Industrial Revolution 3

[fervent stream]

They are 100x100

Just about everything that I design is based around 100x100 city blocks. I can post the basic city blocks setup later but I got them from nilaus a long time ago, so you can see the design from him as well

[sturdy flicker]

bruh

[gray escarp]

I've made a thing

[maiden ferry]

I see, I see. I keep seeing people only saying city block without mentioning the dimension. So I assumed there's like a universal agreed size for it.

[wind forge]

There are a few common sizes and after a while you can usually recognise by sight but there’s no fixed rule on how big

[fervent stream]

"City Block" can be a wide variety of sizes but the most common that I've seen are 100x100 which is the range of the robo ports when fully expanded but still connected. They overlay on the edges of the block so that multiple blocks together will be connected via logistic network.

The other common size I've seen is 96x96 which is 3x3 chunks on the global grid. Not as big of room to work with but some people like that. I prefer the 100x100 and all my BPs are built based off that so they're all consistent and can usually work cohesively together without much tweaking in-between. Also comes with the perk since 100x100 is the max range of 4 roboports together, if you bring them in one tile - you can isolate that specific cityblock from the logistic network - great for robot based builds which I lean on quite a bit

[reef lark]

Blueprint String

Full Cityblock w/ measurements

Blueprint String

Full Cityblock w/ measurements

[fervent stream]

This one - Had to make an edit. The chests between the powerlines mark the 1/2 way point on each - good for measuring and ensuring you're even on all sides if thats important

[maiden ferry]

I see, thank you for the explanation! I usually just design my factory based on terrain. No bus or block, so basically spaget. But I make separate "outposts" for major industries.

[hazy zodiac]

how do i unlock miners with "inspired" addon enabled? i can't progress

[worldly portal]

Literally unplayable

It’s so over for Deadlock

[spiral creek]

Have you smelted your scrap yet?

[worldly portal]

He unlocked them already, said it in #modded-chat

The solution was to craft their ingredients or something

[hexed turret]

oooh there's a new add-on!

here it is: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3Inspiration

oh, requires a new start... does it actually add anything, or just replaces the need for some research with inspiration unlocking

[spiral creek]

I think it’d do both

Reminds me of little alchemy

[hazy zodiac]

its a bit weird addon, im not sure i like it. while its nice idea, i don't really like crafting all of the intermediates by hand and hope some of them unlocks something. like for example miners. i don't even know what i had to craft to get them unlocked and it wasn't just 1 item. i had to make multiles of the same ones

[fervent stream]

not a very fun addition - I wouldnt restart just for it

[hexed turret]

deep core mining and hot air balloons were good

I've gotten spoiled

[supple pecan]

Copper, Tin, Iron, and Glass blocks under construction

building these to be expandable later on. Copper, Tin, and Iron are at 1/4 intended capacity. Glass is ??? because it's weird

Bronze, Circuits, Science, and Malls are all that remain before I match my pre-rail capacity i think

and I need to make a Coke block for better fuel efficiency and steel

this overhaul's been interesting

[worldly portal]

Oh, I can’t even imagine doing IR3 oil in cityblocks

Good luck

[supple pecan]

wait what

[worldly portal]

Byproducts

[supple pecan]

right, oil has a lot of them

expecting oil to result in a large block cuz of that

Heavy oil, sour gas, light oil, petroleum, natural gas, and bitumen are the materials I think are significant from oil?

with later tech allowing light oil and bitumen to be broken into the other products?

[worldly portal]

For most of IR3, the only final “oil” (not sulfur) products are plastic and lube

Natural gas can only be burned for power, and ligh oil has no uses

Besides being flamethrower fuel I guess

Later you will have a chance to use up bitumen, but there’s a chunk of time where all you can do with it is make asphalt

[supple pecan]

good to know

[worldly portal]

But there are cetain technologies later on that allow you to greatly streamline the whole thing, so expect changes

Man, maybe I should talk less and just let you experience it, but I can’t help it

[supple pecan]

nah it’s all good

type of guy who’s fine with spoilers lol

tbh my experience has been a bit iffy due to my transition to rails

but once everything’s all up things should feel better once i progress

[worldly portal]

“starter iron is far away and you have to get to it without trains” is one of the mod’s more questionable design decisions, I agree

[supple pecan]

didnt help my starter iron was fucked over by lake generation

so i had to pursue the next largest iron patch which was surrounded by biters

[worldly portal]

😭

[supple pecan]

‘s what made me turn off biter expansion to make things easier

[hazy zodiac]

when ever i start a new modded playthough and want to progress on my own pace, i use island seed. So i still get the biter murder later when im ready

[worldly portal]

And then the mod uses more stone than you expected and you don’t have enough for the landfill bridge

[supple pecan]

guess that’s a smarter decision lol

well whatever, im fine playing with biter expansion off

still get to deal with the progressive challenge of larger nests + stronger biters building up over time

• i can always turn it on again

[supple pecan]

i'm assuming that for malls it's probably best to maximize direct insertion w/ large frames

[sturdy flicker]

Natural Gas can eventually be turned into Hydrogen, which you'll need a crapton of to launch rockets.

Light oil can be cracked, but I agree for a lot of the game, those two things are very useless.

[supple pecan]

good to know

I take it natural gas for supplemtning power early on's a good idea?

Or just stick with boilers running on coke

[worldly portal]

You don’t really have a choice

At that early stage, you either burn it or vent it

And venting makes a lot of pollution

[fervent stream]

I put my oil into 2 city blocks, all the bi products can be broken down into other components so they all just stay balanced with each other.

[supple pecan]

what's a reasonable SPM to aim for early on?

[hexed turret]

Doesn't hurt to overbuild science a little, especially early on the hardest part is automating the buildings, science is really simple

This remains true even at purple science

But maybe after purple science it's no longer true.

[supple pecan]

asking since I don't want to aim too high and overburden my base

thinking 75 spm for now since the # of machines are nice

[hexed turret]

What number of machines is that?

[supple pecan]

4 red assemblers, 8 green, 8 blue

[hexed turret]

Doesn't hurt to double it, but anything more than double would be too much

But 4/8/8 is also ok

[supple pecan]

I'll leave room for doubling then.

[wind forge]

75 will get you to victory pretty easily, especially if you remember to take advantage of the flexibility of modules and pollution cleanup

Your biggest issue will likely be the balancing of ores in washing, not so much the production of intermediates etc.

[supple pecan]

Ah right, ore washing

Saw that and found the ore doubling neat to see, though yeah balancing ores is gonna be interesting

[wind forge]

I wanna stress the importance of going green

Chucking some forestries in pollution-dense areas is nice but they’ll likely die without the modules to not overwhelm them

But once you do you really have virtually no biter attacks except expansion groups

I guess importance is maybe not the best word, usefulness is probably better

[supple pecan]

I turned off expansion because I was progressing too slow

but yeah I understand the importance of forestries

have some rubber ones setup but didn't setup wood ones

[wind forge]

Yeah, because modules can be wiped and reused, basically every green module you have is a future red module etc.

[supple pecan]

and yeah i'm green-moduling everything

did that in vanilla, IR3 made it significantly easier with cheaper modules

[wind forge]

Correct, it’s much easier in IR3

All the best! Share some screenshots

[supple pecan]

Here's a map view of what I have currently

Haven't started oil, that's gonna be interesting

Building the science blocks

after that, probably gonna upgrade some of my production, iron primarily

[hexed turret]

Or just ignore forestry xD it's not that good and petrochem can make rubber too

But yeah actually doubling your science might be unnecessary, I said it just in case, because it's very simple to do and doesn't cost much

[supple pecan]

I actually need to get some wood forestries setup because I currently don't have automated wood

relying on the 40-50 stacks of wood my roller got with bots

also yeah I just realized i'm almost at 50% evolution so yeah I made a good choice turning expansion off

[hexed turret]

U only need wood earlygame

After that I think there's nothing that uses it

[supple pecan]

rails

though it's a miniscule amount that it needs

[hexed turret]

Ah fair

I don't build trains :P

So I wouldn't notice

[supple pecan]

blue science has finally been made

just need to build a place for the labs

[sturdy flicker]

If you're celebrating blue science, you will legitimately cry once yellows are made, because , , and logistics chests are stuck behind it.

I know I did

[supple pecan]

YEAH, I NOTICED

MY MALLS ARE GONNA BE GARBO FOR THE REST OF THE GAME

[wind forge]

Don't fall for that trap, you can what I truly believe to be IR3's best selling point for assembler builds - mini assemblers

The moment the mod really clicked for me was when (spoilers about one creative but common way of making builds) I found out that I could just ||"modularize" my builds, so I just shipped Iron and Copper etc. and made everything else (gears, plates, etc.) on site using direct insertion||

[supple pecan]

mini assemblers have been an interesting logistical change

1x1 so they don't take a lot of space but makes using long inserters more restrictive

[wind forge]

In other words, don't ||try to move all your intermediates around (which bots excel at)||, but rather ||ship the raw material around and make "components" that you piece together||

[supple pecan]

that's what i've been doing, shipping ingots instead of specific stuff like gears plates etc

since for most mini-assembler products it's either 1:1 or 1:N (N>1)

[wind forge]

Picture of my iron-level builds

[supple pecan]

Did look ahead a bit because i'm not immune to analysis paralysis/curiosity of what the pack has, only exception would be brass gears i assume

didn't see a use for brass ingots or plates besides gears

[wind forge]

Yeah, that's correct, brass is not particularly useful

I didn't realise that as well going in so I overbuilt it, and I would say there's enough demand for brass that you could probably get away with even on-site production of it if you wanted

Later game red circuit train -> train build using DI

[supple pecan]

oh, train DI

I'll have to see if I incorporate that

[wind forge]

It's not a very easy thing to do because the increased cargo wagon size make the buffers much larger

If you can't dedicate a whole rail to one train you have to have enough room to completely load/unload the train which is why I have double steel chest

[supple pecan]

Get the feeling I need to prioritize:

1. Basic Military sci for grenades and improved ammo (biters are close to my pollution cloud)
2. Solar Panels & Accumulators (reduce pollution & coke demand, though the ore washing requirement is a bit annoying.)
3. Roboports (makes building a lot easier)

and I just realized #2 and #3 are locked behind me getting to & finding gold...

[hazy zodiac]

logistic bots are overrated anyway. Heres my mall

[worldly portal]

Smallest IR3 mall

[hazy zodiac]

perhaps, it does produce everything. few missing ones are made just below the screenshot

[gray escarp]

my goodness

[supple pecan]

ok yeah i really need grenades big biters are spawning

time for oil

[hexed turret]

I've made some botless malls. They're messy

[supple pecan]

an update on my biter situation

shotgun turrets are absurd

[supple pecan]

oil WIP

Trying to design a rough starter "all-in-one" block which is probably a bad idea long term but whatever
Oil, Water, Stone goes in; Lube, Sulfur, Plastic, come out; CO2 and Natural Gas vented; Bitumen turned into oil (not in WIP)

[supple pecan]

Think I have a final design for this

[wind forge]

I just came up with a new lab design, which isn't really creative, but is going to be my next target to hit - 1 blue belt of science each

[proven fractal]

I mean hey, simple isn't bad. Looks clean.

Is there a reason you gave them that spacing? Could be one closer to be more compact or one further so that all the labs have the same number of beacons.

[wind forge]

Yeah I really couldn't stand the substations not tiling nicely

I get that everyone has their own preferences but this is my personal choice of what looks good for this design

[proven fractal]

Fair enough

[wind forge]

Might get sick of it in the future but yeah

[proven fractal]

8 vs 10 beacons isn't a big deal tbh

[wind forge]

Oh it's 10 v 12 not 8 v 10

But you're right, I might be able to squeeze a little bit more if I flip some of the labs around

[proven fractal]

10 vs 12 matters even less then

[wind forge]

Maybe this looks a little nicer?

Still 10 beacons, to get any more I'd have to have beacons between the labs and I don't know that I need that just yet

I can't tell if I like this more or not, maybe I'll just have both lying around

[proven fractal]

Wait nevermind, I just realised that a 7x7 building will always be affected by 10 beacons if in a row like that.

That's really cool actually

[wind forge]

True

I could have calulated that but calculations have become boring in the face of just visually checking if you can squeeze more or not

[proven fractal]

Because the square a beacon needs to be in to affect a 7x7 building is 13x13

So there, spacing doesn't matter at all apart from size/appearance

[wind forge]

Works for me

Seems like the most you can squeeze all around would be 20

Okay, yeah, I can get behind thatt. ((Building size + 5) / 3) * 4

Hmmm something's off about that

Was trying to calculate most that could fit on one side allowing for 4x rotation

[hexed turret]

beacons are particularly strong with larger buildings

been playing some Krastorio 2 and it made me realize this

[supple pecan]

Got my Oil block built and it works!!

This took longer than I expected to plan

and I still have the problem of figuring out what to do with the natural gas

[supple pecan]

now to figure out red circuits

[proven fractal]

Good luck!

[supple pecan]

mild peeve, there's a portable steam engine and portable battery discharger but not a portable combustion engine?

[sturdy flicker]

Same reason you can't just chuck coal into trains and cars, makes the game a bit more interesting, having to keep a supply of "battery-like" things on you.

[hexed turret]

Why do we even need a portable version of the steam engine while the engineer can carry many tens of real sized steam engines and could just fuel those

[quaint pollen]

Because those don't integrate well with equipment.

[proven fractal]

Clearly miniaturised buildings don't operate very well. Gotta un-minaturise them first

[supple pecan]

did say it was a mild peeve. The coal stuff was interesting since I made a global fuel pipeline for fueling trains. Just didnt want to carry 2 fuels since I got rid of steam stuff and thought “hey, only need to carry 1 fuel again” before realizing batteries were needed

[sturdy flicker]

Has anyone found a way to have Alien Biomes and IR3 somehow work together to spawn some ores in certain biomes, or is Alien Biomes simply aesthetic for the moment?

[proven fractal]

Unless the mod specifically supports something like that I wouldn't expect it to work like that

Alien biomes is pretty much just pretty biomes

[hexed turret]

Alien biomes does spawn a fuckton of rocks sometimes

Or some tiles that are slow to run on

Annoying

[sturdy flicker]

like, it does this, and it would be awesome if "volcanic" ash tiles cause maybe a slight amount of damage to unsuitably protected individuals, or the weird green area would contain uranium, etc.

I believe there was an FFF about terrain gen for 2.0, but unsure if it mentioned anything like this, where the ore-generation was somehow tied to it.

I know that they did do it for Vulcanus, because we get sulfur vents and other such things in certain places, but not willy nilly anywhere

[worldly portal]

Also on Fulgora, except it’s all one resource and one biome, but there are specific things to look out for. Large islands have lots building of space but little ore, small islands have rich ore but no space, and there are medium islands which are inbetween and tend to have the most ruined city bits

And for Gleba we can speculate, so far it seems to be tied to two different types of water that are needed to grow the two different plants. Pink/magenta water to grow the brains, and yellow water to grow the red fruit

[worldly portal]

““““““pretty””””””

[sturdy flicker]

Man I just had this awesome picture go thru my mind about a steampunk mid + endgame extension for IR3.

• clockwork combinators you need to keep fed with steam and you set timing of (work like regular signals except their "wires" are like little rubber tubes of pneumatic air-pulses.)
• hyper-compressed steam bombs that take a long time and a lot of energy and steam to make, but produce a massive explosion of steam when set off.
  (If anyone has watched "Steamboy", think of the steamball rupturing scene at the end).
• entire-base requires steampipes but you get access later to more powerful, higher temperature steam and pipes that go further,
• Speed-bonuses in entities are based on steam temperature.
  many more goodies

[spiral creek]

This is something I was concept designing for a while, the premise was low tech that proceeds into the late game

I came up with seven ages of tech. The low tech is always less convenient than the higher tech, but it has advantages when used in combination with high tech. For example, the mechanical age introduces mechanical belts that must be powered by a rotor; but in the forthcoming tech ages you get really fast rotors that let you make your mechanical belts faster than the belts of that age.

[worldly portal]

I was actually thinking of a similar concept myself

I mostly just thought of the science pack names

Red: Mechanical science
Green: Chemical science (cursed I know)
Grey: Same as now
Blue: Electrical science
Purple: Computing science
Yellow: Robotics science

Green science era would totally steal EI’s heat powered chemisty idea

But this time you would use it for longer than 5 minutes 😭

And most electrical stuff would take plastic (maybe even a separate rubber item, not sure if it would be necessary)

[spiral creek]

Alright here’s mine
I. Burner
II. Mechanical/heat
III. Pneumatic
IV. Diesel
V. Electropneumatic
VI. Caustic (magic/alchemy)
VII. Sci fi (still haven’t figured this one out)

[hexed turret]

Yeah I'm not a fan of purely decorative stuff that I can't interact with meaningfully

I also wish that if an area is green then it contains some resource

[supple pecan]

Earendal’s changing that up for SE 0.7 i think, not sure for base alien biomes though

[supple pecan]

red circuits!

Time to figure out ore washing...

ore washing, solar, accumulators, logi bots

wow a lot more stuff was unlocked

[wind forge]

I'm going to give you a tip from my personal experience and say that you will want to have bigger buffers while you figure out how to balance your ore washing

[supple pecan]

my current thought is to try and make a circuit that'll vary the water temp based on what's in the buffer

since hot and cold water are able to mix

[supple pecan]

ok yeah, think I got a design figured out

taking byproduct buffer, reducing it into a percentage signal, interpreting the signal so that:
byproduct < 10% -> use hot water
byproduct > 50% -> use cold water
byproduct between 10-50%, keep condition from before
got some help from #combinators because i didn't know sr latches lol

[wind forge]

Yeah, SR latches work great here

Realistically you could do a single above/below but SR latches definitely fit nicer

[supple pecan]

want to use SR latches to be fancy :P

but i think latches work better since it provides a greater range of buffer to account for changes in demand

[hexed turret]

never bothered with latches, too lazy to make lots of accumulators, always simpler to just make moar powah

my battery is the chest full of coke, that is connected to an alarm which beeps when coke gets below 8k

here's a "fun" idea for a base: never have belts going between recipes which are longer than 20-30; use airships for everything.

if someone does this and makes a video about it, I'll watch 3 minutes from the video

[wind forge]

Are there even airships in IR3 lol

[hexed turret]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3Airships

6 months old

[wind forge]

Looks great

[hexed turret]

it's certainly refreshing to use a new mechanic

[sturdy flicker]

Doing another Linked Chest Run

[spiral creek]

“What’s a belt”

[wind forge]

How do you prevent your builds simply being linked chest -> machine -> linked chest?

[proven fractal]

You don't apparently

[wind forge]

Yeah I mean that's a trivial solution to the matter

Enhanced late game with beacons

But I'm curious how you could best do it with limited linked chests, ala space exploration

[hexed turret]

Add OP modules and beacons, and you'll just need one of each building

Like AngelBob's

[supple pecan]

linked chests just feels like OP logistics network lol

[wind forge]

Yeah, definitely

It's more OP than bots

It works well on SE to fit the "inter surface" kind of teleportation that bots can't do, or in other words they're intersurface bots

[supple pecan]

i mean it's probably why the linked chests are locked at the end of the game i think

[wind forge]

For sure, and even then very expensive to craft

[supple pecan]

DS3 at least since they require arcos iirc

yeah, the only recipe that consumes arcos entirely

[wind forge]

That's correct, they're one of the places where arcospheres can be completely consumed

Exactly

[supple pecan]

has anyone used the waterfill explosives before?

bit bummed out it seems that they need adjacent water to activate

[wind forge]

Yeah they’re more intended to be “adjust the shape of your water” rather than “put water wherever you want” even though it’s able to basically do that

[worldly portal]

Just place a comically long line of them, and you can indeed put water wherever you want

[supple pecan]

that would be nice, if i didn't already place a bunch of rails everywhere

probably easier to just have my water-dependent blocks near lakes

[worldly portal]

Like in vanilla

[supple pecan]

that's the thing, i've never railblocked in vanilla

maybe once I launch a rocket i'll download a shallow waterfill mod since that doesn't feel as bad as the "waterfills your house" variant

[wind forge]

Sometimes it's annoying to have train wagons be double the size because then unloading takes twice the time for DI train builds

[quaint pollen]

Just limit all the wagons with half the size

Which would break all the "inventory full" train conditions.

[sturdy flicker]

Wait....you have the space, why aren't you using loaders? 4x blue loaders is 180 items a second per wagon, per side, so 360 i/s total per wagon, and would absolutely thrash those long inserters

[wind forge]

Hmmmm in part because it's my first train DI playthrough, in part because I don't like full logistics coverage on my rail network

[sturdy flicker]

like, if it was just a 1 cell tall space, then sure, only an inserter works, and youd need to use , but here you have a 2-high space.

[wind forge]

That second bit is something I've talked about more in either the spage or the FFF channel, but I'm not a fan of roboports everywhere

[sturdy flicker]

Oh...well unloading wouldn't be so fast, but loading would be.

[wind forge]

I'd need to get lube everywhere and that's not something I think is logistically easy right now but maybe sometime down the line

For this kind of build since buildings are odd dimensions and rails are evenly spaced, I definitely need to have long on either the loading or unloading side

You're right that I could do it for one of them

If I ever did it in a future revision I might, that's definitely a good point you bring up

But I'm not entirely sure how far this base will go since I did not expect a 2-way 1 lane network to be insufficient given the frequency that these trains would be moving

In other words, there are more trains on the network than I anticipated and it might be one of those things which is not worth the time to solve (tear up the whole network and replace it)

[sturdy flicker]

Personally I'd move the build one space towards the loading train, in this case , giving space to put a Loader pair at the [U] :tin_gear: / because you want the unloading to be faster. Technically you could also just leave the [L] train there to trickle load, so its not such a big deal for its loading time.

[wind forge]

It's mitigated by the fact that it's double sided

But honestly speaking the other sciences will probably be the bottleneck, so I will keep it in mind for the future

I'm currently scratching my head trying to figure out how to get purple science into a 6-wide build without belts

I thought I had a build for blue science but I will have to redo that since I confused the graphic for stone brick with the graphic for concrete brick lol

[sturdy flicker]

oof, I feel that

[wind forge]

Yeah, I took a break from that and changed the order a little and built my graphene first

It's honestly kind of a blessing that most things don't accept prod so I don't have to worry about potential loss

Room for beacons later if I need to buff them

[sturdy flicker]

Hot diggity damn do I dig this base design

By what metric is/was the train length decided?
Just arbitrary number 2-8 from a hat or is this a chunk lengthed train?

[wind forge]

I promise you it looks a lot more fun than it is to design lol... but if I can pull through I will be immensely satisfied

[sturdy flicker]

ditto with the linked chest programming and library creation

[wind forge]

2 is the minimum length needed to do stations like this, and any more than 8 was too slow

The thing about these builds is that the length of the train directly corresponds to the amount of assemblers you have, so in the future I realistically would probably do 4-16-4

Not necessarily in IR3 but if I do a DI train build in the future

[sturdy flicker]

Doubleheaded or single direction 4-16-4?

[wind forge]

They're currently running on batteries and I have plans to upgrade them to run on hydrogen cells, but that's a future optimisation since they don't even have enough time to ramp up

[sturdy flicker]

oh, double headed

[wind forge]

The network is 1-way but these stations require you to exit from where you came

I'm considering moving my labs down the middle here, and that would let me "isolate" the doubleheadeds from the network, but I don't think that's going to be the biggest of my issues anytime soon

[sturdy flicker]

this is equal parts cursed and genius

[wind forge]

I don't claim credit for the idea

Unfortunately with an engine length of 2, you run into issues like this, where one of the outer inserters for a wagon can't fit

So you have to ensure that your middle (the straight) track is the one that corresponds to the outermost assemblers

Sorry, missing inserter

Another thing to consider with these builds in IR3 specifically is probabilistic outputs or whatever you call them

Stuff like the ore washing/kovarex stuff, because if one assembler lags, the whole build lags

[wind forge]

How's that going for you btw?

I was curious how it would go, and especially if you'd find a way to do it without simply using linked chests for every input and output

[sturdy flicker]

Very quickly realising with every cheat entity I use, the lower the return on fun I get. damn devils bargain it is

It basically becomes more unfun the longer you do it because its just the same thing over and over.

[wind forge]

Yeah lmao, freedom restricts your fun

The more restrictions you have, the more you spend designing and being creative with builds

But there is a balance between restrictions and fun and that balance is something everyone must find on their own

[sturdy flicker]

Ok the remix thingie is flaking on me, but I'll try to visualise it:

Might a serial set of stations also worked, instead of a trident-branch? They have an offset of 2x2 each, so if the inserters are spaced apart the same, it could work.

|S1| DC-> glass plate
|S2| DC-> copper wire
|S3| DC-> copper foil
|  |
|  | glassplate inserter A
|  | copperwire inserter A
|  | copperfoil inserter A
|  | glassplate inserter B
|  | copperwire inserter B
|  | copperfoil inserter B
|  |

Idea is to reduce that "wagon on curved track issue" you might have with fluids.

S1 = Station1, etc.
DC = Decider Comb.

[wind forge]

Sorry, I looked at this and couldn't figure out what you were trying to say

Remember that although I technically don't have to, I'm trying to not to use belts here, everything DI until I really can't

[sturdy flicker]

For each of those white/blue/purple "[" brackets, they represent the wagon offset with each corresponding station

and that is where you put the inserters to unload that resource

Ignore the horribly fucked up non-corresponding scale to the real image, isnt correct

[wind forge]

Okay, yes, also possible

Fluids themselves aren't an issue because undergrounds are acceptable, and they can stretch far

That kind of build is something I would like to avoid while I can, because the cognitive load is something I don't think is necessary to undertake right now

But I will probably end up experimenting with something like that for future builds, I am very rapidly running out of space when it comes to the chrome and electrum science packs

One personal guideline I'm sticking to myself is to not make a build for anything that is used in only one place

But for things like these advanced motors (mall build pictured), I need to use more than 1 side of an assembler to get all the inputs in via direct insertion, and once I need to use 2 sides for 1 assembler I can only have 1 assembler per 6 (technically 7) wide space, and then I need to fit a lot more things around it

[sturdy flicker]

Yeesh, I would jave just trained in the molten metal. Yes I know it makes no IRL physics sense to pump molten metal at 3000 degrees thru a rubber tube, but you can here.

[wind forge]

That's something I considered at the start but decided against until I really had to

It would definitely save on the amount of space needed for buildings but the amount of trains would drastically increase due to the carrying capacity of the wagons

A cargo wagon can carry 8000 iron, a fluid wagon only 2.5k

[sturdy flicker]

is more molten metal made than can be consumed by three casteries?

could maybe share one arc furnace per pair of motor+3xCastery group

[wind forge]

That's a good question but usually isn't the limiting factor on the builds. I'd have to redo the calculations since I discarded them after I came to my conclusions, you'll have to give me a bit if you want that answer now

As I said, these usually aren't the limiting factor anyway since the underground pipes allow them to not take up space and so I can have more machines and ensure they're not the limting factor

When it comes to science, I find that often 1 ingredient assembler can feed more than 1 analysis pack assembler, so it's often a question of many beacons I can squeeze around it

Purple science which I haven't yet moved out of my base

btw I think my next step in the world is to set up oil cracking all the way down so I can get the hydrogen canisters for the rocket launches. I haven't yet decided if I want them to be via direct train insertion yet or not

Both the satellites and the rocket silos themselves

This is something I had in mind right now but it's very much still just in my head

[sturdy flicker]

I'm still not sure if Arcing ingots just to cast them into casted ingredients instead of using two Mini assemblers one behind the other makes any sense.

It was fine for electric motors because you could make all three ingredients with casters, but here you could just go
ingot -> rods -> rivets +
ingot -> plates

instead of
ingot -> molten metal -> cast rods -> rivets +
ingot -> molten metal -> cast plates

[wind forge]

Yes, but then I need to use columns to unload every item and then I have less space for other things. What you suggested is definitely possible but needs a lot more work dealing with the loading/unloading, and also this way I'm able to avoid one side needing long-handed inserters when loading/unloading

[supple pecan]

im starting to realize my rubber supply is pretty low, just ran out of red belts and my production is abyssmal lol

[supple pecan]

probably should get nickel up for ethanol & rubber

[supple pecan]

Something I've noticced is that my oil processing has become spaghetti already

[wind forge]

Yeah it adds another 2 tiers of processing past petgas, and those 2 tiers aren't really used much

[supple pecan]

i'm slowly starting to think that at some point it's probably worth converting most, if not all, petroleum to natural gas?

petro : ngas : ethanol is 1:1:1 and ethanol-plastic is a use for platinum

and natural gas is needed for lots of hydrogen later on?

[quaint pollen]

Keep some petro if you want to make high octane fuel

[wind forge]

As a way to use up platinum, yes, but otherwise it's debatable

[supple pecan]

ah yeah, high octane

[quaint pollen]

5/s

[supple pecan]

250-ish sci/min damn

nvm 300

wow that's a lot

[wind forge]

5/s constantly is great

[supple pecan]

i built for 1.25/s

[quaint pollen]

Yellow is next, and hoooo boy the blue circuits are going to be something.

[supple pecan]

Don't think I have the infrastructure to support 5/s

[wind forge]

Yeah, I cleared the pre-rocket phase with 1/s

I could probably go higher now but this is also my first IR3 playthrough

[supple pecan]

at least I think i'm making good pace

[wind forge]

Yeah, it's the first place where all the fluid/gas loops are really prominent and even mandatory

[supple pecan]

Just have to get chromium up then i'll start purple science

my sulfur production though...

[supple pecan]

vanilla assemblers?

[quaint pollen]

It's the icon on factory planner

a total count

[wind forge]

That's the mod's placeholder for a generic assembler

[supple pecan]

ah

total assembler count including intermediates, right

[wind forge]

As AntonEgo said it's used when you have a subfactory containing multiple buildings

[quaint pollen]

yeah, lots of small assemblers

[supple pecan]

gl gl

[quaint pollen]

I like starting my blocks with ingots and working up the logistics, since they not

Maybe beacons will shake things up, but it's a long way before getting there.

[wind forge]

I did your method too

[supple pecan]

yeah, assemblers can't take prod but ingot-related stuff can i think?

er more specifically, crushers, washers, and furnaces

[quaint pollen]

oh I forgot that science pack can be prodded, oops.

[wind forge]

Yeah it's a bit counterintuitive

[quaint pollen]

well, that's a free +40% to my goal SPM

[supple pecan]

oh the science packs can be prodded

[wind forge]

But basically anything that goes into making an ingot (except the ingot melt -> recast recipes, to prevent infinite resource generation) can be prodded, and science packs, and labs

Nothing else though

[quaint pollen]

oil products ?

I'll see to it, my current oil setup is too weak.

[wind forge]

Hmmm I don't remember but I think you might be right

Oil has never been a limiting factor to me

One thing that was nice is when I unlocked the air filters + robots, I started just venting all my excess oil byproducts (sour gas, CO2, etc.)

[supple pecan]

thought venting co2 was an expectation. Doesn't seem to be used for anything?

also, excess of sour gas?

[quaint pollen]

advanced forestries...

I'm mining sour gas spot, need so much sulphuric acid.

[supple pecan]

advanced forestries seem ehh

[wind forge]

They are indeed ehhh

[supple pecan]

lot more resource investment for 2x wood?

just place more electric forestries tbh

[wind forge]

I tried using them as a way to clean up CO2 but it's simpler to just use the air filters

[supple pecan]

and there's not really a need for wood later on besides rails

[wind forge]

With numbertweaking it could be a good thing but not at its current balance

[worldly portal]

All the steps accept productivity modules, it can provide a nice increase to plastic production

[wind forge]

Personally I found it simpler for myself to just use efficiency modules because then enemy attacks weren’t a thing, especially when considering that oil specifically is essentially free

[supple pecan]

Some solar to reduce the number of steam engines needed by ~25-30%

[wind forge]

Turning your idle chemical processing plant to power gas engines is a good idea too

[supple pecan]

Yeah I probably should find a use for natural gas to get my oil processing to get sulfur made

otherwise i'm just gonna be venting it

[supple pecan]

god i love ore washing

[hexed turret]

it's a good mechanic, I just wish there was a way, even costly, to void excess washed ores

[proven fractal]

It's weird because I've never had issues with excess washed ore

Everyone else seems to but I don't know why

[supple pecan]

assuming the main culprit of excess washed ores is lead?

nickel and chromium are fed into chromed stuff at a 1:1:2 nickel:chrome:steel
electrum is 7:3 gold:plat
brass is 10:5:3 copper:tin:lead, but brass and lead demand isnt tied to something constant like science

[hexed turret]

it's just weird to have ores be a harmful byproduct, which you can void only manually by committing chestbox murder, and otherwise you'd have to smelt unwashed ore for worse yields

it's also weird that if you ever need to use more than 50% of a secondary ore compared to how much you use the primary ore, then you just can't...

ok, maybe having a large buffer can prevent this in practice

[supple pecan]

in theory wouldnt >50% secondary only apply to chromium when there’s a lot of on-demand stuff from a mall + active science?

so yeah a buffer would help

actually wait im dumb

lead is used in both yellow and white sci

but idk if it’s >10% compared to tin usage

[wind forge]

If you don't care about squeezing everything out of your washed ores, you can always just always wash with max heat, and supplement any of the main ores with non-washed ores

There is some potential wastage there, but if you don't use max heat you could say the same. Question is which kind of wastage irks you more in some sense.

[wind forge]

The exact ratio is a question for you to figure out and depends on your specific production chains (where you use prod etc.) but I can tell you that there's a reason the ranges are what they are

[sturdy flicker]

Decided to start a proper run this time, no cheat entities, this time a train-map.

I've noticed a bit of an annoying dead-zone at the start of the game however.
So, the basic tech: Automation, needs 10 , and each sci needs 60 seconds to be consumed.

If you only use one lab, its 10 minutes of standing around and handcrafting in total.

But you're also building the first lab by hand, and each of its sub-ingredients, which takes 3 minutes. Now we're at 13.
Sure, you could build a second lab, again by hand, while the first is running, but to not run out of red science in the mean time, you need to have already made at least 3-4 red science, which don't take long, but still, about 10 seconds per.

Basically, when you start a new run, you can have your starter-mines and smelters going, but you have this agonizing 8-10 minute wait of just standing around and doing eff all.

[wind forge]

When I was playing through I found iron and copper to be "in excess" too. Just another perspective on your problem

In vanilla you just expand your production in the meantime

I don't know if the numbers are as large in vanilla or not but it's not something I feel is particularly significant

[wind forge]

Do you happen to know what kind of size your trains will be?

[sturdy flicker]

I might try your grid size

the one you showed a few days ago

[wind forge]

I'm not using a grid

[sturdy flicker]

well, yours but as a grid.

[supple pecan]

i mean i have a system to switch between hot and cold water since they can mix

so secondary production’s between 10-50%

[wind forge]

Hmmm, you mean you want to do a cityblock kind of build? Your blocks are going to have to be very big, just FYI

I just wanted to caution you against using trains of my size for cityblocks, since they're very long, and often the "area" needed for your builds is proportionately much lower than the "length" would normally imply for a cityblock

[proven fractal]

Basically, when you start a new run, you can have your starter-mines and smelters going, but you have this agonizing 8-10 minute wait of just standing around and doing eff all.
This is why I never start a run with only the basics and always adjust the settings to start with higher stage tech. I just can't be bothered to sit through that much nothing

[supple pecan]

1-1 trains in railblocks seem to be fine for me so far

[wind forge]

A 2-8-2 train like I do is already 83 tiles long, which as you might imagine takes up what most consider to be a good size of cityblock - a 100x100 cityblock

[sturdy flicker]

I'm probably going to incorporate my checker-board grid layout too.

Each grid will just be platforms fitting as much of a particular Train2Train DI setup can fit, the length of the block.

Related:
#1247210473171193879 message

[supple pecan]

8 wagons is pretty absurd

[wind forge]

DI trains are more suited to rectangular blocks than square blocks - my builds are never more than 40 tiles wide, most of them are not more than 20 tiles wide

That's barring the double sided ones but just a heads up

Looks like a cool build! I think it's great but I don't think it's very suited for trains of my size

You're going to have to claim a lot more space than you might need, there's going to be a lot of gaps in your bases that you could otherwise have used for production

[sturdy flicker]

This is why landfill and nuclear artillery exist ^^

[wind forge]

Yeah, of course, just wanted to make sure that you were aware that you would have a lot of dead space since you wanted to copy my train size

[supple pecan]

and yeah, i would assume that the ratios of primaries and secondaries needed for all sciences is between 10-50%

[worldly portal]

Yellow science uses a little lead

High capacity batteries
But that is pretty pathetic compared to the others, I agree

[hexed turret]

I think washing made more sense when it costed sulfuric acid to get more of the ores, when I first played IR3 this was already changed and I was glad to do less work

building washing twice - once per variant - would be too much work for an already complicated painful transition...

and yet I feel like getting more of the secondary ore ought to cost something

instead of just getting +40% for free

like ok here's a simpler variant than that initial thing:

right now it just gives you free ore, 1 becomes 1.1 or 1.5

have only one type of washing, make it cost sulfuric acid or anything that is not free but is affordable

(optionally: remove the bonus from the primary resource, maybe 1 crushed iron ore it gives 0.75 washed iron ore which smelts to 1.5 iron ingots)

and add a method which only makes the secondary ore, without making the primary ore, but make it inefficient compared to the washing

this way, you default to washing, until you're overloaded on secondary ore in which case you smelt crushed ore

and optionally you can add buffers and if the buffer for primary is full while for secondary is empty, you can use the inefficient alternative

[supple pecan]

i can kinda see why sulfuric acid washing was removed since it seems like a pain to make consistently

maybe the heated recipe could reduce the primary output to 0.75, not sure

i feel that the 1.1 and 1.5 recipes are mostly fine though? getting more product out isnt strictly better in this overhaul

[worldly portal]

I thought it was removed to make it easier to switch between the two

Same fluid, so you can pump it into the same pipe

[hexed turret]

yeah it's mostly ok

if you don't have a low-yield and a high-yield recipe, you just switch between high-yield and just crushing which is zero-yield, then it's simple

[hexed turret]

and I think it's better because then you're paying for the rarer ore

instead of it being a free nuisance resource with no automatable voiding

... and I'd just add voiding for washed primary resource (but nothing else)

this way, you can do this in the very rare case that you have too much of the primary resource and not enough of the secondary

and not worry about it

wish I wasn't too lazy to write a mod.

[proven fractal]

I don't quite understand what the difference is meant to be?
If you removed the low yield washing recipe you'd still have the same balancing problem to solve.

It would just change from 0.1 vs 0.5 output to 0.0 vs 0.5 output

[sturdy flicker]

The issue is that depending on the situation, either the primary or the secondary resource is the "trash resource", but you cannot get any secondary resource without ever producing the primary.

The trick is to recognize ahead of time if you need more of the primary resource as ingots/molten metal, in which case you need to also check if have space/demand for the secondary, but you can get away with, as you say, deciding between 0.0 and 0.5

If however the the secondary resource is your goal, you need to have space/demand for the primary because you can't make it, even if the rate is 0.5, because primary mineral has a 200% rate of ingot production, primary crushed 150%, while primary ore is only 100%.

[supple pecan]

probably doing a dumb decision but i'm thinking of centralizing chroming solution production into a railblock
does mean that I'm being extremely inefficient wagon-wise though

1 wagon of iron, 12 wagons of sulfur, 36 wagons of chromium and nickel is feeding 460 wagons of chroming solution i think?

actually is chromed stuff used a lot? I'm starting to see fluid wagons as being extremely inefficient in most situatiosn

[proven fractal]

Chromed stuff is used a lot post blue science iirc

It's been too long for me to remember exactly though

Obviously you need it for the chrome analysis pack, I'm pretty sure it's used a lot in the rocket as well

[supple pecan]

guess i'll have to make my chrome analysis pack block bigger then

current block size for my other sciences can only fit 7 inputs max, chrome's taking 10 since i was thinking of making motors and chromed parts on site

the pain of figuring out what to produce on site vs off site

[hexed turret]

the difference is that if you have 0.1 then it can still overflow

whereas with 0.0 there is no balancing you just get the primary resource

[wind forge]

It's used a lot in infrastructure stuff

All your high tier stuff uses chrome

Well, "all". But that's when I first realized I was using a lot, when I tried to scale up

[proven fractal]

Yes but we already have that, just smelt the crushed ore

[hexed turret]

Yeah we now have 0, 0.1, 0.5

I'd like to see just 0 and 0.5, albeit a 0.5 that costs something

And voiding for the washed primary ore

[proven fractal]

You wouldn't need to void the primary washed ore, 0.5 is already more of the secondary mineral than you need

[hexed turret]

For most practical applications yes but it bothers me that in a rare case it might not be and then it's not automatable

[proven fractal]

It would just be the same fundamental balancing required except it could be done more easily with a priority input splitter

[hexed turret]

I mean you can already do it with a priority input splitter and only do hot water washing.

[proven fractal]

Exactly! so what you're asking for is just... not using cold washing

[hexed turret]

Would just mean you get less yields on primary sometimes

Yeah, replacing it with acid washing

Because it's weird that it costs nothing to get a valuable seeming resource

Making it de facto a nuisance resource

[hexed turret]

is there a way for me to check the older recipes of IR3? the changelog doesn't say what its acid washing recipes were, I want to check both

[hexed turret]

(found it via a Youtube video of a let's play on that version)

[quaint pollen]

I vaguely remember a "75% primary ore, 50% secondary ore"

I can only remember a few fun quirks of the older version, like platinum being used for more efficient oil cracking with a 99% self preservation.

then platinum being renamed tellurium

[sturdy flicker]

Couldn't one just redownload IR1 / IR2 or are they no longer available?

[supple pecan]

IR2 is still available but IR1 isn't it seems

[spiral creek]

I think IR1 is only available for earlier versions of the game

[hexed turret]

I think it was 50% secondary 25% primary

Or 75% secondary

Which also means that the ratio between them was more drastic.

[sturdy flicker]

Could someone maybe also check on their IR3 if this is happening?

Basically, put down any steam inserter, as a ghost or normal, and then replace with its nonlong/long-handed equivalent, then check its gripper placement

Could be due to a mod, but I don't recall having such a mod installed.

Might be the Drop Lane

[spiral creek]

I do think it would be Change Inserter Drop Lane

I’m not at the computer or I would test this

[proven fractal]

Sounds extremely like its drop lane, and the vector position isn't being reset on replacing

Yes it's drop lane

This is a consequence of custom vectors being enabled, you don't even need to replace it, you can just copy the settings from one to another using a blueprint

[hexed turret]

This would be a great bug exploit if it worked on vanilla. Long handed stack inserters. Long handed filter inserters

[worldly portal]

Well, long handed filters are sort of coming in 2.0

[supple pecan]

did someone ping me?

[wind forge]

Good way to see

[supple pecan]

doesnt let me see ghost pings

[wind forge]

If it's a ghost ping then what is there to respond to lol

[supple pecan]

ghost pings are just annoying lol

[hexed turret]

But that is sooooo faaaar awaaaay in the future!

[wind forge]

My new water/steam production area which hopefully will last me until I run out of UPS

There's room to place another build next to it if I run out of space

Basically it just takes in all the water and polluted steam I have, and consumes those before pulling from the "main" water and steam supplies, which are both supplied by offshore pumps

It's located next to the oil production area (which admittedly needs a rework soon) but that should help ease some congestion since most of the demand for steam comes from cracking

I'm tearing down my old dirty water plant and polluted steam plants but keeping my original water source area in case I find that I need more water than I can supply with 1 station, though I'll definitely be deprioritising that one

One question I still need to answer and can only really answer through testing is if the increased distance from the rest of the builds will be an issue with supplying them with water. Since the stations are all going to be 8 wagons long, that's 200,000 units of water sent each time, which hopefully lasts long enough that I can get by with 1 train.

Unfortunately, I didn't realise that having only 1 set of rails each direction would cause an issue with traveling since I sometimes have multiple stops using the same piece of rail, forcing other trains to wait on the main line, hence reducing the amount of trains on the network is a secondary priority of mine. It's still a balancing act between the number of trains I need to maintain throughput and the amount of production I want.

[sturdy flicker]

Do you make similar priority use of the crushed stone/silica/sulfur from the polluted water?
Ie. do those stations signal the main stone/sulfur-works to be disabled if there is enough at the polluted water-cleaner for pickup?

I remember doing something similar with sour gas mines, except I sorta cheesed the system by placing/moving/removing a number of actual physical combat shotguns into the logistics network based on how much demand there was for it.

(one could use any resource, but it needs to be one not normally present in the logi-system storage, and in retrospect could/should have been a sour-gas barrel)

If the shotguns were present in the logistics network (possible because I'm crazy and I would cover my entire base with logistics coverage pre 2.0) then it meant non-oil-refinery sources of sour gas would be allowed to depart from their sour-gas derricks/etc. The important takeaway is that it worked wirelessly.

This way I didn't have to build dedicated [U] SourGas (Mines) platforms at makers which might otherwise stand empty.

[wind forge]

Yes, they all are funneled to liquid concrete for steel analysis packs (blue science)

Gravel is simpler because nothing really demands gravel other than that but I made the decision earlier on to have sand on the network instead of just stone. That's something I might remove down the line.

I’m guessing your U is for unloading?

My sour gas prioritizes consumption from cracking over the natural vents, though I’d definitely be lying if I said my cracking system couldn’t be improved

I’m trying to play with a priority system by allowing trains to enter based off how much gas is present but it’s posing a little bit of an issue due to the limited buffer sizes and the time between pickup and consumption

[sturdy flicker]

May I ask by what means you achieve the priorization mechanic?

• Dedicated but usually empty [U]nloader station platforms for vent sources that are trainLim=0 'd whenever cracking-sources provide enough?
• Distributing the current count of sour-gas available at consumers to all sour-gas providers via wire?

[wind forge]

So firstly for my network, the train limit is always either 1 or 0, owing to the large size and so low number of trains. I can't really say if it's necessary but it's a design choice I made when I decided to use the larger trains. Then I just read the amount of items ready for pickup/dropoff. Because of that I just adjust the threshold to set the limit to "enable" the stop. But beyond that I also have stations named priority that go there and pick up items first, though admittedly they also have to go do a normal provision stop, but those are never limited, so it's always an in-and-out, never really waiting around for it to be free

[sturdy flicker]

Ok, so dedicated.
This must mean that most trains that have potential choices between priorities also have potentially more complicated schedules than just
"Go to and Pick up at (A), Go to and Unload at (B), Repeat"

[wind forge]

It's more like

• (optional) Priority Pickup
  -> Regular Pickup
  -> Dropoff

[sturdy flicker]

I swear some of my solutions are just downright illegal

copper isn't any more elegant

[sturdy flicker]

its just....really weird how theres this annoyingly fluid transition between iron and copper/bronze technologies, with respect to mining/crushing/malling.

Depending on how you go about researching tech, you could have electric mining, crushing, smelting and assembler tech done really quickly, which really cuts down the time-use factor, and thus return on investment of bronze smelteries.

[wind forge]

Seems like you started a new run?

[sturdy flicker]

yep

train-map, because I still just don't want to deal with biters as much, so having them not expand into new territories is a nice tradeoff.

[sturdy flicker]

yeesh, deserts amirite

whelp, this is isn't sustainable

[spiral creek]

I think I’ll do 1k IR3

[spiral creek]

Thanks to the recent work of @polar glade I was able to do sushi for my bronze smelter. I’ll get a picture when I can

Excuse the grid

When backed up

[wind forge]

Are you using any circuit wires?

[polar glade]

no it's mechanical sushi, splitters only

[spiral creek]

Hey what’s the net pollution for burning wood from a forestry? Is it positive or negative?

I’m on a high tech multiplier and I don’t wanna drive far to reach my forestries

[worldly portal]

You should probably turn wood to charcoal first

It has a pollution reduction

But as for the question itself... Idk

[bitter mortar]

Negative iirc
Also you need trees for it and they also drop pollution heavily

[spiral creek]

That’s true I can use trees. I’m really worried about my pollution right now for wood output but the trees will help

[spiral creek]

I don’t think these trees are gonna do it. I think I’m gonna need to find an alternative solution until I get pollution filters

[wind forge]

Maybe you wanna beeline to green modules

[sturdy flicker]

Something kinda bugs me about the green modules, and whether they actually reduce pollution at the entity they are placed in.
Taking a look at all three modules, the productivity module is very expressive, showing 4 stats each with a bonus or penalty. The tooltip text also reflects this.

However the Efficiency module and Speed module tooltip text state they each have a penalty/bonus to Emissions, which for me means pollution, measured in X/minute
Their actual stat listing shows only an energy consumption/speed bonus/penalty. No mention of pollution.

This tells me, that the only point at which pollution is reduced/increased, is where burner fuel meets the boiler that produces steam for electricity, since that extra/reduced demand for electricity makes itself most present at that point.

Pollution at the entity where the module was placed in however, would remain the same. The only difference being the speed and energy consumption at which products are produced.

[wind forge]

Iunno enough about this, all I know is that they do feel like they make the machines produce less pollution

Maybe someone more knowledgable about the technical side of factorio can answer things

[worldly portal]

Pollution emission scales with power consumption

That’s how they do it

However, in IR3 specifically, eff mods in assemblers and other non-polluting buildings do indeed only have the indirect effect

[sturdy flicker]

Well aseemblers and non-polluters I can understand, since 0 -30% is still going to be 0.
But Furnaces, both burner and electric do pollute, hence why its weird not to see their pollution emissions go down when the module is inserted

Oh, wait, nvm they do

hmm, could it just be a tooltip thing?

[worldly portal]

It just kind of assumes you know this

[sturdy flicker]

yeesh

IR3 malls, man....

[worldly portal]

IR3 rail recipe my beloathed

Rails always have to cause some kind of trouble

In vanilla they’re the worst science ingredient ever, and in IR3 they’re like small power poles you can never upgrade

[spiral creek]

Pollution is proportional to the energy consumption of a machine. This is a base feature and it’s ambiguous in vanilla as well

In space exploration the efficiency modules do a bonus pollution cut meaning they actually double dip

[maiden ferry]

The change is difficult to notice at first unless you used it from the start (no pollution) as the old pollution cloud need to disperse first.
I use eff module religiously for oil outposts and sometimes mining camps. full eff modules practically eliminates my need for heavy defenses on them, or even entirely.

[sturdy flicker]

It sorta kinda bugs me there's no way to speed up the creation of Field-Alligned Electrum Crystals within Supermagnets, or a post-copper age charcoal kiln, or ability to chuck wood/wood-chips into a normal furnace and creation charcoal faster.

Like, not that you need it in very large amounts post copper age, but still

[worldly portal]

Really, why can’t electric furnaces make charcoal

They don’t even have the restriction that the stone/bronze ones do that makes charcoal kilns a requirement

[sturdy flicker]

That fun moment you're slowly building the grid 😄

[sturdy flicker]

Really gotta get myslf cliff explosives and stop all this nonsense

[sturdy flicker]

me: " noo, you can't just buffer materials, its not the same as having throughput "

also me:

[willow bronze]

still addicted to ir3

[bitter mortar]

WTF is this

[maiden ferry]

i-is there even a point to this buffer?

[sturdy flicker]

just means each smelting is capable of outputting a full belt of smelted ingots for....one sec...

boxSlots = 30
boxesPerSection = 2
stackSizeIngots = 100
totalIngotsFull = 30x2x100 = 6000
beltSpeed = 30/s
bufferTime = 6000/30/s = 200s/section
smelterCraft = 2.5
baseCraftTime = 1s
actualCraftTime = 1s/2.5 = 0.4s
smeltersPerInputBelt = 30*0.4 = 12
sectionsNeeded = 12/4 = 3
totalBufferTime = 200*3 = 600s

So, assuming its full, and then suddenly switched off, at standard smelter-column length to consume a whole input belt, you'd probably have about 10 minutes of continuous, full, single red belt of output.

[bitter mortar]

Why don't you just make a classic buffer in the end of line?

[sturdy flicker]

because this is the same, and inline, ie. taking up less total space than needing an additional classic buffer at the end of the line.

Hell, I can do this for the input material too, and really make the whole thing a powerhouse of buffering.

[bitter mortar]

Weeeeeeeell

[bitter mortar]

I just gonna keep using my little buffers

[quaint pollen]

Stone and Calcium storage from Ultracube ?

Maybe someone should make a thread on that overhaul.

[bitter mortar]

It has a server

[quaint pollen]

Does IR has one ?

[bitter mortar]

no

[worldly portal]

I think there used to be one but it got toxic and annoying so deadlock killed it

[bitter mortar]

You have to ban everyone or everyone will ban you

[sturdy flicker]

that moment you completely forget you need to extract the physical bitumen byproduct from oil refineries

that moment you remember that petrofluids are polluting...

[spiral creek]

You can connect the red to conserve underground’s

[worldly portal]

I think these spaces are also short enough to use those “short undergrounds”

[supple pecan]

is why i have a 7-wide gap between refineries

can stick long inserters + belt between

[spiral creek]

In brevven’s with the carbon black output I sandwiched an output belt and input fluids between the refineries

[sturdy flicker]

I just realised IR3 lets you deconstruct landfill.

It does not however, return the materials to you.

Have a guess who got themselves stuck in the middle of the ocean.

[spiral creek]

How will you get back

[maiden ferry]

I can see the appeal. but it wont't be even half as effective without loader. right? 🤔

[sturdy flicker]

Used an autosave, only way at this point.

[sturdy flicker]

Correct, the only way this works is using the loader to facilitate an uninterrupted maximum of belt-speed at all times.
Unless you have bulk-inserter hand-size research torqued up past the belt's speed, (which IR3 doesn't do natively), then the loader is the only way.

I showcased this mostly because it nicely fits within the n*3 length of smelters, providing a perfect "loader -> chest -> unloader" space.

[maiden ferry]

it does tickle my aesthetic preference. thanks for sharing it. :>

[sturdy flicker]

deciding to try a different kind of smelter layout

Only really feasible/practical due to having the mod to change output lanes

[bitter mortar]

Can't you just have two out lanes

Nvm anyways

[wind forge]

Interesting choice to make it a big rectangle instead of more square

This is pretty good for an infinitely extendable smelting area, but the difficulty in copypasting goes up a fair amount (not that its super annoying even then) when your blocks are less than "one bend wide"

[quaint pollen]

Even though the out/in ratio is 1.5 it's a pretty compact design.

2 for pure ore

[wind forge]

Always curious what the endgame arcfurnace layouts look like

Without beacons, the footprint of the casting machines is seriously dwarfed by the arc furnaces

But since the casting machines can't be beaconed, there's a bunch of flexibility given how small they are

[quaint pollen]

Yeah there was a time where electric furnace with had a better yield than arc furnace, but not anymore, they produce 30 molten per ore (equivalent to 3 ingots)

[sturdy flicker]

I'm really liking the station(s) width === factory width restriction I showed above for smelters. For simple recipes, like smelting or grinding, its quite simple to setup.
More ingredients makes the design more complicated, but widens my width so there's emergent gameplay there too.

Currently making tinned wire with a combination of my lane-mixer balancer and some spaghetti-belts. Screenshots to follow...soon.

[worldly portal]

Oh, they patched that? I’m so glad, I’ve pointed it out a few times since I got into the mod

[hexed turret]

Yeah, the mod creator isn't contactable by any means afaik

[bitter mortar]

Deadlock is contactable on GitHub
I see him fixing bugs 2-3 weeks ago, no more bugs are open atm

https://github.com/Deadlock989/IndustrialRevolution/issues/449

[hexed turret]

Seems fair, porting for space age gonna be a lot of work

[worldly portal]

Aww, I liked deep space mining

[hexed turret]

IR 3.2 will not be compatible with the Space Age paid-for mod (I'm not buying it)
Guess I won't be playing IR3 anymore then. I hope he changes his mind after he sees how good it is.

[hexed turret]

Same :(

[bitter mortar]

What does it have in common

[worldly portal]

I mean I was never expecting it to get spage compat

They don’t really fit together

[bitter mortar]

He's just saying no Quality and Space compat
Not like it had Space Exploration compat

[worldly portal]

Most current overhauls probably won’t bother with it

The only ones I can maybe see giving it a shot are EI and krastorio

And the SE situation is already known

[bitter mortar]

Didn't Ear said that "there be a poll after SA"?

[worldly portal]

Yeah that’s what I was referring to

[bitter mortar]

But I guess it'd hit that 90% of SA players anyways

[hexed turret]

Hmm maybe you're right

Maybe if it's compatible with SA then it will need to be called IR4 (because of the huge amount of new stuff)

But it sounded like he's not making such a thing

[hexed turret]

... I do hope most overhauls do Quality though. Obviously Space is not right for every mod

[gray escarp]

Damn, i didn't expecting that, guess i won't be able to enjoy SA with IR3

[supple pecan]

tbh i get the impression deadlock’s not a fan of the factorio community

so makes sense he doesnt want to try adding SA compatibility and getting a million complaints abt stuff

kinda surprised he doesnt want to buy the SA expansion though

[proven fractal]

Raiguard confirmed a few times that K2 will not be made compatible with Space Age. It will get a day one 2.0 port though.

[wind forge]

You don't have to enable SA in every playthrough

Supporting SA and making your resources every-planet compatible is different from making your resources Elevated Rails/Quality compatible is different from making your resources Elevated Rails/Quality dependent is different from making your resources 2.0 only

I'm taking his statement to mean at most it will be compatible with Quality/Elevated Rails and not required

[proven fractal]

I would like to play through IR3 again with train schedule interrupts and elevated rails.

[hexed turret]

Oh god, IR3 mall building is already hard without quality xD

[sturdy flicker]

hell, I'll buy a copy for him if it means he'd continue development or at least get some fun out of it

Totally get the decision though, Space Age is its own overhaul mod for 2.0, just as IR is for 1.1.
There is nothing gained for IR3 to include different planets (at this point) other than maybe raised rails, since "most" of the draw of IR3 is the early game, and not necessarily the lategame.

That is to say, unless you could somehow get all the biomes onto one planet, which would be awesome btw, there is no significant advantage to IR's lategame theme to be done on say Gleba or Vulcanus.

Due to this, its just an overhaul mod, so you basically are holistically picking whether to play:

• Vanilla 2.0
• SpaceAge
• IR
• some other overhaul

[sturdy flicker]

Gotta say, love him or hate him, Deadlock knows how to put down a zero-tolerance for bullshit boundary and sticks to his guns.
Clean repo, no swarm of open issues, short and to the point readme. Basta.

[hexed turret]

Same

I'd do it even if he only wants to play it

Yeah my initial reaction was because I misunderstood what it meant to support SA vs just 2.0

[spiral creek]

I was thinking about this more

I can’t imagine deadlock isn’t paying for subscription software to make the graphics for IR3

[random pewter]

I plan to complete IR3 before the Space Age release。

[maiden ferry]

technically SA is also an overhaul to the vanilla game. so it kinda makes sense that most overhaul mods wouldn't be able to run together with it.

but having a steampunk age in the progression for space age is very salivating.
it doesn't need to have a big relevance for late game.

[sturdy flicker]

No, of course not. It would be really cool to have the whole copper age before hand. I just see an already overloaded item-tree ballooning even more were that added to a hypothetical IR:SA

[maiden ferry]

that's true. I really like the steampunk aesthetics IR3 brings. I wish there's a stand alone version that just change the graphics of a few things with the ones from IR3. like the pipes and smelter.

[spiral creek]

IR is designed to be flashy and clean looking whereas factorio has a worn and rusty aesthetic and much more boxy and industrial looking art

Except these new machines are a lot more flashy in comparison to the base game machines

[worldly portal]

But they keep the grungy and grimy look, even with the really high tech stuff

Whereas IR3 goes for sort of a retro sci fi aesthetic

[quaint pollen]

Imagine if level make buildings shinier.

[sturdy flicker]

I've wanted a super extended pre-game that just turns the steampunk up to 11. I've said it before and I'll say it again because I can, but more advanced and slightly fantastical tech in the realm of the Aetheric Lamp, such as

• better tech that makes more efficient use of steam, so iron/steel+brass steam-tech.
• same goes for transporting it via pipe, better material results in more advanced pipes that can tunnel the fluids for longer/do cooler things like side-by-side in parallel.
• same for better steam-bots, etc.
• pneumatic combinators (imagine nice thick colored hoses that are the signal "wires") from entity to entity.
• re introduction of fluid temps with 2.0, allows for steam temp to play a part in giving steam-entities a speed bonus.
• steam-punk modules that require certain steam temperatures but result in the usual
• steampunk nuclear reactor, this thing produces the higher temperatures you want for steam. Instead of using the turbines for generating electricity, you would directly make use of the steam itself from the exchanges.
• end game nuclear steam-locomotives, require a tanker wagon of water, but use nuclear fuel as their "fuel". Once at temperature, they produce their own 500°C steam, producing an interesting "refuelling" emergent gameplay puzzle since you need not only fuel but water too.
• steam pumps that use a bit of steam to power themselves but pump 95% of the pipe contents onwards.
• "pressurized" steam, a seperate fluid that cant be mixed with regular stuff, requires heat to do so, and requires a 1x1 regulator to depressurize it again later. Provides a way to transport steam longer distances in more concentrated form. Can be used in specialized weapons, crowd-control steam turret, and a steam-grenade with surprisingly powerful yield.

No idea what the end game goal could be, maybe powering a steam-themed version of the gyroscope-sphere lab to research this new fangled thing called "electricity"

[spiral creek]

You have a very similar heart in your ideas to mine

[bitter mortar]

Fluids are dead in 2.0

[spiral creek]

It’s true

[bitter mortar]

*fluid throughput

[spiral creek]

That being said the fluid throughput greatly increases the options for fluid based power

That was all that was holding me back on my pneumatics idea

I think I’d still have to hack around the engine for it as I described previously

Because machines can’t have dynamically scaling speed

Has there been any statement on how fluid temperature mixing will work in 2.0?

[sturdy flicker]

Not really, not unless you count the one about plasma temperature for the fusion reactor.

Addressing fluid temps "properly" would mean either:

• re-introducing fluid temps as they once were pre-0.15, which necessitates some game-play significant mechanic that can make use of them
• re-introducing fluid temps as an api exposure so modders could make use of them with the new fluid system
• removing fluid temp altogether, but unlikely because you would have to treat 165° and 500°C steam as two seperate fluids, which would be....weird
• leaving it all as is, which means continuing being able to mix same-fluids with different temps and producing an average temp, ie. currently exploitable for on-the-fly ore-washing control.

[spiral creek]

I’m curious if temperatures will mix instantly like fluid levels or if they will mix procedurally like 1.0 fluids do

[sturdy flicker]

Likely instantly per NewSection™ of pipe, since simplifying the calculation and thus lightening the performance load of fluids was the goal, ergo less overall sections to handle. Granularly handling each individual pipe did not actually create for a more immersive experience as hoped, not unless you treated every fluid like trying to pump honey.

[sturdy flicker]

I need someone to check this for me.

Build a transfer plate (3x3).
Put locomotives, wagons, fluid wagons into box near the plate. No filters on the box.
Put a loco, wagon and fluid wagon filter slot into your inventory.
Run over the plate.

No matter what I do, it is the only group of items that refuses to auto-transfer.

[wind forge]

Does the issue persist if the inventory limit is removed?

Check if you’ve accidentally hit some inventory transfer enable hotkey too

[sturdy flicker]

doubt it. I've put other things, such as the Coke or Fish into restricted/red slots, and then filtered for that resource in my inventory.
Transfer plates will pull stuff even from inventory-restricted slots in boxes. Those, afaik, only restrict what inserters can put in.

The saga continues: Todays episode, Thermionic Tubes, supports 4 in, 4 out.

[spiral creek]

Maybe the train cars are just too humongous to fly through the air safely

[wind forge]

I forget the ratios but a blue inserter could possibly work better to output the copper cables

Interesting way of getting glass and copper through the same splitter, I should do that more often

[sturdy flicker]

currently still at yellows. I'm trying to get the R+G+B linear mall removed granularly.
I broke my previous rule about not building over train-grid lines and am slooowly eating away at it with every thing that get replaced.

By god the inventory limit is killing me. But you need so much different stuff all the time.

[wind forge]

Is it really that bad? I think you’re just making a habit of carrying more than you need lol

[wind forge]

From your video here I can see a bunch of things I wouldn’t bother carrying especially since you have bots unlocked

[sturdy flicker]

I tried...I REALLY tried to get glass into that footprint. couldn't do it

And yes, trains will just loop if they must.

[maiden ferry]

that's art right there. how did you even design them?

[sturdy flicker]

The way anyone has ever made anything. Make it in large and easy to follow, then cut the fat iteratively.
being a Belt Madness veteran helps a bit.

Then lose your mind as the kid next door completely redesigns it better, faster, and cheaper than you did.

[supple pecan]

really need to get back into my IR3 save and finish it. This design’s making my factorio addiction itch again

[torn cairn]

So is this the place for discussing IR3 or is there a fan-run discord somewhere as well?

[maiden ferry]

Yes and technically maybe.

[sturdy flicker]

If said Discord wasn't shutdown, but yeah, this may as well be it.

[sturdy flicker]

I had the idea of a ToScrap-train. Its only order is to go to a [U] ToScrap station, but you select it and Ctrl-click on the train-grid closest to your position.

It comes to you, you offload all your junk into it, and it goes back and unloads it all to the scrappers that evtl. re-smelt everything.

[sturdy flicker]

Decided to highlight my [U] stations if they have a limit of 1 or 0

[sturdy flicker]

What I find a curiously counter intuitive about transfer plates is that they aren't able to really "autobalance" an inventory.

Lets say you have a box that has filters for . But you also have a couple inventory slots filtered to the same.
The box could be 75% full of them, but if you have only a few belts left, instead of first making sure the player has a full amount of those filtered slots, it instead prioritizes the slots in the box, and will pull from the player.

Ideally, both box and inventory would act as buffers, and the transfer plate simply recognizes whether the player has too much or too little, pulling or pushing the difference from the box, as opposed to just blanket-pulling everything from the player.

[bitter mortar]

Hnm

[bitter mortar]

I get why
Chests are red

You'd need yellow chests for that

[wind forge]

Looks exactly like a set of rails that would suffer from an intersection of that size

[sturdy flicker]

Those trains sit there for so long, especially atm that they're using instead of or . TPM is more like MPT, so its not a big deal if one has to wait a little longer for another to clear.
For now its an okay solution. Later I'll spread out those stations.

[wind forge]

Eh, personal pet peeve of how you have trains there while and also buffers, but no big deal

[sturdy flicker]

this is still pre IR3/ and other steel-age buildings, hell I'm barely getting Diodes and , off the ground at scale

soon as i get this shit off the ground

[fiery walrus]

spent a while designing this for a very generalized mall, so that it could take inputs from many lanes and process them into the main recipe or into a chain of intermediates
but looking at the recipes needed in a mall... its just not useful i dont think.

looks kind of like to make a clean mall, you have to make intermediates in designated areas, and then belt them into a mall

because things like large iron frame requires a large assembler, and so does the basic computer that it needs, and so does the small iron frame that the computer needs

[wind forge]

Well that depends on what you consider an intermediate but yes, those are usually made elsewhere

Looks like a nice design, you can also take out some of the middle minisemblers and use a long-inserter to keep them in line when you do certain intermediates

Personally don't use (presumably here) bob's inserters? Or whatever you're using to adjust the pickup and dropoff

[fiery walrus]

yeah last minute i realized that a lot of recipes need something like plates and also bolts from the same material so i forced it in with side inserters

without that you could double the small assemblers on each side

but its a failed design anyways

[wind forge]

Most recipe use at most two materials, and a lot of them are "tiered", so if you use iron you'll rarely use steel, if you use steel you'll rarely use chrome, etc.

[worldly portal]

You could use IR3’s loaders

To output on near side

I’ve seen that done before

[wind forge]

In other words maybe you can come up with a design to have one "main" resource bussed in and then just move the other intermediates another way (e.g. copper/iron could share a belt for your steel-tier assemblers)

[fiery walrus]

i think the way to do is it to make a mall for each technology tier. and belt all the intermediates into it, without doing direct insertion from small assemblers--but you could do a mix of direct and indirect. like i could belt in a iron and copper ingot one, so that i can make gears rods bolts etc and copper coil. but things like beams and frames cant be made inside the mall

but the problem is that like, a lot of recipes require lots of same material processes so to do it cleanly is another thing

[sturdy flicker]

flexes knuckles

time to trim the fat 💪

[fiery walrus]

i thought this made for a fun challenge. i want to see if i can find a generic way that works to reorder belts like this

this was almost what i would consider clean, if the 4th diamond belt didnt need to poke out into the spacing to get to the last column

[fiery walrus]

after a couple attempts, seems like this as as neat as i can get it

hmm, looking back at it though, i think i actually almost like the first one better in some qualities

I think whats happening is that the blue side gets more complex looking, while the red side is completely ordered.
so its creating an asymmetry that isn't appealing

[sturdy flicker]

UGH FINALLY

the reason's its not alligned will become clear

using the cheap 4-4 """ b A L a n C e R """ because my goal is density, not perfection

[sturdy flicker]

And an alligned version

[sturdy flicker]

yisss

[sturdy flicker]

decided to "cheat"

then again, the fact you can't connect individual wagons to circuit networks means its more difficult to define priority

[spiral creek]

This will block because you’re using loaders rather than inserters between wagons

[sturdy flicker]

hmm, good point

[glass kernel]

Hi all

I just got red circuits up and set up oil stuffs

I ended up storing a bunch of products in tanks but I'm kind of overwhelmed by the sheer number of products

I'm working towards the chrome analysis pack now I researched everything available until steel analysis packs

Having a good time just building things :D

[sturdy flicker]

It's honestly the best draw of the IR3 mid/late game, solving each I/O puzzle as every product requires its own maddeningly unique set of ingredients, with little overlap between products.

Once you build a bot mall it does take a lot of the strain out of it. But getting to , and logistics is the real mountain to climb.

[glass kernel]

Yep! Now I'm on the ore washing step and I'm gonna have to figure out what to do about that

[wind forge]

Seems like the issue could be resolved a little by simply having more space

Clean is usually a lot easier to achieve if you leave yourself the room to doso

[sturdy flicker]

I'm reading up about coking coal and why it and only it is suitable for making coke, as we see it in IR3.
I had the idea to somehow turn charcoal into coke, and looked up if there was any specific limitation.

Theres quite a difference actually, the fact that mined coal has been formed under millions of years of pressure and has all these other trace elements like sulfur and stuff. I'd love to still have some process whree, perhaps using the recipe-furnace (multi-ingredient furnace), you put charcoal and sulfur into it and it has a 50% chance of producing coking coal. Not exactly energy efficient, but you have a resource sink out of that at least if you need to get rid of wood.

[sturdy flicker]

4 belts in the width of 3, tho tbf completely unnecessary

[glass kernel]

Are loaders unloaders necessary?

I've been playing the entire time without them

Also I haven't really touched modules but I see a lot of people throwing efficiency modules into things

I'm just now starting to build my ore washing set up

For context

[sturdy flicker]

Not with the improved version ^^

[glass kernel]

I wish I could build cool things like this

I'm really bad at designing lol

[sturdy flicker]

But for a setup like this, where you somehow have to insert 18 items within 2 seconds, they outperform pre-bulk inserter

[glass kernel]

I see

I can imagine it would be helpful for my pipes right now

I see what you mean

I'm still working with yellow inserters

I've started to not use things where I don't need them just yet unlike my vanilla runs where I would just replace everything

Everything is so costly here I don't think replacing is the right move right now

If I'm understanding the "spirit" of the mod of that makes sense?

[sturdy flicker]

I would really recommend getting the Blueprint Sandbox and Editor Extensions mods, they can really help provide a quick way to have access to all items infinitely, and give a space to design.

Once done, you hop back into the main map and paste your BP there.

Work iteratively, make a really large and bulky design that is baby-easy to follow, then cut the fat here and there until it reduces down.

[glass kernel]

Ive been watching this and it looks so cool!

[sturdy flicker]

Like, i spent legit 6 hours on this alone

[glass kernel]

That's amazing

[sturdy flicker]

aw, shucks

[glass kernel]

I'm at 100 hours and I just got to ore washing it's been a quick jump up

I did vanilla rocket launches and then I tried krastorio 2 and jumped to ir3

I haven't finished krastorio but ir3 looked really fun I liked the idea of going through ages

But it's a lot of stuff

[sturdy flicker]

100 hours of IR3 or total Factorio playtime across all mods?

[glass kernel]

Ir3

[sturdy flicker]

oh, okay, was just about to say, 100h for vanilla, and krast and now IR3 would be some kind of record

[glass kernel]

I have plenty to learn :D

[glass kernel]

Oh god no

[sturdy flicker]

ultimate speedrun

[glass kernel]

I think 200 ish in vanilla which was 3 rockets start to finish then I tried to do mega basing and the amount of modules/beacons was too much for my brain so I tried krastorio 2 had fun in that one for about 2 runs and then I was like ir3 pretty wanna try

It's my first ir3 run

I don't think I'll finish before space age comes out cause I don't build quite fast enough

I get side tracked and build too big too quickly

[sturdy flicker]

dude, we have a month
now if it was satisfactory, then I totally get it

[glass kernel]

Ir3 doesn't let me do that with all the intermediates and stuff so I kinda like it cause it made me slow down and really made me think

[glass kernel]

New dad 😂

[sturdy flicker]

oh, congratz!

[glass kernel]

Thanks!

I'm lucky if I get an hour every other day

XD

[sturdy flicker]

Not my place to say the hows and ifs and shoulds on parenting, but get one of those chest-carry holders, get a standing desk, and let them watch you play.
Even seeing the fancy colors and how stuff connects will make some kind of sense and be really entertaining.
Since you're standing, its easy to move about and do other stuff, change diapers, prep meals, etc.

Obv the whole screen issue dependancy issue is also a thing so, again, thats all up to you ^^

[glass kernel]

Yeah!

I already got the baby back pack it's the most ridiculous thing

She loves the belts

They make her giggle

The steam age sounds were really calming for her

[sturdy flicker]

riight aren't theyyy?

tss pffff ffff~

[glass kernel]

They are!

I love the attention to detail

Really cool :)

[sturdy flicker]

If Wube could get Deadlock (creator of IR1-IR3) onboard, and if the collab work-structure works for Deadlock too, Wube'd have a really dedicated creative asset to produce quality work for Factorio

[glass kernel]

That would be cool!

[glass kernel]

I downloaded the loader unloader to help with trains and to filter out my nickel and copper pure ores these things are great

[supple pecan]

very power intense those loaders are though

[glass kernel]

Oh I didn't even check that XD

I should do that

[supple pecan]

if you get to solar + accumulators power is basically free though

[glass kernel]

I am still using steam engines

I got nickel ingots set up

A problem for tomorrow me is to figure out what to do with this polluted water

Then chromium ingots

Then I can make the solution and make the science packs

[sturdy flicker]

I decided last run (before I went full crazy and used unipipes and linked chests), to just bring my polluted water to my main fluids area va train, and handle all the purification and subsequent supply of good water and sulfur/stone derivatives to go wherever needed.

• Water -> Steam boilers -> lubricant/plastic/random smattering of other things

• Water -> Oil refining

• Water -> Acid makers

• Water -> Ore washing

• Sulfur -> Sulfuric Acid -> Batteries

• Sulfur -> Explosives -> Military science

• Sulfur -> (I think in some kind of landfill/concrete process?)

• Gravel and Silica -> Grind gravel, make more silica --> Glass smeltery

• Gravel and Silica -> Mixed for liquid concrete.

This was childs play once I had my train grid and [L] / [U] station naming scheme + train-limits setup going.
Whenever a limit changes to 1, it means that platform will accept any train with that destination, and the closest available train will reserve it, and there can be many such trains and such platforms all battling for a reservation.

[glass kernel]

Bet sounds like a plan!

I got chromium and I made ingots I just copied the nickel set up

I made some chrome analysis packs

Next is electrum and I'm scared

I'm working on my first grid I started a big bus up until these chrome packs and then I was like I think I'm ready to try grid aligned blocks

[sturdy flicker]

screeenshots mang

[sturdy flicker]

IR3 Beacons and Magnetized Electrum crystal will break you.

Supermagnet entities are practically the late game version of a charcoal furnace. Takes 120s to make a single activated energized magnetized crystal from electrum, it is non-modulable, and the supermagnet itself has its own crazy ingredient tree, and its power hungry.

Every step of process is practically screaming at you to not spam beacons and instead make non-beacon-sandwiches or grids, unlike in vanilla 😅

But again, its just a question of time and scaling.
More supermagnets, more magnetized electrum per unit of time. Its just slow going.

[glass kernel]

I'll send some screenshots when I turn on my computer next time :D

[glass kernel]

[glass kernel]

here's some pics of my IR3 base so far original bus with starter patches

second base/bus after I got trains unlocked started setting up rails

blocks started for nickel and chromium ingot smelting

ore washing

omg I found uranium and it's so cool looking!

yeesh I have to figure out this electrum stuff to get uranium processing

I think I should get some solar working

[glass kernel]

I have to wash tin to get lead now OK THEN

[sturdy flicker]

Now I feel like the dingus, currently flying overseas (actually on holiday to USA), and we have wifi on the plane, but the free tier only has messaging, no media (photo/video) to see the screenshots

Still, better than nothing!

[sturdy flicker]

solid grid design there

[glass kernel]

Thank you very much 😊

[wind forge]

You're going to have to wash all the main metals, so you might wanna get ready for that. But also you're going to use different amounts of the washed resources at different stages of the game, so by that metric an "ideal" setup might allow you to account for different demands at different times

[glass kernel]

Oooo

Ok I'll work on lead for now since that's the next one for the next science pack

But I'll leave space for that

I have 2 pumps right now and I'm using the loaders on a chest at the end of the washed ore lines with a circuit condition that turns on pumps depending on how many stacks of the pure materials I have

[fiery walrus]

made a large iron frame design with exact ratios

[glass kernel]

here's where I'm at

got the 3 ores crushed washed and dealt with all the byproducts

[glass kernel]

this is absolutely sick

[glass kernel]

just gotta deal with the sulphur gravel and silica

I think I'm just gonna turn the gravel silica into landfill

and the sulphur I'll send back to the old base

I'm debating if I have it in me right now to set up gold for platinum

[glass kernel]

I indeed did not have it in me lol

[fiery walrus]

since you liked that ill also show this electric motor design. kinda interesting way to get the items out of the assemblers.

also interesting is the copper wire and iron rod belt

you also need steel poles to power the loaders unfortunately. otherwise it doesnt tile well

i also made small iron frames, computers, motor units, and circuits but none of them ended up looking interesting

circuits you can make look nice but you have to throw away ratios

2:3 cringe stuff

just now realizing there was space to put the iron bar assembler above so that its more symmetrical

[glass kernel]

I do this sometimes

It's a fun little trick

I've been abusing medium steel poles everywhere lol

This is my first time actually using blocks and it does make things easier

Although everything is samey

Just plot down square and build

Having the robots early makes life significantly easier tbh

I just use the speed up game mod and walk around and everything gets built pretty fast

I'm going to need to work on the electrum stuff after I finish gold washing

That's the plan for tomorrow

[fiery walrus]

like... isnt the perfect ratio one just... cringe?

[fiery walrus]

thats what i do too

i havent used speedup before this

but it felt necessary

[glass kernel]

Ye it does absolutely

[glass kernel]

I'm at 122 hours I just looked

[sturdy flicker]

Yeah, I honestly just try to make sure the input ingredients are balanced as best as possible to nice numbers, ie. 1:1:2 would basically say how many lanes (not belt!) of each resource I need, keeps things compact, and limits the length until the belt is used up.

[maiden ferry]

damn, giving cracktorio before she can stand up. she would be making 1000 spm bases and raytracing circuitry by the time she's 13.
also, congratz dthboidad!

[fiery walrus]

also made combustion engines, kinda awkward again because of 2:3 ratios but at least its with small assemblers

perfect ratio only saves 2 small assemblers, but at least it doesnt look bad

[spiral creek]

With those small assemblers the DI is often more compact than the ratio

[fiery walrus]

counting the tiles it is very slightly more compact to do direct insertion it seems

like ~10%

[glass kernel]

Thank you 😊

[wind forge]

Your builds can be smaller if/when you choose to include faster tiers of inserters

btw, my personal unsolicited tip: green modules are cheap and are recycled into other modules, the small assembling machines add up quick, put some green modules in there!

[sturdy flicker]

I've also done "dubiously illegal" setups like this, where if the number of input ingredient types is 4 or 5, ie

• copper wire
• iron rivets
• iron rods
• iron plate.

then I can do it by doubling up on long inserters.

Theoretically possible to also do with the two-stage, if you don't mind the extra long length.

[sturdy flicker]

Also this is possible (above half)

[sturdy flicker]

Hot diggity dang

This took a few days, working on it on-off

[wind forge]

That’s a lot more belt machines than I think I need

[sturdy flicker]

Yeah, I could definitely shave it down a few

[ancient isle]

I could beat my first IR3 playthrough after 140 hours with this smelting and washing setup! I got a few bottlenecks due to some of the ores not getting out of the machines but it works at least

[sturdy flicker]

Dang, real tight.
What was your go to for controlling between hot and cold washing? Seperate setups or mixing water temps via signal?

[ancient isle]

they are only setup for hot washing there, the electric boilers are just beside each washing module

[stable wadi]

Is there a way to have aetheric lamps turn off during daytime? I set a white color that's easier to see at night but in daytime it's blinding 😵

[sturdy flicker]

Afaik, all steam based entities cannot connect to the circuit network. Additionally, from what I read on the FAQ on Deadlock's IR3 github repository, steam-inserters are in their own special quick-replace item group seperate to regular inserters, that might also affect being able to ever connect them to circuits.

[sturdy flicker]

Okay, I don't know who needs to see this, but I've made a bot network based fuel switcher.
Basically if you want a certain fuel to be used, you just put that many shotguns or whatever physical item you may not make many of or generally have en-masse in the logisitics network into a passive provider somewhere.

I probably could instead do one better and somehow set the box to only request certain fuels, which i'm trying to do now going forward.

[sturdy flicker]

Ah, you know what, screw it.

The way IR3 does its fuels anyway means that it makes sense to just have several different designs as your tech level increases, and then scope the requests to that.

ie. why would you supply copper-steam canisters via bot, when you have the tech to make high-pressure high-octane canisters as well as hydrogen fuel cells.

[wind forge]

The idea isn't superfluous

You could easily use this at a stage in the game where you decide that the fuel type in your train matters, and use this as part of the way to get all of a certain fuel type out

[sturdy flicker]

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have this work well, but the idea is to somehow make sure that the "best fuel available" is used first, picking lesser and lesser fuels if supply is used up.

Wouldn't be an issue if item IDs helped, but they don't. Currently it looks like this (spaced in groups):

# - item name - pow
7 - octanfuel - *******
6 - petroleum - ****
5 - steamiron - **
4 - steamcopp - *

3 - hydr cell - ******
2 - high batt - *****
1 - norm batt - ***

ideally the sorted order would be (spaced into item groups):

# - item name - pow
7 - octanfuel - *******

3 - hydr cell - ******
2 - high batt - *****

6 - petroleum - ****

1 - norm batt - ***

5 - steamiron - **
4 - steamcopp - *

so its a nightmare because the after high octane and petrol you have the iron steam canisters, which are very basic.

[stable wadi]

What's a good SPM target and train length for the IR3 equivalent of launching a rocket? If I keep designing for my current SPM (28.13), even 1-1s might work: https://factoriolab.github.io/list?z=eJw1zk1Lw1AQheF.k8Usyk0UrAsXufeECILgV9Nkc2m0rVZDS2P96OL97YZKZnHmWQzD2ZVPlk0n6VksZyOqEYsR8xH1iOYfSWdlNEXLk6WlMXOWRcuS9iVZXdnglTlz8e6UsTqt5pS9Ded7c0nvSMk4xzv8BX6KF.4G3-AX-DX-A38kTAiXhECoCSvChtARDoRvlCOPhEp0je7RA5qhGrVoidboFb2hDXpHHdqiHerRJxo-.FBUFA3FgqKleOaWRyrm1DS0bNnTc-CX41DbhsmH5l-p-wPJ2GTD&v=10. But idk if that's fast enough to keep up with the later sciences 😅.

[wind forge]

It probably depends on the design of the base you're using

There's no reason that a well-designed 1-1 train system would fail before your UPS does

[stable wadi]

Tested with a sushi clock and Improved Research Queue ETA. Half an hour for any of the 1k tech is probably fast enough considering that I've taken 10h to get out of red science and another 5h for green.

[maiden moth]

love/hate pre-bot mall, I'm unable to do it properly organized

[stable wadi]

Is there a better way than the ones below to automate wood collection from forestries in bronze age?
-Running a giant belt loop around the base for 1-2 items (e.g. wood one lane rubber other lane) sucks
-Handloading 12+ locations until vanilla IR3 trains sucks even more
-Vanilla IR3 trains are more versatile than a belt but also iron tech and iron would have to be belted back first
-Mini trains with IR3 compatibility would need almost as many belts as the giant loop to compile wood from 12+ chunk-spaced forestries into a smaller number of stations that each occupy more than a chunk. Alternative: park trains directly on a dedicated mainline loop with smaller inline stations (at which point the giant belt loop starts to make more sense).
-IR3 airships fit thematically but are an expensive steel tech
-Long range delivery drones are an expensive iron tech with vanilla steel chests in the recipes
-Loot chests/pickup towers (use by inserting wood to ground) are also too high tech and feel gimmicky
-Linked chests feel even more gimmicky

[spiral creek]

I would use a car tbh

And transfer plates

But I don’t really do that in Bronze Age

I just put it in a chest and wait

[stable wadi]

I did that with a monowheel last run in a desert. This run I started in a forest with too many cliffs so I ended up running a very sketchy belt as an upgrade to walking most of the route. I think I will just disable cliffs next run ngl. It's not like I'll feel up to IR3 deathworld anytime soon

[wind forge]

Comes with experience

[wind forge]

tbh you'd probably be alright with the heavy picker which IIRC is the iron/steel age? The point is that you don't usually need forestries for wood other than rubber, so mining it is usually more than enough

Especially if you use green modules throughout your base, the amount of land you can claim goes up quite a lot

[spiral creek]

It starts with being able to do a good vanilla mall

Which is hard in itself

[wind forge]

Also comes with experience lol

But if you're trying to do a good modded mall before having done a good vanilla mall, all I'd say is just adjust your expectations a little

[stable wadi]

Apparently it's one of those things 🤣. I actually rushed forestries for pollution reduction and then realized hours later that eff1s don't use oil in IR3....

[wind forge]

Ah, ok, I was completely off with my memory of when the heavy picker was unlocked. I got by with a couple forestries connected by belt for most of the playthrough, but you should keep in mind that forestries (just like real life) do need space to function

The advanced forestries are good, though I'm not sure if they're worth going for depending on your playstyle and specific game

[fiery walrus]

It is the problem with designing recipes that are too complicated, you create solutions that have no elegance
late game you can solve it by overbuilding and you can get elegance that way, but theres no elegant solution when you just need like 1 electric motor assembler and 1 large frame assembler etc making intermediates

elegance is something that can be almost as complicated as you want, so i prefer to play overhauls that have simple recipes for that reason, which makes almost all overhauls play very poorly for me lol

small assemblers are fantastic though, so many options you can do with them that really increase the ability to make elegant designs in new ways

[maiden moth]

nice truism

[maiden moth]

yep, I can make good looking build later on, when its not that needed anymore

[wind forge]

Haha, just a way of saying there's no obvious/simple shortcut you're missing

[sturdy flicker]

I honestly just used a gigantically long pipe for water, copper tanks to buffer water, and a mix of top-up, one-way, and fill-to valves to cheese an unpowered passive fluid pump.

Burner inserters use a very tiny amout of wood to keep themselves powered, and otherwise remove the wood and put it onto a long, long belt.

The belt line follows along the border of two chunks side by side, so it always became a 2n worth of chunks for a length of n chunks.
Also if you want to invest in more belt per n, you can branch out and make it 4n or 6n etc.

Further more, I try to start the length near a stone mine, this is so I can create bricks at the start of the column, and all the wood coming to that spot can be also used to make more trees.

A long belt takes the output of the plantable-tree assembler going back towards the back end of the column, where the newest forestries are always built, thus has a supply of plantable trees where you need them.

[stable wadi]

That sounds like a good use for the roller and a lot easier to hand collect than the loose circle I had. I never found a good use for the copper tanks since they only stored steam. I did go for burner inserters since I didn't feel like routing steam pipes on top of belts and water pipes. But at this point I'm starting to not want to engage with forestries as much in the first place. They feel win-more in forest maps and noob-trappy in desert maps. For the latter especially I'm tempted to just pop into editor after spawning in and slap down several blueprinted wood farms so I can play a normal game.

[wind forge]

Yeah, I've never found a good use for the copper tanks even for steam, the inability to connect them to wiring mean that their lategame uses are relatively limited, and also the amount of steam you need at lower technology levels means that you could probably skip using them and just use your pipes as buffers

[sturdy flicker]

Oops, yeah, my bad, they only do steam in those tanks. Had it in my head that it does both steam and water. Perhaps the length of piping needed is more than enough of a buffer.

[sturdy flicker]

something along these lines.

[bitter mortar]

I had more interesting build

1. It was in groups of 4 chunks

2. Everything outside the center 16x16 zone was concreted

As the trees don't spawn on concreted tiles, they were carefully placed on that small 16x16 square

Amd I had the remaining 48x60 space for whatever

(generally rails)

And had tham all around my base as a pollution wall

[wind forge]

That's a good idea I never thought of lol - controlling where trees spawn because of pollution

[last sluice]

i dont think i ever really had a need for regular wood; i did use regular wood forestries for pollution reduction with a quick and dirty blue print with 4 forestries on chunk corners, feeding into a charcoal kiln, feeding into a steam boiler+engine, all fed by electricity from my main network and whatever water was close by

it was rather prone to locking up if my power demand was low, but it was net negative on pollution, very cheap and very simple

i suppose in the bronze age, though, there isn't a very good way to just delete the wood since its not like you can just vent the steam that early on

if you were really committed to it before the bronze age, i suppose you could burn off the wood with a long burner inserter loop

[random pewter]

Unsuccessful design, It can be rotated arbitrarily, but expensive.

[last sluice]

pretty cool that you got something that works at all