Don't do it lategame. It won't back up until you forgot you put it there, and you're running around the star cluter trying to figure out wth your bottleneck is lol.
I'm not speaking from a bad experience, no sir/mam, nu uh not me.
The T-junctions do everything you need them to do but you can use a splitter as well.
Also splitters (especially on a Mk3 belt) hurt your framerate more than a T-junction as far as I heard.
A splitter is about the equivalent of 25 sorters (so I've heard ...)
So yes, a t-junction is cleaner and less CPU intensive ... but not that much. Just don't go spamming them everywhere and you're fine. Hydrogen priority is a perfect use case.
To avoid a hit to the CPU yes, don't use splitters liberally. However, sorters won't split a belt evenly, but ideally you're looking at ratios when you plan your belts, and you won't get yourself into a ton of situations where a splitter is actually needed outside of maybe your central mall.
IMO its just because it will use all other inputs before the Orbital station pulls. This saves on Warpers / travel time (power).
Plus the other sources generally are byproducts and actively need to be gotten rid of. I try to not use splitters if it can be avoided. They are bulky and ultimately are really only needed (or best option) in a few cases.
It's really easy to do as well.
1. Feed all the excess hydrogen into the local supply.
2. Place a PLS near the ILS and factory for Casimir crystals or your deuterium production with local demand and remote storage for hydrogen. The ILS has remote demand for hydrogen and local storage hydrogen.
3. Place the T-junction(s) at the start of the factory line.
Can you go into more detail though. How does this solve the excess? If there still more hydrogen coming in that he deuterium and/or casimir Crystal's use, you're still getting backed up... I do something similar to this but then route the (still excess) to a burn farm or (now) an priority ILS to a garbage dump planet with either hundreds or liquid storage or a half-planet sized field or thermal generators (ie. A massive burn burn farm. Am I missing something?
Casimir crystals use a ridiculous amount of hydrogen. By making a priority input for the locally produced (ie excess) hydrogen, this excess hydrogen gets drained very very quickly. And when the belt(s) for excess hydrogen dry up, the belt of gas planet hydrogen fills it up.
Basically you always need way more hydrogen than you produce as by product of graphene and refined oil production. So as long as this hydrogen gets used first, it will never become a problem.
It's the fire ice that always gets me. Either way too much h2 or way too much graphene.
Sure casimir crystals use tons. But as soon as my demand for crystals drops off and over produces, my h2 gets backed up and I'm back to square one. Burning off the excess works well enough. I'm just wondering if there is another solution I'm missing
I've learned that on red science when my graphite from coal clogged up the belt and I was unable to distribute graphite from x-ray cracking, therefore blocking my hydrogen output.
Is there any way to "set" that or it's just matter of where you combine belts?
I think all buildings is rather excessive until you're super late game where you're building whole factory planets at once and need hundreds of a thing. You can get away with handcrafting stuff like labs or chemplants, but more basic ones like miners, thermals, smelters, and assemblers for sure. I also automate wind turbines bc they're cheap and a quick way to generate power for new outposts with a nice blueprint.
I did the Nilaus bus, but when I had a proper logistics system set up, it was now a total waste of space and resources. My options were to abandon it (way too ocd) or deconstruct it all and reorganize all the resources back into my new economy. Now all my buildings are fed into PLS towers, i can deliver them anywhere. since you can click on them anywere on that planet, i usually just grab them manually, but for belts, sorters and foundations, i usually have spinner drones auto-delivering them into my inventory.
I'd say a mall is one of the things people still need to unlearn from Factorio.
They're good for very early game only. After that, you should have drones keeping you topped off on what you need, not visiting a mall.
I still call my ILS/PLS-based building-production area a mall.
But the general idea is automating all building production and centralizing where I can grab stuff from.
My point is, you still don't want to be building anywhere in the factory where you have to actually physically walk Icarus to to pick something up. You shouldn't even be clicking on towers from across the planet.
The fidget drones can bring everything you need to you automatically.
Outside of the early game where you don't have access to that (which is also when you don't need more than 2 or 3 buildings automated anyway), you should (IMO) be relying on the drones to handle your inventory management for you.
Closest thing I have to a mall anymore is when I'm landing on a new planet and I'm setting the drone delivery system up. After that? I'm just running around the planet dropping blueprints and the fidget drones restock me as fast as my construction drones can put it down.
Yup. Shift+left-click then hold-and-drag. 5 seconds and you have 20 identical buildings all in a perfectly spaced row. Hundreds of hours in and it's still satisfying.
If you do want to change the spacing, while holding click after dragging, press +/- buttons to make them tighter or further apart. Comes in really handy for stuff like chemplants which are very sensitive to spacing depending on the meridian you're at.
Yes, this. Then left click, hold and draaaaag. Took me a few play throughs to learn this one. You can also use this to apply any changes over top of existing buildings.
That you can request items to a unpowered Interstellar Logistics Station. Would have saved me so much time going back and forth getting buildings in the late mid/early lategame while going to new planets.
I more use it for the other way: All you need is a 1x1 square to raise the terrain in a 3x3 or 4x4 grid. Cheap and economical way to reclaim land for building.
One material is limited only to black hole and neutron star. It’s unipolar magnets. They are used to make endgame smelters and to simplify your pink container recipe. But the further away the planet is, the more resources they contain. So you want your neutron star to be far from your home planet to max out the number of magnets you can mine.
Edit: for what it’s worth, when you get to the level where you need them, your vein utilization should be high enough that you never run out anyway, so it’s more about throughput than it is about availability.
Yeah, I had this issue. Had huge deposits of unipolars in one game, but issued through only a few veins. Even with the large bonus output from VU high enough to make them effectively infinite, I just couldn't pull enough out of the ground fast enough to keep my gigantic white-science planets fed.
And yeah, I foolishly thought that with my VU so high, why NOT make my planetary blueprints utilize unipolars to make particle containers? Now I know.
I'm not sure this exists 100% of the time. In my current seed, i have a neutron star only 4-5 ly from my home planet, and it had 47 unipolar nodes. The black hole however is 28 ly and had a mere 14 (or something).
I’ve played like 8 playthroughs, over 1,000 hours, and I still learn new things every time I play. It is a little frustrating to realize that parts of the factory are imperfect, but I guess that’s just life. I spent a lot of time making single-product builds (basically, maximum possible products per second out of a single ILS for a single product), but now I’m into blackbox builds that make, say, 20 white science per second from ingots. I do all my smelting at the mining sites, so there are no ores in my logistics network. I make factories for nanotubes from spiniform on the spiniform mining planets for the same reason.
Such a good game. Excited for whatever comes next update.
With your experience (i’m mid game, kind of a slow player/enthusiast) Could I ask what your top 3 priorities are when you start a new save/progress? Like, your top of mind things? Appreciate it!
It’s always a fun mess until I start bootstrapping PLS/ILS. Top of mind is:
1. Automate a mall for buildings, split some of that off for blue science
2. Automate red science
3. Play around with logistic bots a little, expand the mall, make proliferator happen, struggle
4. Hack together yellow science
5. Sigh in relief, move everything to PLS/ILS networks
Things at this early stage are always chaotic and I never worry about doing it perfectly, because I know whatever I build won’t last forever.
Thanks! Right now I’m at step 4, researching for purple science. I had a power hiccup but it’s better now that I have Deuterium fuel set up properly. I also have an ILS set up to bring me Titanium.
You’re at step 5, homie! If you have ILS at all, it’s time to spend like 3 hours retooling your whole production line to work off of ILS instead of what you’ve been using. Reinvent your factory. Miners feed PLS that then ship ore to ILS or PLS that make ingots. Once you have 90-120/sec each of copper, iron, and magnets, then you make ILS factories for circuits and whatever the copper + magnet thing is called. Etc.
So lemme clarify the smelting: make an ILS with say iron ingots as the output and iron ore as the input (set it to storage for now as you set up). Now build a Mk. 3 belt out of ore, and make it long and straight so that you can feed 30 smelters with it. Then output those smelters to a return belt that will hold iron ingots. That’s 30/sec iron. Now another line out, smelters, and a return belt. 60/sec. Then another. 90/sec. Etc. You now have overbuilt iron ingot production for the foreseeable future (your miners won’t be able to keep up though, which is fine). The point is, your logistics network will have plenty of iron ingots to go around when you start demanding them for your builds, and when you make iron mines on other planets, you can send that ore to this smelter factory.
Circuits are the same idea but only slightly more complicated. I believe the ratio of circuits is 2 iron, 1 copper, 2 output? So at the “front” of the ILS, draw out lines of iron, copper, iron. Place an assembler above and below these belts, and have them each draw from the belt. Then give each assembler a return belt to feed back into the ILS. You can build these rows out to a length dependent upon the speed of whatever tier of assembler you use.
Hope it’s not too confusing!
I appreciate the explanation! I’m gonna have to definitely change my way of thinking about that. I’ll have to play around with it today, but I like what I’m reading!
Cool here's my top 3
1. Don't overbuild. Use factoriolab to tell you how many buildings to make. Shoot for 100 colored cubes / min to progress to the end the official game. Yes it's that easy. You don't need five planets worth of stuff pumping to beat it your first time.
2. Plateau your growth at the end of each color. Unlock 'everything red' in the research tree, make sure you have the new resources coming in at the right rate. Then start jammin yellow. Rushing certain tech without leveling "sibling tech" comes with a lot of problems in this game.
3. Don't sweat the spaghet. The early game is defined by it. When you unlock PLS/ILS you'll have an opportunity to simplify stuff a lot, if you want to, or ignore and roll
Did you unlock red? If you have a huge surplus of refined oil or hydrogen, just build up a bunch of liquid storage. definitely save that for research bursts.
> Don't sweat the spaghet. The early game is defined by it. When you unlock PLS/ILS you'll have an opportunity to simplify stuff a lot, if you want to, or ignore and roll
You don't even have to wait that long. The fidget drones can be made into functional towers long before that.
Oh I always go all in on them ASAP.
Yellow science is so much easier when you're not having to deal with spaghet lines all over the damned place.
By the time I get the ability to build towers, I already have tower based automation set up to build them for me.
Best thing you can do early on is build with mini-towers in mind from the start.
For example, you're obviously going to make a bus to automate blue science with, you don't have any other options. But, you will research splitters PDQ. Anywhere you can put a splitter is a spot you can put a chest on, and then later a drone port.
So for example, early smelting I do ore down the middle and 3 smelters on either side. The belts converge in a T and off my materials go into the early bus. But I make sure to build in room for when I get splitters I can turn those early T's into a splitter combining the two outputs. Which means I can put a chest limited to like 2 stacks on top of those. Which I can then forget about.
When I build my mini-mall early on for the basics (belts, splitters, power poles, wind turbines, etc), instead of using inserters to drop into a chest, I just pre-build them on top of splitters and belt into them.
Then when I get the drones researched, I can hand-make ports and drones to put on all those splitter chests I already had set up.
After that, first thing I automate are the spinners and the ports.
Then everything proceeds like it would for PLS/ILS tower play for the rest of the game. Everything gets pushed into a mini-tower, everything gets pulled down from a mini-tower.
Long as you're building right and tight early on, the range limitation of the towers isn't an issue. By the time you get big enough for it to become an issue, you've usually already reached the point where you can research a range increase for them.
I find that even for stuff like plastic production, the spinners are more than capable of keeping up with the demand for transporting oil and water.
Then later on when you get your PLS/ILS towers proper, all you have to do is build a quick mini-tower to pull down from your fidget cloud and then belt it into the tower. And remember how we had those mini-towers on the ends of the smelter lines? When those early patches run dry, you just set the towers to demand smelted material instead of provide it, and then you can feed from a PLS to a mini-tower set to supply, and your starter bus now functions forever from the cloud as well.
No need to tear anything out, no need to retrofit anything, your entire starter base just merges perfectly into the new design paradigm.
My issue is their initial range is so small and their throughput so miniscule, that simply ripping off a belt works a lot better in most cases. They shine for niche things like say, bringing in turbines for Mk2 belts to keep the mall size smaller.
Their initial range is fine for most factories, IMO.
The overall range at start is 30 degrees, which seems an odd way of putting it, but we can calculate that out pretty quickly. Total circle is 360 degrees, so 30 degrees is 1/12th of that. 360 degrees around the equator of a planet is 200 tiles. So the range of a logistics bot is, at the equator, a 16 tile radius, or a 32 tile diameter.
And remember, the entire planet is 200 tile diameter. Half the planet is 100 tiles. A quarter of the planet is 50 tiles.
So the starting diameter of a fidget drone covering an area almost a quarter of the entire planet.
That is easily more than enough to cover your entire starter base, it just isn't good for trucking long haul supplies in from over the horizon. And you can research to increase that distance pretty easily.
Logistics inventory (on the left of your inventory) can hold items! First 2 things you should ALWAYS hold extra stacks is fuel and warpers. Never ever be without a full stack of fuel and warpers in your logi inventory. You do NOT want to be stuck in space without fuel or warpers.
Add ammo and belts/sorters/foundation to that list when you can, but you never want to run out of fuel miles from home.
Power your base with antimatter fuel rods and not directly with ray recievers.
edit: you can slap a small depot on a splitter and either unload or load it that way. bonus points for splitter<>depot<>logi distributor. I'm using that at most ILS for warpers and my sushi mall
That PLS towers in small factory(Belts, Sorters, assemblers, etc) networks don’t need anywhere near 5000 units of a given resource to operate efficiently.
You can use a sorter to pull from one belt to another but it only really works at low speeds. Greens and blues will pull faster than the belt provides and you won’t get a split
Do not make a mall.
Outside of the very early game, you don't want that kind of setup. We have had fidget spinners for quite a while now, and they can be set up to automatically deliver anything in the game to you without you needing to interact with anything else.
Early game when thats not an option? By all means, make a rudimentary mall. But after that point, no. All that does is make the game harder.
Build a fidget port into your assembly lines. Automate your buildings, and have the fidget drones bring them to you as you need them.
At no point after that becomes an option, IMO, should you be manually clicking to pick up parts, either from mall storage chests or towers on the other side of the planet.
This is an automation game, we have the tools to automate inventory management. Use them. :)
proliferate your grav lenses for more critical photons
Wait... You could do that? I could have just proliferated instead of filling my planet of ray recievers.
Nah, just do those 2 things at once, im dedicating one of my planets simply for that
Fluid storage for hydrogen… Also tab to change the way you’re laying down belts.
You can put small warehouse on top of splitters, which will work as both tool to add and remove material from storage at belt speed.
you just blew my mind with the fluid storage for hydrogen...
It works for other gasses, and oil, too!
I have 700 hours in DSP and had no idea until about a week ago that all gasses can be stored in the liquid tanks.
There's no way that it has always been able to do that. I must have tried when I first started years ago and it didn't work
They’ve been in since EA launch according to the wiki, I’ve used them as long as I’ve played
I bought the game at launch, and have always used tanks for the oil cycle. I just assumed that they would fit. Can't remember if a tool tip said so.
It's been since day 1
I bought the game when it first hit EA and you could do it even back then.
Anything that wobbles when it's on the belt
Don't do it lategame. It won't back up until you forgot you put it there, and you're running around the star cluter trying to figure out wth your bottleneck is lol. I'm not speaking from a bad experience, no sir/mam, nu uh not me.
OmgwtfDQbbq did you say?
I had this same problem with refined oil...
What do you mean tab? What does it do??
It shifts it from having a right side bend to a left side bend or disabling grid snap
Oh.
Using priority T-junctions to make sure my excess hydrogen from oil/fire ice gets used before the hydrogen from gas giants.
I'm so clever I already fixed that problem once and for all at least 4 times.
Why not use a splitter with priority? Scaled up, I have multiple inputs and outputs.
The T-junctions do everything you need them to do but you can use a splitter as well. Also splitters (especially on a Mk3 belt) hurt your framerate more than a T-junction as far as I heard.
A splitter is about the equivalent of 25 sorters (so I've heard ...) So yes, a t-junction is cleaner and less CPU intensive ... but not that much. Just don't go spamming them everywhere and you're fine. Hydrogen priority is a perfect use case.
They got it down to 10 sorters supposedly, but yeah, use sparingly.
So is it better to use high tier sorters to take items from a belt?
To avoid a hit to the CPU yes, don't use splitters liberally. However, sorters won't split a belt evenly, but ideally you're looking at ratios when you plan your belts, and you won't get yourself into a ton of situations where a splitter is actually needed outside of maybe your central mall.
IMO its just because it will use all other inputs before the Orbital station pulls. This saves on Warpers / travel time (power). Plus the other sources generally are byproducts and actively need to be gotten rid of. I try to not use splitters if it can be avoided. They are bulky and ultimately are really only needed (or best option) in a few cases.
Omfg this is huge i cant believe i didn't thibk about this
It's really easy to do as well. 1. Feed all the excess hydrogen into the local supply. 2. Place a PLS near the ILS and factory for Casimir crystals or your deuterium production with local demand and remote storage for hydrogen. The ILS has remote demand for hydrogen and local storage hydrogen. 3. Place the T-junction(s) at the start of the factory line.
Can you go into more detail though. How does this solve the excess? If there still more hydrogen coming in that he deuterium and/or casimir Crystal's use, you're still getting backed up... I do something similar to this but then route the (still excess) to a burn farm or (now) an priority ILS to a garbage dump planet with either hundreds or liquid storage or a half-planet sized field or thermal generators (ie. A massive burn burn farm. Am I missing something?
Casimir crystals use a ridiculous amount of hydrogen. By making a priority input for the locally produced (ie excess) hydrogen, this excess hydrogen gets drained very very quickly. And when the belt(s) for excess hydrogen dry up, the belt of gas planet hydrogen fills it up. Basically you always need way more hydrogen than you produce as by product of graphene and refined oil production. So as long as this hydrogen gets used first, it will never become a problem.
It's the fire ice that always gets me. Either way too much h2 or way too much graphene. Sure casimir crystals use tons. But as soon as my demand for crystals drops off and over produces, my h2 gets backed up and I'm back to square one. Burning off the excess works well enough. I'm just wondering if there is another solution I'm missing
Graphene burns in like a tenth of a second, so you could always feed the way too much graphene into thermals /s
I do this indeed when it's graphene that's the overflow.
I've learned that on red science when my graphite from coal clogged up the belt and I was unable to distribute graphite from x-ray cracking, therefore blocking my hydrogen output. Is there any way to "set" that or it's just matter of where you combine belts?
The belt going straight has priority on the belt coming in from the side.
What about t-bone merge where you get a little pavement?
Then the incoming belts have equal priority and work the same as a splitter without priority settings.
I didn’t learn this until my 2nd or 3rd playthrough
a good mall will make your entire life 100x easier.
it doesn't even have to be a good one. just automating all the buildings instead of hand crafting.
I think all buildings is rather excessive until you're super late game where you're building whole factory planets at once and need hundreds of a thing. You can get away with handcrafting stuff like labs or chemplants, but more basic ones like miners, thermals, smelters, and assemblers for sure. I also automate wind turbines bc they're cheap and a quick way to generate power for new outposts with a nice blueprint.
best blueprint that you like?
Nilaus' main bus is the easiest to set up and expand, but takes a lot of space.
I did the Nilaus bus, but when I had a proper logistics system set up, it was now a total waste of space and resources. My options were to abandon it (way too ocd) or deconstruct it all and reorganize all the resources back into my new economy. Now all my buildings are fed into PLS towers, i can deliver them anywhere. since you can click on them anywere on that planet, i usually just grab them manually, but for belts, sorters and foundations, i usually have spinner drones auto-delivering them into my inventory.
I'd say a mall is one of the things people still need to unlearn from Factorio. They're good for very early game only. After that, you should have drones keeping you topped off on what you need, not visiting a mall.
I still call my ILS/PLS-based building-production area a mall. But the general idea is automating all building production and centralizing where I can grab stuff from.
My point is, you still don't want to be building anywhere in the factory where you have to actually physically walk Icarus to to pick something up. You shouldn't even be clicking on towers from across the planet. The fidget drones can bring everything you need to you automatically. Outside of the early game where you don't have access to that (which is also when you don't need more than 2 or 3 buildings automated anyway), you should (IMO) be relying on the drones to handle your inventory management for you. Closest thing I have to a mall anymore is when I'm landing on a new planet and I'm setting the drone delivery system up. After that? I'm just running around the planet dropping blueprints and the fidget drones restock me as fast as my construction drones can put it down.
Shift + left click to copy a building + all attached sorters. Beautiful thing.
Yup. Shift+left-click then hold-and-drag. 5 seconds and you have 20 identical buildings all in a perfectly spaced row. Hundreds of hours in and it's still satisfying.
If you do want to change the spacing, while holding click after dragging, press +/- buttons to make them tighter or further apart. Comes in really handy for stuff like chemplants which are very sensitive to spacing depending on the meridian you're at.
Wow I was just thinking last night, there has to be a way to do this. Thanks!
Yes, this. Then left click, hold and draaaaag. Took me a few play throughs to learn this one. You can also use this to apply any changes over top of existing buildings.
That you can request items to a unpowered Interstellar Logistics Station. Would have saved me so much time going back and forth getting buildings in the late mid/early lategame while going to new planets.
You can increase the size of foundations. There were many of these but this one hit me the hardest.
I tried all key binds and couldn’t figure out how. Would you share?
+/-
I more use it for the other way: All you need is a 1x1 square to raise the terrain in a 3x3 or 4x4 grid. Cheap and economical way to reclaim land for building.
Make a mall. It does not have to be pretty but just make one
Spaghetti mall is the way
You can place storage on top of splitters.
You can build diagonal/slanted belts.
That ore I need from neutron star need to be further away
I need help with this one. Someone explain?
One material is limited only to black hole and neutron star. It’s unipolar magnets. They are used to make endgame smelters and to simplify your pink container recipe. But the further away the planet is, the more resources they contain. So you want your neutron star to be far from your home planet to max out the number of magnets you can mine. Edit: for what it’s worth, when you get to the level where you need them, your vein utilization should be high enough that you never run out anyway, so it’s more about throughput than it is about availability.
Yeah, I had this issue. Had huge deposits of unipolars in one game, but issued through only a few veins. Even with the large bonus output from VU high enough to make them effectively infinite, I just couldn't pull enough out of the ground fast enough to keep my gigantic white-science planets fed. And yeah, I foolishly thought that with my VU so high, why NOT make my planetary blueprints utilize unipolars to make particle containers? Now I know.
I'm not sure this exists 100% of the time. In my current seed, i have a neutron star only 4-5 ly from my home planet, and it had 47 unipolar nodes. The black hole however is 28 ly and had a mere 14 (or something).
RIP
I’ve played like 8 playthroughs, over 1,000 hours, and I still learn new things every time I play. It is a little frustrating to realize that parts of the factory are imperfect, but I guess that’s just life. I spent a lot of time making single-product builds (basically, maximum possible products per second out of a single ILS for a single product), but now I’m into blackbox builds that make, say, 20 white science per second from ingots. I do all my smelting at the mining sites, so there are no ores in my logistics network. I make factories for nanotubes from spiniform on the spiniform mining planets for the same reason. Such a good game. Excited for whatever comes next update.
With your experience (i’m mid game, kind of a slow player/enthusiast) Could I ask what your top 3 priorities are when you start a new save/progress? Like, your top of mind things? Appreciate it!
It’s always a fun mess until I start bootstrapping PLS/ILS. Top of mind is: 1. Automate a mall for buildings, split some of that off for blue science 2. Automate red science 3. Play around with logistic bots a little, expand the mall, make proliferator happen, struggle 4. Hack together yellow science 5. Sigh in relief, move everything to PLS/ILS networks Things at this early stage are always chaotic and I never worry about doing it perfectly, because I know whatever I build won’t last forever.
Thanks! Right now I’m at step 4, researching for purple science. I had a power hiccup but it’s better now that I have Deuterium fuel set up properly. I also have an ILS set up to bring me Titanium.
You’re at step 5, homie! If you have ILS at all, it’s time to spend like 3 hours retooling your whole production line to work off of ILS instead of what you’ve been using. Reinvent your factory. Miners feed PLS that then ship ore to ILS or PLS that make ingots. Once you have 90-120/sec each of copper, iron, and magnets, then you make ILS factories for circuits and whatever the copper + magnet thing is called. Etc. So lemme clarify the smelting: make an ILS with say iron ingots as the output and iron ore as the input (set it to storage for now as you set up). Now build a Mk. 3 belt out of ore, and make it long and straight so that you can feed 30 smelters with it. Then output those smelters to a return belt that will hold iron ingots. That’s 30/sec iron. Now another line out, smelters, and a return belt. 60/sec. Then another. 90/sec. Etc. You now have overbuilt iron ingot production for the foreseeable future (your miners won’t be able to keep up though, which is fine). The point is, your logistics network will have plenty of iron ingots to go around when you start demanding them for your builds, and when you make iron mines on other planets, you can send that ore to this smelter factory. Circuits are the same idea but only slightly more complicated. I believe the ratio of circuits is 2 iron, 1 copper, 2 output? So at the “front” of the ILS, draw out lines of iron, copper, iron. Place an assembler above and below these belts, and have them each draw from the belt. Then give each assembler a return belt to feed back into the ILS. You can build these rows out to a length dependent upon the speed of whatever tier of assembler you use. Hope it’s not too confusing!
I appreciate the explanation! I’m gonna have to definitely change my way of thinking about that. I’ll have to play around with it today, but I like what I’m reading!
Awesome! Yeah, saturate your logistics network with every product in the game, it’s a good way to play.
Oh I guess you asked for 3 things lol. Well, that’s my step-by-step guide for the early game.
I appreciate it nonetheless!
Not that person, but a Q - are you wondering what makes a good seed, or are you wondering how people make the early game smooth?
More the latter- tips to just move through the game with slightly less headaches/roadbumps
Cool here's my top 3 1. Don't overbuild. Use factoriolab to tell you how many buildings to make. Shoot for 100 colored cubes / min to progress to the end the official game. Yes it's that easy. You don't need five planets worth of stuff pumping to beat it your first time. 2. Plateau your growth at the end of each color. Unlock 'everything red' in the research tree, make sure you have the new resources coming in at the right rate. Then start jammin yellow. Rushing certain tech without leveling "sibling tech" comes with a lot of problems in this game. 3. Don't sweat the spaghet. The early game is defined by it. When you unlock PLS/ILS you'll have an opportunity to simplify stuff a lot, if you want to, or ignore and roll
Thanks mate, that’s definitely helpful. I need to really start gearing up for late game research (stuff is gonna get beefy here soon I’m sure).
One thing I’ve been doing is to prep research cube ingredients BEFORE I get to that research cube.
Did you unlock red? If you have a huge surplus of refined oil or hydrogen, just build up a bunch of liquid storage. definitely save that for research bursts.
Yup, I’m just about to unlock yellow today.
*noice* GL. building your first PLS/ILS towers feels like a ridiculous expense but i swear you'll be churning them out soon.
I actually do have my first ILS system bringing me home Titanium ore. I think I’m realizing their potential more and more with these comments now
> Don't sweat the spaghet. The early game is defined by it. When you unlock PLS/ILS you'll have an opportunity to simplify stuff a lot, if you want to, or ignore and roll You don't even have to wait that long. The fidget drones can be made into functional towers long before that.
I usually don't bother, but definitely yes. Hats and spinners are SUPER good for making your fog farm.
Oh I always go all in on them ASAP. Yellow science is so much easier when you're not having to deal with spaghet lines all over the damned place. By the time I get the ability to build towers, I already have tower based automation set up to build them for me.
Hmm I just started a new seed, like last night. Maybe I'll lean on them more. Thx.
Best thing you can do early on is build with mini-towers in mind from the start. For example, you're obviously going to make a bus to automate blue science with, you don't have any other options. But, you will research splitters PDQ. Anywhere you can put a splitter is a spot you can put a chest on, and then later a drone port. So for example, early smelting I do ore down the middle and 3 smelters on either side. The belts converge in a T and off my materials go into the early bus. But I make sure to build in room for when I get splitters I can turn those early T's into a splitter combining the two outputs. Which means I can put a chest limited to like 2 stacks on top of those. Which I can then forget about. When I build my mini-mall early on for the basics (belts, splitters, power poles, wind turbines, etc), instead of using inserters to drop into a chest, I just pre-build them on top of splitters and belt into them. Then when I get the drones researched, I can hand-make ports and drones to put on all those splitter chests I already had set up. After that, first thing I automate are the spinners and the ports. Then everything proceeds like it would for PLS/ILS tower play for the rest of the game. Everything gets pushed into a mini-tower, everything gets pulled down from a mini-tower. Long as you're building right and tight early on, the range limitation of the towers isn't an issue. By the time you get big enough for it to become an issue, you've usually already reached the point where you can research a range increase for them. I find that even for stuff like plastic production, the spinners are more than capable of keeping up with the demand for transporting oil and water. Then later on when you get your PLS/ILS towers proper, all you have to do is build a quick mini-tower to pull down from your fidget cloud and then belt it into the tower. And remember how we had those mini-towers on the ends of the smelter lines? When those early patches run dry, you just set the towers to demand smelted material instead of provide it, and then you can feed from a PLS to a mini-tower set to supply, and your starter bus now functions forever from the cloud as well. No need to tear anything out, no need to retrofit anything, your entire starter base just merges perfectly into the new design paradigm.
My issue is their initial range is so small and their throughput so miniscule, that simply ripping off a belt works a lot better in most cases. They shine for niche things like say, bringing in turbines for Mk2 belts to keep the mall size smaller.
Their initial range is fine for most factories, IMO. The overall range at start is 30 degrees, which seems an odd way of putting it, but we can calculate that out pretty quickly. Total circle is 360 degrees, so 30 degrees is 1/12th of that. 360 degrees around the equator of a planet is 200 tiles. So the range of a logistics bot is, at the equator, a 16 tile radius, or a 32 tile diameter. And remember, the entire planet is 200 tile diameter. Half the planet is 100 tiles. A quarter of the planet is 50 tiles. So the starting diameter of a fidget drone covering an area almost a quarter of the entire planet. That is easily more than enough to cover your entire starter base, it just isn't good for trucking long haul supplies in from over the horizon. And you can research to increase that distance pretty easily.
Logistics inventory (on the left of your inventory) can hold items! First 2 things you should ALWAYS hold extra stacks is fuel and warpers. Never ever be without a full stack of fuel and warpers in your logi inventory. You do NOT want to be stuck in space without fuel or warpers. Add ammo and belts/sorters/foundation to that list when you can, but you never want to run out of fuel miles from home.
Ctrl-Shift-R for free rotation of buildings. Helps to get better bites of resources for mining.
THAT is nice to know. I kinda wish we could free move buildings too
I think just holding shift when placing does that.
pressing tab to change the splitter form/orientation.
That you can stack splitters.
Putting a storage box on top of a splitter
Power your base with antimatter fuel rods and not directly with ray recievers. edit: you can slap a small depot on a splitter and either unload or load it that way. bonus points for splitter<>depot<>logi distributor. I'm using that at most ILS for warpers and my sushi mall
Thanks for the tip! I could definitely reorg some storage knowing this now
That PLS towers in small factory(Belts, Sorters, assemblers, etc) networks don’t need anywhere near 5000 units of a given resource to operate efficiently.
This isn't Factorio, busses are the devil.
If an ILS isn't working reduce the power instead of assume the problem is on the other end of the seed.
Make junctions with the conveyor belts. I was using pile sorters. I realized at 60 hours aprox.
That's easy for merging. What about splitting? Do you use splitters or sorters to branch a belt?
You can use a sorter to pull from one belt to another but it only really works at low speeds. Greens and blues will pull faster than the belt provides and you won’t get a split
Do not make a mall. Outside of the very early game, you don't want that kind of setup. We have had fidget spinners for quite a while now, and they can be set up to automatically deliver anything in the game to you without you needing to interact with anything else. Early game when thats not an option? By all means, make a rudimentary mall. But after that point, no. All that does is make the game harder. Build a fidget port into your assembly lines. Automate your buildings, and have the fidget drones bring them to you as you need them. At no point after that becomes an option, IMO, should you be manually clicking to pick up parts, either from mall storage chests or towers on the other side of the planet. This is an automation game, we have the tools to automate inventory management. Use them. :)