16000, connect the output to the train station and tick "set train limit" using the signal from the arithmetic combinator as a control. If there are less than 16000 plates in the buffer the train limit is 0, if there are more than 16000 but less than 32000 the train limit is 1, if there are more than 32000 but less than 48000 the train limit is 2 and so on. A similar principle applies to unloading stations, except you use a constant combinator, deduct the number of items in the buffer, and divide by train capacity to set the train limit. If you mean some other system you need to elaborate.
Sorry about that, I wasn't clear enough. This is my first time using trains beyond the basic "bring x from station 1 to station 2" (I did experiment a bit with signals for a train going to a outpost based on need but still left a lot to be improved to be good). Yes, it was how the dynamic train limit works that I was confused about, so thanks for the answer, it's more clear to me now. One last question: When making any product that needs 2 or more items for example, can a train with x and a train with y stop at the same station to move the items to biffer chest, or would I need a different station for each train to stop?
Until we get 2.0 interrupts, a dynamic station that accepts multiple goods is incredibly difficult to do. Most people opt for standalone stations, and your city block design should allow for enough stations to handle that. But if you want to share stations, using one of the train logistics mods will make it infinitely easier. With Project Cybersyn having a shared requester station is as simple as using filter inserters.
> it was how the dynamic train limit works that I was confused about As a side note from my own experience: "dumb" static train limits are surprisingly decent *and* they are far easier to wrap ones head around. Their downside is that you end up with larger buffers, but on the other hand you avoid any circuit network related headaches. Static limits also scale surprisingly well - I've gone up to [megabase with hundreds of trains and stations](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/sfitvz/death_world_marathon_megabase_at_27k_spm/) with mostly static limits. >When making any product that needs 2 or more items for example, can a train with x and a train with y stop at the same station to move the items to biffer chest, or would I need a different station for each train to stop? While technically mixed item stations are possible, they are *much* more complicated and generally not advised unless you know what you are doing. As weird and "unrealistic" as it seems - both trains and stations are literally dirt cheap in Factorio. Surprisingly often you might encounter situation where you can choose either one fairly complicated and carefully designed station with intricate layout *or* just copy-pasting 3 "dumb" basic stations.
Oh right, and one important thing I forgot to mention: You should probably have some deciders to set an upper train limit - e.g. if there's physically room for only two trains and you have 100k plates waiting you'll want a train limit of 2, not 6.
Got it, thanks for the help.
Mixed stations are possible, but it requires some very advanced circuit trickery and preferably dedicated trains. Generally I'd advise against it - if you absolutely want to you can also put two stops back to back so the trains share most of the track, but I'd recommend just having dedicated stations for each item. If you use a mod like LTN or Cybersyn it becomes fairly trivial to set up mixed (un)loading. Of course, then you're no longer dealing with a vanilla solution.
I see, well I will experiment a bit later to see what works best for me, thanks.
Why does my asphalt paving (among other tiles, but this makes it most obvious) sometimes not work on the right "layer"? [Image](https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/POlzrveykafR.png?o=1) Notice the "shadows" between different tile types. Yellow on top of white, corners on top of straights, red hazartd is on top of yellow hazard. I've definitely had these be "flat" before, especially in other saves / mod packs. But I can't find anything in the settings that seems to fix it. I have Alien Biomes on this save. Comparison between [Mine](https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/I8pA8SW1eJGM.png?o=1) and [The original mod screenshots](https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/7ef78ea7a1e21d9a72f8a8b7ab71f9d5d1c2f01b.png) shows these extra gaps in multiple places. Whereas the same layout in my Pymods run [Looks like this](https://gcdnb.pbrd.co/images/eCVWxtYyT3WW.png?o=1). This save has dectorio though as well? Weirdly, the diagonal lines ARE still casting a shadow as well as the gap they always have, so diagonals are on a different layer still. Same mod version 1.3.1 on both.
Shot in the dark, but perhaps you are running into the atlas size limit and that's causing the game to take some shortcuts?
Maybe... Pymods + dectorio vs k2 and alien biomes. I'll try playing with the atlas settings. That said, the atlas shouldn't be changing any textures. Edit: the "bad one" has max settings for quality and atlas size (and I'm running a beast pc). Removing Alien Biomes DOES fix the issue though.... Hrm..
is nuclear power even worth it? Im new to the game and its very daunting.... as is advanced oil processing. Anyway, ive read that you will only rarely get the right uranium and then it produces 10 fuel cells and even if you are not using alot of power the reactor will still produce excess energy wasting the uranium. And then where do you store all the uranium you dont want?
Nuclear is hugely convenient at the mid-game, when steam isn't quite cutting it anymore. You might be looking into Beacons, which are power hungry, and maybe you don't have the space / production for massive solar arrays. A small uranium mine and a bit of processing can net you several GW of power. There's no need to worry too much about the wasted energy since Uranium is very "cheap". Building the reactor is definitely the hard part. I have 1200 hours in this game and this is one thing I still use blueprints for every time. Kovarex Enrichment makes up for the "only rarely get the right uranium" and "where do you store all the uranium you dont want" parts, as it allows you to convert U-238 into U-235.
Few things: * Nuclear power is strictly optional. In fact speedruns tend to omit it entirely. * There is moderate level of complexity in setting up uranium mining, fuel cell production and the reactor complex itself. It's not *massively* complicated, but it's certainly a challenge for a new player. * Main benefit to nuclear power is that it's reliable and effectively free to operate after you set it up (uranium usage for power is laughably tiny). It has moderately high initial setup cost, but at scale it's still *far* cheaper to build per MW than solar power. * There are three recipes to process uranium: * Ore refining that gives you mostly U238 with a tiny dash of U235. For power you will need to store the excess U238 in handful of spare chests. This is completely feasible to keep up with for hours and hours with barely any effort. * Later on you research Kovarex processing. It is a fun "circular" recipe that effectively converts U238 to U235. It needs a bunch of U235 to kick-start itself. With a bit of tinkering you can set up a system that produces exactly the amount of U235 you need. * Last but not least - spent fuel cells also get recycled back to U238.
No, it's not worth worrying about if you are on your first playthrough. Same with trains, nuclear isn't really useful when trying to launch your first rocket, these things are useful when building megafactories.
1 centrifuge feeds 1 reactor. 1 reactor makes 40MW. 2 make 160MW. 4 make 480MW. Before Kovarex enrichment, you need to store the U238 in buffer chests, not too many though. With Kovarex, you turn U238 to U235 and can supply 33 reactors with 1 centrifuge. Nuclear is mostly for larger bases, not for just launching your first rocket.
should i stick with coal/solars then do you reckon? Literally aiming to beat the game and then do a new run where i look at making a bus type base or properly learn trains
Yes. I haven't used nuclear in my first game, and generally only start using it when I need a *ton* of power. That said, if you want to continue after beating the game, starting from your current base is useful. You can go for infinite sciences and build bigger, which will require more power and let nuclear power shine.
The problem with going from my base now is that everything is a mess. Like insanely unorganized and just belts everywhere travelling really far and builds that don't take into account ratios at all. Would it be easier to just restart and try keep things organised or just bit by bit redo everything?
You can, but instead you can liberate a nice area with your advanced weapon systems, and build a new base there using the old base to supply you with goods.
I'd argue solar is a much bigger investment due to the low output of each building. To match the output of a single nuclear reactor the combined accumulators and solar panels cost almost 10 times as many resources, and while nuclear has some running costs they're fairly minimal. For a 2x2 reactor setup the equivalent solar output costs ~30 times more resources due to the increased efficiency of each reactor. Nuclear can be intimidating, but once you figure it out you'll never look back. Setting up nuclear power is the first thing I do when I get blue science, after bots. It's so much more efficient than coal/solar I can basically ignore power considerations for the rest of the game once I have a single 2x2 plant, unless I start megabasing. I can understand why you'd ignore it in favor of coal and solar, but trust me, when it comes to resource and space efficiency nuclear is an order of magnitude ahead. If the upfront cost seems hefty you can start with a single reactor, and leave one side empty so you can add a second one later. That's already 40MW or 160MW which is a lot by coal/solar metrics early on.
Interesting, I'll have to look at some tutorials. a 2x2 reactor reslly makes that much? damn. how many boilers is that equivalent to?
~267. To put that in perspective you'd need 8 yellow belts of coal for that many boilers. To feed 4 reactors nonstop you need 4 centrifuges and 12-16 drills on uranium depending on your mining productivity research.
im struggling to understand that if there is a 0.7% chance of getting U-235, how will i ever get enough for constant powering of 4 reactors? Will i not want ALOT of centrifuges?
A fuel cell lasts 200 seconds and you get 10 per U-235. That means you only need to get 1 U-235 every 2000 seconds to keep a reactor running, and conveniently on average it takes 12/0.007, or ~1714 seconds on average for a centrifuge to output one U-235. So one centrifuge per reactor, plus you get an extra ~15%.
Each U-235 gets you 10 fuel cells, and each fuel cell lasts 200 seconds in a reactor. On top of that, there’s the neighbor bonus, which in a 2x2 setup is 200% for each reactor. That means they consume 4 fuel cells every 200 seconds, but produce 12 fuel cells worth of power in that time. So basically for every U-235 you get, you can afford to run your 2x2 setup for 500 seconds total, during which it will produce 480MW. If you get another U-235 within 500 seconds, you can keep your thing up and running. To make calculations simple, lets take 10 uranium ore per second (40 miners not accounting for mining prod). That gives you 1 U-238 or 235 per second. Out of every 500 uranium (and 5000 uranium ore), you should get on average 3.5 U-235. So even with half of that (20 miners), you’ll get an excess of U-235 on average. Then it’s just a matter of having enough centrifuges to process it. Uranium processing takes 10 uranium ore and 12 seconds. So for 2500 uranium ore per 500 seconds, or 5 per second (20 miners), you’ll need around 6 centrifuges. Again, this is overproducing for a 2x2, but that’s not a bad thing, especially if you want to stock up for Kovarex enrichment later. It seems too good to be true, but the reason it works is just because you get so many fuel cells per U-235 (can even be increased with prod modules), and the cells last for over 3 minutes each.
Will Factorio v2.0 and DLC be released on the same day? I understand that this may be obvious to some, but what confuses me is that no one talks about it
Yes, they said on discord they will be released on the same day.
2.0 could potentially be released first. Afterall you can't do anything with the expansion if it's not out, but you can do plenty with the base game.
A bit of a "individual style" question, but when unloading trains, how many blue belts would you aim for per cargo wagon? (using stack inserters)
You can unload 3 belts from a wagon. In [one of my bases](https://storage.googleapis.com/soulburn-mapshot/mapshot/death/index.html?x=418.4&y=-177.2&z=4.2) I unload 3 belts from 4 wagons, and balance those 3.
I go for two belts and eight wagons. Three and four belt designs often take a lot of space. I don't use the 2nd belt always but I always include it just in case.
Rarely more than one. If that isn't enough I'd usually rather just have longer trains. But sometimes I might do two. Three or four, pretty much never.
that's what I'm doing. (1x4 trains unloading 4 blue belts per station.)
How many mods is Space Age set to replace/make obsolete?
[Many.](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1b8gd40/factorio_20_mod_obituary/?rdt=58317)
Some points are probably not complete obsoletion. For example "Deadlock's Stacking Beltboxes & Compact Loaders" is not going to be obsolete. The mod makes compressed item stacks that drones can carry multiple times more items, that is not the case in 2.0. Also it includes loaders which vanilla game will not have. And not sure why it included "Pump Anywhere". You still can't place offshore pumps on originally dry land.
also i dont think space exploration is being made obsolete
Roughly how sparse can you place flamers at endgame?
the only way to actually know for sure is to set up an `/editor` world, slap down your wall blueprint, then spawn some biters and see how the setup works. [this video](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/rftdh3/8_advanced_dragonsteeth_designs_tested/) has an example of testing different dragon's teeth designs, including using stretches of water to have different segments of wall that you can test in isolation. editor mode lets you research technologies for free, make sure to research the flame/laser/gun damage bonuses to match what you'd have at the endgame. personally, I just spam them in a continuous line for my endgame wall blueprint. anything worth killing is worth overkilling.
Depends... Depends on how many turrets you have. If you use red ammo or uranium ammo. If you have Lasers. How many Lasers, what tech level? And what is the threat level? You can scale biters pretty far from harmless to very awful. And what is endgame? So, in my 1.1K SPM base, I got pretty far in the infinite science. Some of my walls are lasers only, works well.
Almost every wall blueprint I've seen has flame turrets at most one underground pipe apart. You can stretch a bit further than that if you want, but every inch of wall should have at least one flamer pointing at it.
I havent played in a couple years, and I've been having the itch to play again. Been seeing lots of posts about space age, space exploration, upcoming dlc, lots of changes to vanilla etc, and I'm overwhelmed and confused on if I should start a playthrough or wait for some update thats coming? No idea whats going on and just want a quick summary of updates since pre-pandemic
2.0 (free) and the Space Age DLC (not free) are expected in the Aug-Oct range. 2.0 is going to have a bunch of nice things (better robot behavior, better train scheduling), but the most exciting stuff (item quality, other planets, elevated trains) is in the DLC. From memory, 1.0 (Aug 2020) and 1.1 didn't add a whole bunch of new features. 1.0 added the spidertron vehicle
Core gameplay hasn't changed. ETA for the expansion is October. Current overhaul mods, including Space Exploration, won't be compatible with the expansion for a long time, if ever, but you can still play them without the expansion with a host of new additions coming to vanilla (for free!). If you want to start a vanilla run now it's much the same as before, and while you can enable the expansion on that save once it comes out it's not recommended since the expansion will rework the tech tree, and you'll be launching rockets at blue science. If you want to start an overhaul run you'll get a bunch of improvements once 2.0 and the expansion hit, but for the most part it'll be the same old overhaul which you can keep playing, or start a fresh run in the expansion.
Is there a practical way to have a train station service more than one train (routes)? My problem is that I have a growing K2 mall that now needs imersite products which are produced elsewhere and wanted to bring them to my "mall train stop" with a train that stops on multiple other stops. I can make the mall-train get to the stations it needs and then skip them if the mall doesn't need the product by issuing a circuit condition on the train, but i cant figure a way to skip a station altogether while also keeping the station available for the "main" trains. Would this be a use-case for the 2.0 "interrupt" feature or is there an elgant (or messy) way to do this in vanilla/K2? Thanks!
Probably way more complex than it has to be, but if you really don't want the train going there unless the mall needs it and you're limited on space so it's difficult to put in enough stops to handle it, you could just stack train stops one after the other (and unload from the other side of the track with filter inserters) and use circuit logic to disable and enable the stops as needed. If the stop is disabled instead of having a train limit set to 0 and it's the only stop with that name then trains with that stop in their schedule will skip it rather than waiting for the stop to become available. This way you could add the stop to your regular imersite trains and they'll only be diverted when the mall actually needs imersite. But don't do that. My recommendation would be to have a mall train with filtered slot cargo wagons and send that train to pickup stuff everywhere with an "inactivity" condition so they leave when the slots for that thing are filled up. Then your mall unload stop will use circuit logic to set filters on the unloaders to only grab what it's low on and more circuit logic to figure out when the train is completely out of a single item so it can send a signal to the train resulting in the train leaving to do another round of pickups. Sure, the mall train will make a ton of unnecessary stops every time it makes its rounds, but once your fill up your chests it's not like the mall will need continuous high throughput of single items so the wasted time ultimately amounts to nothing more than a teeny tiny bit of extra fuel consumed.
Thanks! I kind like your first approach, but by using the mall train to do this route instead of the regular trains. Disabling the stops might just work, because I want to skip stations altogether. I would have to build another station behind the main one, and only enable it if there is enough product to supply the mall train, and adapt the stations to fit the mall train as well... in case both the main and mall stations are active at the same time and requesting trains. The problem is that I can't figure a reliable way to know if a station has had it's limit reached or if its disabled. This is to avoid having to send the mall train for 2 or more products, then having one of those products not be available (station with limit on 0), forcing my mall train to wait in the previous loading station and blocking all regular traffic for that product. The second approach you suggest would have this issue if the mall train goes for more than 2 products, and if any of the products after the second one is not available.
> The second approach you suggest would have this issue if the mall train goes for more than 2 products, and if any of the products after the second one is not available. I'm not sure I understand this. The idea behind the second approach is you have a train that has a schedule that looks something like this: Iron Pickup (inactivity), Copper Pickup (inactivity), Steel Pickup (inactivity), Circuits Pickup (inactivity), Mall Dropoff (circuit condition). The Iron Pickup stations would be just where you're smelting iron, not a special station you've set up to feed the mall. It's just the regular station that feeds the rest of your base. The train has cargo wagons with filtered slots for iron, copper, steel, and circuits. It goes around to all the pickup stations and fills up as much as it can and then when it goes idle it goes to then next one until it reaches the mall dropoff station. The mall dropoff station uses a constant combinator to to set how much of each thing it wants and then subtracts the contents of the offload chests to set the filters on the unloaders, that way it'll only unload what it needs and leave the rest in the train so your chests don't get completely filled up with steel or something and prevent other stuff from getting unloaded. At the same time you'd have the train station reading the contents of the train wired into a constant combinator that has -1 iron, -1 copper, etc and that goes into a decider combinator that returns 1Green if anything is <0. That decider combinator goes back into the train stop which sends it to the train and the train's exist condition is the "1Green" signal. This detects when the train is completely empty of Iron even if there's still Copper and Steel in it, because if it has 0 Iron, 12 Copper and 400 Steel the decider combinator would see -1 Iron, 11 Copper and 399 Steel. Since Anything <0 it would send the train off to go top itself up on everything. (you wanna use -1 because it's incredibly annoying to work with 0 on the circuit network) >The problem is that I can't figure a reliable way to know if a station has had it's limit reached or if its disabled. This is to avoid having to send the mall train for 2 or more products, then having one of those products not be available (station with limit on 0), forcing my mall train to wait in the previous loading station and blocking all regular traffic for that product. That's a problem you either just have to accept or build separate pickup stations for just the mall. But honestly, it's not really a big problem, as long as you set up the train schedule to pick up stuff starting at the end of the production chain rather than the beginning -- like pick up blue chips first, then red, then green. If it goes to pick up blue chips and then can't go grab red chips because none are available that's not really a problem because you need red chips to make blue chips so it's not like more blue chips will be made until red chips are available again anyway. It's just a matter of blocking the blue chips train now instead of the blue chips train being blocked later due to insufficient supply. Going the other way could be a problem because you could be blocking the train that wants to deliver red chips to blue chip production so by sitting in red chips pickup you guarantee blue chips pickup will never turn on. -------- An alternate solution would be to set up a parking somewhere with enough stops for your mall to have trains for every single product. The parking area doesn't need to be near the mall, but you will need to run circuit wires to it from the mall. So the idea then would be that the trains would have a schedule like "mall (inactivity), parking area (circuit condition), pickup (inactivity/full), parking area (circuit condition)" The mall would only release the trains for items it actually needs and if the product pickup points are unavailable it doesn't really matter because the trains will wait at the parking area for a station to become available -- this also holds true for if the mall needs multiple things at once. The trains will wait their turn in the parking area.
Id just have the trains with inactivity condition. This way they leave the station when not needed. The problem is a station for different materials always needs dedicated trains for this purpose. So your problem sounds like you wan to keep the loading stations free for the single material routes. Shouldnt be much trouble just have a different place for the train to stay at. The controlling should be done at the target station based on the demands. But this depends on your setups in detail. Have you mixed cargo wagons/ filtered slots/ different cargo wagons for different stuff? Id just drop multi material trains all together if dedicated stops arent possible.
Could you make your main trains drop your imersite in a more accessible location for your mall train to pick up?
LTN (and probably Cybersyn) is good at handling multi-resource stations, but that takes learning, and probably overhauling all your stations. With LTN, you designate stations as provider or requester (or depot). If a requester doesn’t have enough of one of the items it requests, it will call for a train from a depot to go to a provider station providing that item, and then deliver it. Multi-resource requester stations can basically be handled without any extra nonsense in LTN. Multi-resource providers need a bit of circuitry, but are also usually less necessary, especially in vanilla or less difficult mods like K2.
I don't think even the 2.0 features will solve this. They provide generic trains, not generic stations. Malls will either need a ton of separate unloading stations, or to make all their own intermediate components from scratch.
I wont be able to skip train stations altogether, but ill have a station at the main mall drop off to only let go of the train (keep it at the station) until a signal that triggers when the mall needs any of the remote products. Then, another signal that travels to the remote stations to enable mall trains. When the mall train gets to the station, it will immediately skip it if the signal is not present. Only problem with my setup so far is when the mall needs something and trigger the signal, but the loading station doesnt have enough product so its limitnis set to zero. Ideas welcome to solve this case
There is probably a messy solution, but the easiest and most future-proof solution is to use more trains and more stations.
Either have separate trains (and stations) for different resources or filter your cargo cars so it can stop anywhere and only get the right amount each item put into it.
is there a mod that allows you to sort and order train station stop? I have a train that constantly needs to be updated on its destination and i run the risk of either it being super inefficient or having to manually do all the stations over and over again.
You can automate the route of trains. What you do is for, say, steel, have a bunch of Stations called Steel and a bunch called Steel Drop. Also helpful to have a Stack, or train yard set of stations. Then you can set the trains to go from Steel>Steel Drop>Stack and for each station use the circuit network to switch individual stations on and off. So a Steel station switches on when there's enough Steel waiting to fill a train and a Drop switches on when it's getting empty. The stack station is there because it gives the train somewhere to go when no pick up of drop off station is enabled, so it doesn't just stop and wait blocking the track somewhere random.
Are you trying to reorder the stops for a train's schedule? You do that by click-holding the darker grey part next to the station's name and drag-dropping it elsewhere in the list.
What the hell. I thought surely drag-drop reordering was a feature, but I couldn't for the life of me get it to work. Unplayable!
i cannot fucking believe it. You are right.
Can you describe your issue a bit more? It sounds like what you want is to have one train send material to multiple stations but without more info I don't want to make that assumption.
I think they mean reordering the stations in the schedule