Industrial Revolution 3

[bitter mortar]

You should use 2x2 chunk tiling, will be much easier

Amd then just 3 crossing pipes will probably work

[stable wadi]

I wonder how many upgrades I'll need for electric roboports to beat steam. It looks pretty lopsided out of the gate: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eX2dEZiRvMH7MphDQ4udxcYbXJvKNlNg5FL5On10N0Q/edit?usp=drive_link

[last sluice]

yeah, i recall that even multiple battery discharge equipments felt like they struggled to keep up with constant building with the electric roboport. I think that the electric roboport also had a larger build radius, though, so i felt that it was worth it even before bot upgrades... just barely

i think there was a point in time where i was swapping out exoskeletons, battery discharges, and extra roboports depending on what i was about to do

[bitter mortar]

Why not multiple armors

[last sluice]

Didn't think of that. But it'd be hard to tell which armor is my fast armor, which armor is my bot armor, which armor is my fast and bot armor but runs out of charge faster

[bitter mortar]

It's be easier then swapping armor contents anyways as all you need is to open up to N-1 armors to find the correct one

Maybe even N-2 (so 1 if you have 3 of them) as you already know which one you are wearing and can infer which one is the last one if you know all the others

Also iirc armors do show equip grid on hover (or do they)

[last sluice]

Yeah I think that's all true. In theory N can be a much higher value, though, especially if i considered adding a PLD or whathaveyou later down the line, so even if I mostly used the same 3 loadouts, it makes more sense to me to just configure the 1 load out to precisely what I want at a given time

Well, the real reason is probably that I'd feel kind of wasteful making extra sets of armor and equipment

[stable wadi]

Is there any recipe that requires raw copper, tin, iron, or gold ore instead of crushed ore or that is strictly better than the crushed/pure alternative recipe? I'm thinking of onsite crushing everything I can except stone before loading it into trains.

[wind forge]

None to memory and you'd be fine doing that except iirc crushing ore might take more space?

If it takes the same amount of space then there's no practical difference except a bigger outpost to manage

[sturdy flicker]

I'm doing that too this run. Only thing I'm not crushing is stone (due to bricks) but I think even coal can be pre-crushed pre-train.

[stable wadi]

Automating bots makes me wonder if I should bus intermediates like green and red circuits. I underestimated how many inputs would be needed for so few actual items and had to belt some all the way around.

[maiden moth]

greens has two consumers: blue science and mall, same with reds (purple science)

after "logistic system" researched my mall turns completely into bot-delivery

[stable wadi]

I guess there's no getting around intermediate hell 😅. I'm tempted to bus all complex intermediates purely for QoL even if they won't have many uses and will become obsolete. I dislike remaking the same thing even a few times if each time the ratios are different and oddly specific. I also dislike walking through many DI minimalls before personal logistics. I'm thinking of disabling cliffs next run and designing everything around a straight car path lined with transfer plates. After personal logistics I could just replace it with a personal rail.

[random pewter]

Building mall is building intermediate factory, again ,again.

[maiden moth]

in the middle of tarmac placement, some crazy patterns appears

big picture looks even better

tarmac cannot be placed near water for some reason

[sturdy flicker]

Probably wasn't given a water-edge graphic.

But I like how it looks like a pool edge now

[wind forge]

That's different though no? Then it'd just not look nice near water, not be unplacable near water

[sturdy flicker]

I really dunno. I remember that surface tiles have different priority layers, maybe water and tarmac share the same, which is what gives tarmac that nice "sunk in" look as opposed to just being next to grass.

Like if you ever look at a parking lot next to a football field, the asphalt is a bit "lower" or pressed in.

same goes for the water layer with respect to grass, it is also sunk in

[maiden moth]

toying with silicon smelting, left one is working, but I dont like it much - its too long. Any suggestion for specific mod able to change undergrounds reach?

[last sluice]

the design on the right seems reasonable enough if you insert directly from the stone crusher to the silicon crusher

here's another similar design where the stone and coke inputs are separated instead and there are 2 more furnaces per crusher

[maiden moth]

that is nice, thou vertical size is close to the my left design

[maiden moth]

yeah, my idea was to use DI if possible to make it relatively compact

[maiden moth]

with belts-only I've got different solution

[stable wadi]

Finally secured this gold mine. Grenades were obsolete from the start but shotgun turrets with Fill4Me + defenders were able to keep big biters away without guzzling too much ammo. Both yellow and red IR3 rockets felt nerfed from vanilla, still 3-shotting spawners and worms after level 2 explosives. It really felt like gold was the new oil with how much "why not just use _" military tech was behind it (exos, shields, tank, laser turrets, even poison capsules!).

[last sluice]

it seems to me like IR3 rockets are identical to vanilla, as are the spawners. notably though level 2 explosives does not increase the damage of rockets (in vanilla or IR3) but i imagine you usually have blue science by the time you get rockets in vanilla

i think in the early hunts for gold you do also have handheld flamethrower tech available. costing steel is a bit annoying but i seem to recall that it was pretty good as long as you weren't trying to kill nests with 'em directly

[fleet jetty]

Rockets are great for nest clearing, lvl 2 ones better in the bigger bases due to splash damage.

[sturdy flicker]

Not a mod suggestion, but I went with the design on the right, but used exclusive inputs, bringing in only the final ingredients I needed without mid-step grinding.. You might be able to get away with belting in a belt of gravel instead of stone, so gravel+coke on the right, and DI from the grinder -> smelter without it being a three step process, and instead just two.

1:3 coke+gravel = 1:6 coke+silica, which is a far cry from the needed 1:12 coke+silica ratio, but its better than doing 1:3 coke+silica like I did and having half the possible column length.

It does mean you'll need to somehow do a half-column belt switcheroo as one of them exhausts itself or an output line gets too full, but you avoid needing an extra mod for tunnel-length modding.

[maiden moth]

I've decided belt solution since ups is not a concern

[stable wadi]

Made a robotower-aligned solar with good ratio and personal rails. I ruled out signals since I couldn't fit exit blocks for even 1-1 vanilla trains. I also decided not to rely on my regular rail blueprints that overlap with each other since that seriously limited how many panels would fit.

[last sluice]

I seem to recall never having a reason to use robotower instead of the roboport

[stable wadi]

It came with personal logistics and I didn't have accumulators researched yet because of the vanilla mindset that early solar is a trap. But IR3 nuclear is farther away and air filters/forestries can even offset the production pollution of solar. And it seems more compact too, just 9 chunks replacing a ratioed boiler.

[last sluice]

ah, they cost accumulators. right

[stable wadi]

Since I'm getting accumulators anyway for solar I might as well design for the big roboports. Now I can replace a boiler array in 2 clicks instead of 9 and get rid of the pathfinding penalty stops in my 1-way to 2-way bridges. Edit: fixed some signals

[last sluice]

I remember not realizing how much the accumulators were buffed relative to the solar panels, building a usual 21:25 ratio, and then wondering how I ended up with 12 GJ of accumulated power

[stable wadi]

I figured the ratio would be different because the panels were but couldn't get Solar Calc to work at first until I realized it needed daytime to be unfrozen in editor

[wind forge]

Interesting choice of intersection

Is here a reason you chose for this design?

Also, there are bigger solar panels you get later on

[stable wadi]

The 2-way rails are for space efficiency. My 1-way 32x32 grid rails are 4spaced and would eat into a lot of the 64x64 usable area that allows blocks to merge into one logistic network for base bots. The solar arrays cost 1k yellow science and I don't even have purple automated yet 😅. I also considered more boilers + air filters but I was worried about coal and bitumen consumption over time.

[wind forge]

Hmmm I'm not really experienced enough to critique a design like this but it seems to me that if this design ends up limiting your base in the future it will be a much bigger hassle to replace it later than to simply start with a design that will last longer

[stable wadi]

My thinking was that solar literally lasts forever, so even if I play slowly due to inexperience I can still progress. Even if I'm not doing much the base still consumes power and my oil yields steadily deplete

[last sluice]

That's one thing that makes me like solar as well

I also recall feeling like the solar arrays were rather expensive; and though they offer more space efficiency than regular solar panels, the regular solar panels are quite powerful when you accounted for how extra powerful the accumulators are as well

Securing more land for solar panels was also made easier by the extra weaponry ir3 adds, since ir3 didn't appear to buff biters at all

Photon cannon my beloved

[hexed turret]

I wanna make an IR3 mod which buffs the pointless buildings like last tier mining drill and gas furnace, also allows voiding of primary ores. However, I don't want to do all of the work :D

[obtuse scaffold]

Gas furnaces are so useless its unreal
They don't even have module slots, why are they a thing?

[maiden moth]

significant part of energy goes into furnaces, gas furnaces consume a little gas and zero electricity, so its nice way to reduce energy consumption

[obtuse scaffold]

that is true, and early on you have plenty of excess natural gas, but that's something efficiency modules and petrochemical generators also fix

though considering how you're stuck with boilers, petrochem or solar until the 5th science pack, gas furnaces are quite apealing for that

[hexed turret]

A single petrochemical generator of gas can fuel like 5-10 electric furnaces with efficiency modules while eating the exact same amount of natural gas, and even 1 gas furnace costs so much to build.

I was thinking of something like, 2x the crafting speed and reduce the energy consumption, so it's uniquely energy-cheap and slightly faster than the fastest un-beaconed max-moduled furnace but at an extremely low energy cost, and you still won't need it after nuclear power

My notes aren't here so it's from memory

No clue what to do about forestries and CO2, though. Forestries seem to die to pollution too easily. And are maybe not rewarding enough??

[stable wadi]

My uninformed impressions:

Early game forestries feel too dependent on map settings and manual exploration. Some greenhouse mods drop seeds from trees that can be used to grow more trees, but their research and recipes aren't balanced for IR3. Even if they were, I would still feel pressure to setup a giant belt loop around the base to absorb pollution, especially in deserts. And forestries stop absorbing pollution while output full. So before ethanol they seem perversely required to be bad at wood production to be good at cleaning air.

Midgame forestries feel forgettable. Not many iron/steel/gold age items use wood, a handful of rubber farms cover most rubber needs, and air filters stack to remove all pollution from a chunk. Even wood chip production for ethanol power is inefficient enough to discourage me from relying on it. It takes 48 electric or 24 advanced forestries to produce enough wood chips for 20MW of ethanol generators. 20MW / 48 chunks or 20MW / 24 chunks = 0.42 or 0.83MW / chunk vs 18.85MW solar / 4 chunks = 4.71MW / chunk.

Unrelated: does anyone use battery generators? They seem a lot worse than steam storage in all but pollution, and that can be offset by air filters.

[wind forge]

I used them to burn excess gas and to smelt things that don't accept prod. But they're definitely part of a 2-birds-1-stone waste disposal system rather than a core part of the infrastructure

I had the impression that using gas in the gas furnaces produced less pollution overall than turning gas into electricity and then using that to activate the machines. I forget the calculations I did so I can't easily verify if I was right in this

If true though, it's unfortunate that the logistics involved in setting up this alternate power system for a few machines do not give you a proportionately rewarding "reward"

[wind forge]

You are producing too much pollution in one chunk, simply reduce the amount of pollution-producing buildings in one chunk or leverage some air filters to help as well. The reward of forestries is the prevention of biter attacks, at some point you simply do not need the amount of wood you produce, unless maybe for some reason you chose to only use wood to produce plastic and never used prod modules at any step (I don't remember if there is a step in plastic production from ethanol that accepts prod)

[wind forge]

I tried using them to power some early game outposts, but like I mentioned with the gas furnace point earlier, I don't think that the rewards for setting up this alternate power system was worth it. The advantage of being able to physically ship power is that your power transport line is more secure and flexible, unless of course you set up multiple big power poles that were defended against expansion. But this advantage doesn't really turn out to be necessary

How early game are you talking about forestries though? I think tree beds are pretty early in the crafting tree and they're pretty cheap, just wood and stone basically

[stable wadi]

Say right at spawn in a desert map with basically no trees

[wind forge]

But if you mean early early, like before you can craft them, then I think you're probably overreliant on them, at that stage they're not meant to be an attack preventer, they're meant to be an attack frequency reducer. Deserts are definitely the worst terrain to deal with but this is a fault of deserts, not of forestries.

[stable wadi]

But forestries are disproportionately scaling off an already good map. Something like eff1 though is good in any map and not so dependent on an ideal start

[wind forge]

The advantage of mid-game forestries is that you can use wood to supplement (not be the main source of) your power/plastic, and you basically don't need to do anything for it. Forestries are also cheaper than air filters, which need a constant supply of items to be fed, which also means you need to set up logistics to the pollution eaters

I think it's true that they could be balanced better, but things that depend on terrain but are not necessarily intended to "balance" bad terrain will always have that extra bit to consider

[stable wadi]

I just felt like responding to @hexed turret 's question of how they might not be good enough (presumably in a vacuum where we pretend we're the mod developer and don't have to accept things as given; it's always a fun kind of question to answer even if it goes nowhere)

[fiery walrus]

The biggest red flag for an overhaul is 'does it have wood production'

trees make up the worst parts of py, seablock/angelbob, krastorio, ir3, i played a not well known overhaul called jeffroid extensions and it was also a terrible part of that as well but one of the better ones like a simpler angelbob but still no.

It's biggest sin is that it makes the mall messier by adding 1 belt (wood) dedicated to 1 item (rails)

[hexed turret]

Maybe the last tier forestry could be buffed by +50%, and to also consume 2x CO2

[stable wadi]

It turns out my big solar bp was too clunky to ever use (either 64 tiles away from the nearest existing roboport or overlapping the main bus or a large clump of trees). I had an existing grid of robotowers so I just started filling in dead areas that I didn't want to weave the bus into. Oil based ethanol generators covered the other half of power demand.

[obtuse scaffold]

I remember my very first 2/3 steam iron miners were fully powered by like 6/7 bronze forestries and i just belted the ore back to base lol.
I'm not at speed3 beacons everywhere stage, but at least in the early to midgame, forestries are a very good defense. You make a wall of them like a base perimeter and as long as you keep burning the wood, no pollution will pass and touch the nests. Don't rely only on them for power, i did that early on and once the buffers ran out suddently i was on 50% power.
Will say, i did not get a desert start, god knows it whould suck getting the first forests up and running to produce the tree beds

[narrow cliff]

ok i get that iron is supposed to be the first big expansion endeavour but that's quite the distance to clear of biters and traverse with belts before getting trains...

[wind forge]

Railworld?

Patches look more spread out than normal and your terrian looks a bit funny, do you have a biomes mod installed

[obtuse scaffold]

Either i'm blind or you really don't have a lot of ore patches in general

[narrow cliff]

Alien Biomes default settings

[stable wadi]

Just realized I could save a lot of air filters by disabling their inserters when the ore stops moving (assuming that output full drills in IR3 stop polluting as they do in vanilla). I don't mind flickering so inserters simply enable when Any > 0 reading pulse belts.

[fiery walrus]

that gives me the idea that you could do that with gun turrets as well

if your wall is actively defending it kicks on the air filters for like 10 minutes

[narrow cliff]

i am sure nothing will go wrong here

[bitter mortar]

Is it that a belt?

[sturdy flicker]

it might be tumor.

[obtuse scaffold]

The long iron belt
And from the looks of things it will be similar with gold, so good luck

[hexed turret]

belts, compared to rails, are:

• cheaper
• easier to setup
• still enough to meet your bandwidth requirements most of the time
  that's why I never build trains

[obtuse scaffold]

Stackers are goated, a single belt can have up to 180/s throughput

Spaghetti main bus has never been so apealing

[narrow cliff]

By then I’ll have trains, right?

[obtuse scaffold]

Yeah

[bitter mortar]

Are you sure they are cheaper

[hexed turret]

especially in IR3 you need to have forestries just to have rails, they cost wood

otherwise rails might be cheaper than last tier belts, sure

[bitter mortar]

Hmm
Nah, rails are still cheaper
They do require wood tho

[hexed turret]

I guess they're cheaper in IR3 actually yeah. And IR3 belts red and higher did require rubber!

[bitter mortar]

So, same as in vanilla, rail cost is roughly equivalent to single yellow belt of same length

[hexed turret]

in vanilla rails cost rocks and steel. it's about twice the cost as yellow belts

[bitter mortar]

And twice as length?

[hexed turret]

oh, huh!

[bitter mortar]

How much wood is a tree?

Mined I mean

4?

If it's 4, it's just 2 trees per chunk

So rails may look a bit expensive, compared to a single yellow belt, but that's clearly because yellow belts are cheap AF

[sturdy flicker]

Tbf, yellows only require basic copper age stuff to make, no need for grinders to make gravel or anything or forestries to slowly make wood.

If you really need to go hard, it's true, yellows don't hurt that much.

[stable wadi]

One thing that really threw me was that red belts were actually pollution positive in IR3 due to rubber forestries 😄. In vanilla I was used to staying on yellow at all costs but I'm mixing reds in more freely now whenever the throughput is needed.

[hexed turret]

yeah fair enough

[sturdy flicker]

y'all are getting rubber from forestries?

[bitter mortar]

Yes?
Was there another way?

[obtuse scaffold]

you can make it with ethanol and something else if you don't want to be lorax

[stable wadi]

When I first unlocked rubber yes. After ore washing I prefer running ethanol and platinum from the bus to dealing with wood chip byproduct. But I still prefer the petroleum plastic recipe (to the new ethanol one that needs plat on top of two pipes).

[narrow cliff]

weirdly proud of this pre-iron (and pre-2.0 steam) outpost setup. Designed to at least mitigate a light amount of pollution and be self-sufficient.

[stable wadi]

Redesigned my ore washers after seeing the recipes for yellow science and laser assemblers.
Gold example:

1. Start: hot wash, pure gold and plat ingots output
2. If plat ingots back up: plat furnace inputs disabled, pure plat outputs
3. If gold furnaces back up: pure gold also outputs
4. If both plat back up a bit: pumps switch to cold wash to delay case 5 for as long as possible
5. If they back all the way up the belt: ore bypasses washers to gold furnaces
   Iron omits case 3; copper and tin also omit case 2. Ingame I'll probably read bus belts to detect backups instead of relying on chests far upstream.

[wind forge]

Gold ore specifically has more of an interesting consideration during washing because of Electrum Crystals

Granted, you could simply set up a 50-50 hot-cold water washing setup dedicated to producing Electrum, and it would probably be simpler, but converting your excess from balancing into Electrum is interesting

[stable wadi]

Ingame my gold washer was always case 5 since only rubber used plat ingots. I figured sending out excess ore would give the "good" pure ore smelting recipe a second life until the pure plat backed up as well. Same idea for my 2 iron washers, but I never got around to setting up washing for my 2 steel smelters. Once I did it would have gotten annoying to keep manually balancing chromium output from 4 iron washers with nickel output from 1 copper for electroplating. And iron would have benefited the most from good recipe uptime since it never backed up.

[wind forge]

Eventually I found out that I simply did not find it worth it to merge the electrum production with the rest of the gold. The increased productivity made ore patches last a lot longer anyway, and I'm not sure how much more efficient I could get with my setup. I suppose I should have tracked how much Gold:Platinum I used with the various steps of productivity to optimize better, but I simply did not bother to.

[stable wadi]

Speaking of productivity, is it still worth getting these for the silo if I'm just going to launch 1 rocket and restart? (Assuming it takes 30-35min to research them)

[bitter mortar]

No

Outwaiting is easier
Maybe not cheaper, but easier

[hexed turret]

you can still use prod modules 2

[last sluice]

i remember thinking really hard about ore washing, then giving up and just stashing stuff into chests whenever something or another backed up

[stable wadi]

Ngl in my real save hot/cold washing is manually toggled with a CC and polluted water waste is DI into bottomless pits 😅. All the washers are in separate areas due to lack of space and a couple are upside down lol

[stable wadi]

Time to completely overhaul all my sketchy early game prints for next run 😄

[wind forge]

That's a screen I miss. But I'm sticking to not playing Factorio until the DLC releases to improve my gameplay experience.

[fiery walrus]

and then the wait for mods to update

[bitter mortar]

Don't you want to do a 100% speedrun on 1.1 while you still can?

[wind forge]

I thought about it but I decided I didn't want to bother

Speedrunning has never really been my thing anyway, so it'd basically just be an all achievements run but messier

Unless I also learnt speedrunning but that seems like more than i care to do

[bitter mortar]

Speedrun (non-professional) does have some wise stuff
I recommend checking out a 100% run video if you didn't do that yet

[wind forge]

I've seen some

I don't know what extra I'd learn from it though

[bitter mortar]

Red inserter builds lol

[wind forge]

Like, builds that use red inserters?

[bitter mortar]

Like, builds that spam red inserters in squares because building 4 red inserters is faster then 2 red and 2 blue

[wind forge]

I mean I did notice that it's faster to not have to swap items to place down but I don't really see how that's a significant loss to not have done in 1.1 lol

[bitter mortar]

And heavily leaning on 1:1 designs just because they are faster to build

[wind forge]

What do you mean by 1:1 designs?

[bitter mortar]

No loss, you'll just never do it again

[wind forge]

I mean, I'll never have done a 20k SPM base in 1.1 either

I'll never have done 1-16-1 base in 1.1 either

[bitter mortar]

DI

[wind forge]

I'll never have done a "no belts base" in 1.1 either

[wind forge]

I already do this in spaghetti

I built a base around 2-8-2 train -> assembler -> train builds in IR3

[bitter mortar]

Gonna wait for 0.8 yo plau SE

[bitter mortar]

I still didn't win IR3 lol

[wind forge]

Lol, I think I'm very content with the amount of factorio I've played before 2.0

[wind forge]

Not that I'm at a crazy amount of time, but reaching 1.7k hours, I think I'm content with where I am

[wind forge]

Is this your base?

[bitter mortar]

Yep

[wind forge]

Is this your IR3 base?

[bitter mortar]

I was one of the first playthroughs where I've started to use this rail design
Yes it's IR3 as you may have guessed from trees

[wind forge]

This is an example of the kind of build I chose to make in my previous IR3 game, using DI red-inserter train to train beltless builds

I think I am doing a fair job at incorporating the things that you wondered if I would be upset if I had not tried in 1.1

[bitter mortar]

Hmm, i guess I should try train-to-train builds some time

[wind forge]

You should do it before 2.0

Otherwise you'll lose the chance to do it in 1.1

[bitter mortar]

:wheese:

I did really like the Klonan's (or who was that) train loading so I now use that as well lol

🤔

I guess I'll just wait for 2.0 and jump into x5 SA

[maiden ferry]

What's the multiple stops for?

[wind forge]

Each train only contains one items so to have multiple items input into the inserter i need multiple trains and so multiple stops

[maiden ferry]

Ooh that is very clever :o

Oh wait. What's the difference than putting them on the same station?

[wind forge]

If I put them on the same station I need to control when each train heads there since the items aren't necessarily consumed at the same rate

For example one recipe might need 2x copper train and 1x iron train, then I'd have to do copper copper iron etc.

[maiden ferry]

Ah I see. I get it now. That cuts the waiting time a lot. Thanks for the explanation!

[wind forge]

Yeah, no problem

[fiery walrus]

I think you could implement a change so that you only have 1 station there, in case you need more than 3

You would have whatever amount of stations you need for item types behind the station, then control it with circuit signals

[wind forge]

Actually with this sort of wagon -> wagon beltless build, one limiting factor is the width of the build, since you really only have space for at most 5 inputs

Most of the time you're limited to 3 inputs, and with IR3, these inputs are sometimes iron gear + iron rod, which take only 1 station since I ship iron ingots

Fluid stations do not need to be on the same "branch" since the goal is beltless not pipeless and so can be farther out

Anyway, because you're limited to 3 inputs, you never need more than 3 stations

[supple pecan]

hm, how do you peeps deal with chrome plating solution?

dedicated blocks for specific chromed products or just moving the fluid around?

feels wasteful to dedicate blocks for chromed rods and rivets, but less wasteful than moving fluid around by wagon

nevermind im a fool, 3 dedicated chrome plating blocks it is

[supple pecan]

IR3 makes metal item densities really convenient. Ingot, plate, rods, and rivets all have the same density

[wind forge]

Things like this depend a lot on the design of your base

I don't have a lot of space in my builds so I was forced to make specific chromed products but I'd have preferred to move the fluid arond

[supple pecan]

went with railblocks, so i decided dedicated blocks for the three chromed products made from solution was a good idea

[wind forge]

Yeah, if you do railblocks, you likely want dedicated blocks depending on the size of your block

[supple pecan]

have variable size blocks so i have some leeway

cuz yeah the solution is not dense at all

doesnt help ir3 buffed cargo wagons but not fluid wagons

though might need to up steel production, 2 ingot-belts worth of plates, rods, and rivets each is probably excessive right now
Prolly just gonna build for 2 ingot-belts worth and only enable half production til more’s needed

[wind forge]

It not being dense is one thing, but the limiting factor for my builds was the size of the intermediate machine needed

[fiery walrus]

barrels in wagons can hold 48k fluid, might be worth it, and unbarreling machines are 1x1 so might even make sense to belt fluids and unbarrel them directly into machines

but fluid wagons im sure are fine as well

[supple pecan]

always forget about barrels lol

[fiery walrus]

they get a few buffs in ir3

dedicated small assembler is unironically the biggest thing for them though

50->60 fluid units per barrel

doubled cargo wagon size

but barrels are bad not because of the density just because of the awkwardness

[supple pecan]

yeah, not sure if i want to deal with the awkwardness

i’ll see how dedicated blocks for basic chromed parts will go

[quaint pollen]

iron capsules even stack to 50, holding more liquid than a stack of 10 barrels. Though they can only hold steam and petro.

[sturdy flicker]

You almost have to. The issue with chromed stuff is that unlike previous tiers, you need to first make the final thing out of steel, and then chrome it.

If you have all your chrome plating solution in one spot, its easier to bring steel/steel compinents there to be chromed, than making bulky builds with pre-chromers requring solution.

[supple pecan]

but yeah coming back feels weird

for one i dont have roboports setup

shouldve had that done a long time ago

setting that’s up gonna be annoyed cuz my spaghetti made the accumulators assembler blocked on all sides. Gonna need to make another one for roboports

gah, skipping infra

[obtuse scaffold]

Roboports are kind of ass to do, but the tiny robotowers have a meme connection range

Still, beats no robot network. Alt+D all over the old steam stuff was great

[supple pecan]

One thing I’m def gonna do going into SA once it releases is getting bots setup the moment I research them

[obtuse scaffold]

Yeah vannila bots are way easier to rush, esp since frames are most of yellow science so you can easily focus on yellow next if you want to

[supple pecan]

Better Late than never

Now for the passive and storage chests and i think i'll have bots up eventually

may also need to build more solar

[wind forge]

I think not having robots in your rail block builds teaches you a lot about how necessary they truly are

They're barely a convenience sometimes when you consider the delay and travel time and how quite often people simply do not have enough robots in their system. But that's a matter for another day.

[supple pecan]

yeah, my builds really need roboports building em

power armor personal roboports aren't enough

[supple pecan]

delay doesn't matter's long as they get it done

multitasking is their benefit

and as far as I care, that's gonna be real nice to have since i'm on the cusp of purple sci, and yellow isn't gonna be any easier

[wind forge]

Yeah I suppose it appeals to different people different ways

[supple pecan]

1/3

[supple pecan]

2/3

3/3

and just realized I need to update the train colors and station colors

[supple pecan]

Out of curiosity, how long/hard is the purple-yellow science period?

[spiral creek]

So you’re putting small assembler products on trains?

[supple pecan]

only chromed parts

[supple pecan]

Anyways

[stable wadi]

Purple didn't feel that hard but yellow seemed to introduce more new things than every science before it combined. A lot of the new things looped fluid/gas and some used each others' outputs so I used long inserters to go over pipes and put more outputs on belts instead of DI into machines. If you bus or train a lot of the individual parts instead of trying to force compact DI like I did it shouldn't be as bad. Lengthwise most yellow science tech cost 1k+ of everything which took about 30-35 min to finish at 28.13 SPM.

[supple pecan]

yeah I was thinking of just getting rocket tech, building rocket, and finishing

advanced assemblers, laser assemblers, cubic presses, gas stuff

yeah, def a lot of new things even this late in the mod

really need to make sure my base can handle all this......

[fiery walrus]

It feels kinda ridiculous how much explosives are required for military science

5 explosives per pack, 3 sulfur 3 coke per explosive, and 700 military science for military 2

ir3 is too grindy

[obtuse scaffold]

Sour gas is whatever anyways, i'm always low on petroleum for plastic and im not using enough sulfur
But "military" science is weird, just 1 input feels wrong

[wind forge]

Depends a bit on how much time and effort you spend on your factory

I felt that purple was more complex than yellow but yellow was more resource intensive than purple

Which in some sense follows the base game

[stable wadi]

I wish I'd rushed electric derrick last run just for this tbh. Also generators to burn off the excess petroleum before it stopped sour gas production (it backed up 10 tanks while I was researching ore washing and petroleum processing to get rid of it the "right" way and I didn't feel like adding more tanks).

Stone/steam age is brutally grindy for sure, especially making big assemblers before big assemblers are automated. Something like 1 red science, 1 belt, 1 pipe, 1 large frame, 1 copper beam, 1 big is skipping small assembler automation and still costing 84 copper beams! It doesn't help that so many intermediates (e.g., piston, basic engine, small frame, large frame) need big assemblers. In my headcanon most intermediates not produced by special buildings are created in small (1 input) or cheap 2x2 medium (2 input) assemblers, with big ones only needed for finished items.

In the real game, without starting items, I'll just have to use temporary builds, like "small assembler from ingots" => collect wood => decon first build to recover big assemblers => slam 6 copper beam assemblers, 1 belt, and 1 pipes => slowly work toward a normal mall with furnace stacks and bussed intermediates

[supple pecan]

yeah oil proc is one of my gripes with ir3

seems like sulfur is in high demand yet it’s hard to get it consistently without venting some gases

maybe it balances out with plastic demand in yellow sci

[supple pecan]

actually yeah looks like it might,
more heavy oil demand with graphite
more plastic (petroleum) demand from graphene -> nanoglass, blue circuits, etc

[sturdy flicker]

I almost prefer using the small ones even in late game, the smaller connection range allows for much more granular coverage "painting" than the big towers.

Also, that the small towers are 2x2 than 4x4 has more positive use cases in compact setups, be it a subfactory or rail station or when expanding solar.

[obtuse scaffold]

Yeah they are not useless, the small footprint can be clutch to slide in builds

And considering how bot speed upgrades also increase battery (this change is actualy amazing i love it), they can travel further before getting recharged

But to make your busy base network, i think the big ones are better

[supple pecan]

Huh, interesting

encountering a sulfur surplus for once

Also need to start making plastic from natural gas, my only sink currently is rubber

[supple pecan]

ok genuinely what's a sulfur sink this is getting ridiculous

[gray escarp]

My only sulfur sink is military science

Or venting the sour gas sadly

[supple pecan]

pain

[gray escarp]

I encountered the same issue, but someone might have a better idea

[obtuse scaffold]

Explosives, sulphiric acid, slowdown capsules, reinforced concrete
I stockpiled a load of explosive science, still ended with too much of the damm thing

[supple pecan]

oo, reinforced concrete

[obtuse scaffold]

Doesn't help that rockets are considerably more expensive than vannila, they could be a decent explosives sink

[supple pecan]

turned peaceful mode on midway through, evolution’s still on though, so may be useful for any biters i still need to clear

most likely im just gonna dump excess sour gas though

[stable wadi]

It's funny that rockets feel so bad but landmines are as broken as ever 🤣

[obtuse scaffold]

Dude adds a rocket turret with target filter and such, then makes each rocket like 8 steel and a basic circuit or smt like thay

[supple pecan]

yeah IR3’s military balance is wack

[obtuse scaffold]

Its still nice for nest clearing when expanding

Esp because tank is in chrome and the rest of good military in yellow

[stable wadi]

Defenders also felt a lot stronger in IR3 but I could be imagining things since all my follower count research piled up to 20 by the time I used them

[supple pecan]

it’s kinda absurd to me shotgun turret creep is still really strong

[stable wadi]

I wish follower count had 1-2 red science upgrades for the clockwork defenders and grenades were green science again so that turret creep wasn't the only real choice early game

[obtuse scaffold]

Shotgun turret creep is peak, ammo is dirt cheap compared to gun turrets and shotgun turrets are far cheaper. Issue is they have almost no hp, 1 or 2 worm attacks and its goner

Clockwork defenders were really fun to use, but at some point the biter armor means they deal no damage

[sturdy flicker]

Best sulfur sink I've found is sulfuric acid that goes into gold/chrome plating solution

[fiery walrus]

I finished clearing out a bunch of space from the biters, now i need to decide what im gonna do for the base, if its gonna be belts or trains mostly

well i should probably make some finishing touches to the starter base first

ugh

[supple pecan]

Updated my oil design

Turns oil into 5 exported products:
heavy oil (for graphitic coke)
lubricant
ethanol (for plastic and rubber)
sulfur
coke (byproduct, will setup a gassification block later)

Going to have to upgrade/switch out all my trains running on petroleum canisters to run on ethanol barrels (why are there no ethanol canisters deadlock?????????)

petroleum to ethanol is 1:1 hence why i'm exporting

and i'm just gonna eat the platinum cost to make plastic from ethanol

electrum is 7 gold and 3 platinum, so that .5 spare from high temp ore washing should be more than enough

[sturdy flicker]

pipe visualizer do be pretty neat

[stable wadi]

TIL barrels can be used for fuel 🤯. But I think I'll stay on canisters unless I phase out petroleum entirely since it's 50 x 12 = 600MJ/stack vs 10 x 24 = 240 (and high octane canisters have 1440MJ/stack!)

[supple pecan]

yeah the stack size is annoying, but my train base isn't gonna be big enough to where they burn 30 barrels of ethanol

[sturdy flicker]

In my entire history of gameplay with factorio, I have not used fluid barrelling seriously except in vanilla for bringing some heavy oil via bot to kick start it somewhere remotely.

Btw, this thread is going to be pretty dead until IR3 is updated for 2.0's engine.

[supple pecan]

IR3 isn't being updated afaik

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

Repository is also archived now

[sturdy flicker]

That's a real shame. Guess I'll need to try and keep two incarnations of the game in order to keep playing it.

Is that even possible? Have two versions of Factorio one can jump between on the same machine? Ideally hooked up to Steam

[supple pecan]

may be possible

[bitter mortar]

You can have a portable with simlinked save folder

[sturdy flicker]

That would honestly be the best solution. In that I can put just the mods I need that work well with that version and thats it

[obtuse scaffold]

Yeah especialy the graphics were very unique, i think it was on informatron that said it took him 3000 hours to make IR3, understandable that he wants to move on
What i might do is move the mods to a separate folder and if for some reason i want to finish my run, get factorio 1.1 from website and bury the hatchet launch the rockets

[bitter mortar]

I maaaaybe like 30% chance try to port IR3 to 2.0 idk

[obtuse scaffold]

Licence says you can't iirc

[bitter mortar]

License says you can't share it, not make it

[gray escarp]

I will miss IR3

Such beautiful graphics

[supple pecan]

yeah the graphics were one of the best parts of it

[stable wadi]

There's a duality to IR3 in that it has both hardship inducing balance and innovative QoL like transfer plates and super early bots and vehicles. It will be hard to go back to vanilla or start a mod that thinks the game is meant to be played without such things 😩

Maybe this will be updated for 2.0: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/personal_logistic_plates

[supple pecan]

at the very least people can use those concepts in their own mods if they want to

one thing that i’d be interested in seeing more is temp-dependent recipes

[obtuse scaffold]

oh my, early bots were a godsend

[supple pecan]

will say, will not miss IR3’s military balance

[stable wadi]

Nor its Handcrafting Age 😆. It's actually incredible how hostile it is to a Lazy Bastard playstyle early on

[obtuse scaffold]

advanced logistic chests in yellow science sucks (a lot of bad things i can say about purple vs yellow science unlocks...), but the early steam bots were so nice

forestries were peak military balance

love those things

[supple pecan]

wouldve loved if adv logi chests were a purple sci unlock

god i want to demolish my mall so badly

[obtuse scaffold]

preach, i've spent so long remaking pretty much everything after chem science and the only reason i keep the husk running is for the mall

but i wanted to wait until all the fancy chrome stuff for a new mall on the new base, but decided to quit it for upcoming SA
not a fan of dropping things midway, but i know i can't wait to go to space

[supple pecan]

also not a big fan of the oil proc, though i’ve never touched any other overhauls’ versions of oil so idk

[obtuse scaffold]

at least my barrels will no longer be voided when used as car fuel

[stable wadi]

At the moment I'm just restarting repeatedly to figure out the ideal build order for a super early game mall. When I first started designing for this I had pipes and belts first but now I'm theorizing that the most painful handcrafts and catastrophic events (like steam brownout) should be played around first. I don't mind delaying 2.0/SA to finish IR3 since I'm late to the party.

[supple pecan]

im stopping midway as well

[sturdy flicker]

Would one be able to share solutions on how oneself or another solved a particular update/porting fix?
Not actually share files, but more a write up doc that pinpoints what specifically would need updating and how to go about doing that.

That could be a collaborative effort, but those with the mod would still need to go about doing the work themselves.

[supple pecan]

im kinda dissapointed i havent finished an overhaul still, hopefully i end up doing so with K2 after SA

~~does SA count as an overhaul ~~

[supple pecan]

I do like that IR3 has pushed me out of my comfort zone though, so I still regard it as a good mod for doing so

[stable wadi]

It's definitely challenged the way I think about the game. Normally in vanilla there is a "right way" that is technically an extreme but because it's optimal I don't have to think about it. But in IR3 I actually have to figure out the right balance of automation vs handcrafting and bussing vs DI

[supple pecan]

probably would've had to think more about DI if i worked on blue circuits

but yeah chromed parts def made me think

[supple pecan]

early on, yeah def

with how many intermediates there were, you wanted them up asap so your handcrafting would be more manageable

then slowly moving everything to be a mall

[sturdy flicker]

and for anyone else who wants to know:

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1g861pf/grab_a_portable_copy_of_the_stable_release_of/

[maiden ferry]

noooo 😭 I haven't been able to go beyond iron age yet. not even electricity..

[maiden ferry]

oh this is a godsend. thank youuu

not having access to train interrupts and the other qol stuff would suck tho..

[fiery walrus]

should i ore wash everything into nickel and chrome or is that going to back up

hmm maybe i should actually go up to purple and yellow science in my starter base

i think im building a new base too early

i want to get beacons and prod 2s in before trying to scale past like 70 spm i think

[supple pecan]

was ore washing everything and it went okay, but had a system to move to cold ore washing at a certain threshold

if you want to be 100% safe, have a backup crushing system

mainly just need to make sure you have something consuming the secondary byproduct

[fiery walrus]

actually i have a ton of real estate in my starter base from these forestries i can remove

[supple pecan]

beacons are yellow sci tech i believe

[willow bronze]

well well well, this overhaul was a time sink untill the DLC release.

[sturdy flicker]

5 mins lads 😄

[sturdy flicker]

It really was glorious.

[glad copper]

It's releasing at 7?

Nice

[supple pecan]

in 4 minutes yes

(whatever your local time is)

[sturdy flicker]

Damn, its almost humbling, after being plagued with complicated recipes in IR3 for even basic stuff like pipes or fast inserters, to just....throw really basic stuff together in 2.0+SA again and get those things.
Kinda missing mini-assemblers though, tbh ^^

[wind forge]

Yeah, it's definitely a nice change that you can easily get too used to

[supple pecan]

im okay with not having mini assemblers

I just end up treating the intermediates in SA differently than the intermeidates in IR3

since most small assembler intermediates were just various permutations of a metal & designing with minis + assemblers is different from designing solely with assemblers

[maiden ferry]

I miss the steampunk aesthetics already. :')

[stable wadi]

Apparently I need 4k+ starting wood to last me to bronze age . I actually started with 1k and had to, uh, replenish another 500 several times before finally setting up forestries. I'll miss the clackedy-clack in SA, but not the DIY balance.

[sturdy flicker]

....really starting to miss a few things about IR3

[stable wadi]

I decided to use the bronze age mini trains with IR3 compatibility for my first iron mine. But in my actual map there's no coal near the iron, no water near the coal, and no way to interface with the mini fluid wagons to ship water or steam without iron age electric pumps. I couldn't find a steam-powered pump mod. And running long pipes or belts along the tracks would defeat the point of the mini trains.

Rather than cheating in electric pumps, solar panels, and accumulators with editor, I'll ship steam cells via mini cargo wagon (manually jumpstarting the first time). About 750 cells power 24 steam drills for 5 minutes. Great use for steam loader output filters since there are no steam filter inserters. And a perfect opportunity for small steam tanks, right? 4 tin chests pointing at 30 steam tanks: Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power!

[hexed turret]

yeah I really wish they increased roboport range in vanilla - at least with quality! :c

maybe vanilla is really just therapy for people who want higher-range roboports, to show us that it's not so bad

[obtuse scaffold]

at first i found really weird how the construction area was so massive compared to supply, but after getting used to it it was really nice, i was building something on the end of my base and they could reach

[sturdy flicker]

You actually don't really need to filter outputs for locomotive-class entities. You can only ever remove spent-canister stuff via inserter, and only ever insert compatible fuels via inserter.

So two steam-powered inserters would do the job just as well.

I also made an overly complicated station that drops off full - and picks up empty - steam-cells (bronze/iron), and I put this in the left-most stop for my entire chain of stops.

Then a nice bi-directional belt running perpendicular to train direction, tunnelling past each locomotive position brings filled cells to them, and its twin outserter removes spents ones to go back to that very first station.

That first station simply changes its train limit from 0 to 1 if filled cells are getting low, and/or there are enough empty cells to pick up, and then does the opposite at a central steamcell-filling location.

[fiery walrus]

Got myself to hydrogen airship

really cool model for it, not at all practical for personal transport though

which is thoroughly disappointing actually

but with the airship station it should be useful for spaghetti style bases

i guess thats why it moves so slow, so that it isn't strong for carrying stuff.

[stable wadi]

That's useful for the locomotive itself but it doesn't work for cargo wagons (and needs to in order to prioritize recycling empty cells over producing more). But I do wish I setup the belts to be easier to expand to a second train. It turns out that taking a coal mine around the same time as iron is critical to avoid a death spiral when the starter coal mines out the edges while I setup iron intermediates and green science. I even found a coal patch just north of my iron that would have invalidated my whole steam strategy if I hadn't missed it 😆. In fact the distance between iron and my base wasn't much more than between iron and coal that I would have happily belted, which is making me reconsider mini trains entirely.

[stable wadi]

Force-building a forestry "line" worked pretty well, I didn't even need tanks or valves and have surplus wood going into charcoal. Only downside is a huge pollution cloud without the ring of forestries to absorb it so I'm planning to remake everything in electric eff1 and tear down the steam stuff.

[hexed turret]

I guess the mod could have made the airship faster if a player is inside it... you might still do it with a mod?

not sure how hard that would be

[fiery walrus]

did anyone bother with geothermal power?

a 100% yield dirty steam vent only produces this much power, just 3.6 mw, and has byproducts to take care of

they seem to range between 100% and 500% yield. and they aren't that uncommon. So you could potentially power a small base with them

in my explored map which is fairly large but not gigantic, i've found 7 veins so far. probably same frequency as oil

3 uranium 3 gold 10 coal, 15+ of others

so im guessing theres like 75 mw of power from dirty steam on my map currently

my current base almost up to purple takes like 40 mw

[wind forge]

Yeah, I did because I wanted to

I already had a dedicated dirty water build so the dirty steam conversion wasn’t an issue

I could use the steam for things like cracking or plastic without needing to build a dedicated steam vent

Excess steam is turned into power

[quasi temple]

mistakes are about to be made

[fiery walrus]

wait, is there supposed to be a way to get bottomless pits?

[obtuse scaffold]

I think in mod configs there was something that mentioned voiding and/or byproducts, not sure
That might be a way

[stable wadi]

You can enable a hidden recipe in mod map settings for 100 stone brick iirc. They can be placed with but mining or deconstructing them will destroy them instead. I used them a lot last run especially before installing the Infinite Inventory mod

[fiery walrus]

oh okay

[quasi temple]

Mistakes have been made

[fiery walrus]

tore down basically my entire starter base to retrofit hot and cold washing into it, and i also got purple science running but my base keeps locking up from byproducts now, sigh

but its "fine"

ill just make tons of steel chests i guess

starter base only needs to survive until i can research everything in purple and yellow

then ill build for trains and byproducts will be easier

[hexed turret]

Is IR3 compatible with 2.0?

[supple pecan]

no, and deadlock doesn't plan on making it compatible

#1217770763701190749 message

IR repository's also archived

[hexed turret]

Oh damn!

[bitter mortar]

I'll consider porting it

[hexed turret]

Nice, I might help, I'm a software developer professionally

Feel free to ping me with things, e.g. something that I could do to help port it

But would Deadlock permit it?

[bitter mortar]

Gonna ask when I have a working proto

No point thinking before that

[fiery walrus]

damn, i think my butt might get kicked by yellow science in my starter base

[quasi temple]

Mistakes are still being made

[stable wadi]

Remaking my oil blueprints starting with the mall. It's hard to believe I was handcrafting most of the bottom row last run 😅. With generators to burn off natural gas and petroleum I can avoid ever building storage tanks. And between concrete and acid recycling into science I shouldn't need bottomless pits anymore.

[sturdy flicker]

About 40h into an SA run, and it still throws me off how easy most of the crafting recipes are compared to IR3's. It even feels...wrong to just build them as one does.

IR3 gets a lot of things right, such as providing rudimentary bots and various forms of portable energy storage/generation earlier, though that might also go hand in hand with its more complex recipes requiring an equally complex setup that would be asinine to scale up by hand until the midgame.

[obtuse scaffold]

Yeah in vannila after blue science i do a mall with like 3 belts and the only things missing are stone bricks and concrete, meanwhile in IR3 the mall is like half of my base

Granted, it wasnt a very good mall, but it worked
Betwen all the intermediates i whould say bare minimum 4 belts for iron age alone, not counting the big intermediates production it whould require

[stable wadi]

The deadlock powered stackers are really helpful for keeping bus width sane, especially after bussing big intermediates to keep the malls sane. I can just have 1 belt of everything and upgrade to red/blue instead of expanding when I need the equivalent of 4 belts to become 8 or 12. In 1.1 vanilla I would never make steel off the bus iron but here I can get away with it. I guess this might become an option in SA too depending on when the stack inserter is unlocked.

[obtuse scaffold]

yeah, the stackers were really good to make bus
my bus is always a mess with too few lanes but i did 2 lanes of most ingots and had plenty of throughput
i think for stone i had 3 just in case but even 2 looked like enough, esp when crushers can take prod

it also helps to save on expensive belts when a single yellow can handle 60/s

i never got to play with the arc furnace but i am interested in how whould a arc furnace bus look like with molten metals

[supple pecan]

makes sense, the mall is like half the challenge in ir3

[maiden ferry]

Industrial Revolution 3? More like Mall Simulator 3.

[obtuse scaffold]

ft never the right amount of sour gas

[sturdy flicker]

I honestly can't live without Loaders now. That and the fact I started a WideChests run last and can't live without it too.

I just can't deal with them requiring lubricant to run rather than just electricity, so I'm paying 50 engines and red chips to get 1 red-belt loader for SA.

But no more belt balancers for me, no sirree.

Oh oops, you meant stackers, not Loaders, my bad

[stable wadi]

Yeah I enable both . Tempted to play with Merging Chests again but once I started it would be so tempting to use them in my malls

All my trains are 1-1 anyway and 3 splitters or Madzuri aren't that bad

[sturdy flicker]

It still isn't....amazing...despite its semi-recent buff.

Its huge, needs more footprint that an equivalent number of regular smelters and casters.

Additionally the casters don't make all the intermediates of that metal that a mini-assembler can.

There was maybe 1-2 usages where I found gear casters were very useful to make directly with pipe-in molten steel (I think for Steel Electric Engines), so I used the Arc Casters for that there.

[sturdy flicker]

THATS AN ABSOLUTE MIND FUCK TO REGULATE hoooly shit I have stories.

[obtuse scaffold]

yeah i was thinking more for gears and rivets where it can be really good to go straight from molten metal to the thing

[sturdy flicker]

So the big problem is the start-up time and atlas-ing due to the mod making every permutation of vertical and horizontal Wide Chests between the sizes you set for x and y.

This...encourages you to not just say "yeah, 64x64" and call it a day. So you go for a conservative 8x8. Cool.

So you build a mall with these 2 or 3x8 boxes (the 8 is more useful here) so you can tack on at least 2 assemblers next to it.

Then, to make the design scaleable, you build in a line, because obviously, so a looong serial line of pairs of assemblers sharing a longitudinal wide-chest.

But you'd like to make sure each chest kind of shares and passes ingredients along, like a sectioned sushi belt with inventory storage, right?

So you have you make logic that

• passes only the ingredients you want
• in the amounts that the next chest can store up to
• without getting stuck transferring the last item because the slot is already full thus clogging the belt AND PREVENTING THE REST FROM TRANSFERRING
• without filling up the five limited filter slots you have

[stable wadi]

Ikr like I have literal editor mode at my beck and call and have no trouble self-regulating that! Merging chests tho 😅

Maybe a nice 4x1 or 6x1 chest for next run (Merging Chests lets you customize both dimensions)

[sturdy flicker]

ugh, rant over

So have a solution for it in SA, by additionally involving the filterable chest slots mod (like filtering cargo-wagon slots), and using the Selector Combinator in Random mode to spit just the signals to the "passer-loaders" (the ones between the wide-chests) and I sorta gave up and decided to just rush Bugger/Requester/Active Provider chests and build a Bot Mall like I did in IR3

---

bows

this has been my Ted Talk, you've been a great audience.

[stable wadi]

Yeah it's easier to resist the temptation when I know I'll have to do something super forced and inconsistent compared to regular belts. In a previous 1.1 vanilla run I had 27x1 chests and did use them for early game crafting combinator malls but my lategame factories were much wider so I switched to bots

[sturdy flicker]

Biggest pet peeve that IR3 got right and Vanilla hasnt.

Nuclear bombs are artillery only, not rockets you can accidentally launch in your base.
No extra mod needed, no nothing, just a very logical decision to make them artillery shells where they make the most sense/effect.

[stable wadi]

Bigger aoe is definitely one way to balance the cookie clicker manual artillery in vanilla. I had to disable map drag and click every 100ms with an AutoHotkey script to mimic a fraction of the power of the cluster remote mod. I imagine it's even worse in SA now with the spawner health buffs

[obtuse scaffold]

one thing i whould love is some sort of drag box tool that marks every worm and nest to death
just drag your mouse on that area and watch them go to town
big hater how manual nest clearing is just 500 gorilion clicks

wait thats what cluster remote mod is, next time i won't read only half

[wind forge]

Chrome takes up more space than you expect because of the plating machines

[fiery walrus]

chrome was a pretty big step up because of all the ore washing stuff
but in yellow its like insane how many new resources i need to deal with

i keep loading the game looking at the recipe a bit and quitting out lol

[upbeat dock]

Artillery Equality is a mod I love that addresses the clicky nature of artillery. You don't have to set it all the way up to 100% manual range, but it doesn't really matter either way. Special artillery remotes were my favorite as well before finding it... easy to just let them fire automatically now

[stable wadi]

Ngl IR3 yellow science scared me more than vanilla blue science did when I was a new player. Gem breeding and cryogenics especially felt right out of the blue since I never touched them before yellow science. Eventually I started messing with them in editor and figured out they were closed loops. ||Mass laser assemblers <= ruby gem breeding <= 1 cubic press + 1 advanced crusher pointing at each other. Screenful of nitrogen and helium pipes <= net zero consumption of both, only flipping liquid/gas state <= 1 air separation cryogenic plant + 1 top-up valve to jumpstart everything (rocket parts can use all the leftover oxygen).||

[hexed turret]

It's a big jump in complexity. If you keep calm and keep building up the factory then you'll get there.

[wind forge]

It's a big jump especially if you're used to only doing what's necessary at a particular tech level to get to the next, rather than experimenting with new features as you unlock them

[stable wadi]

Is there anything else I should bus for a post-rocket run? The items with two black bands are stacked copper, glass, iron, and steel. I'm also planning to use airships for polluted water byproducts, gems, and science.

[wind forge]

The only things you really bus (if you do use a bus) for a post-rocket run are things used in science

Everything else ends at the mall

[stable wadi]

I worded the question badly. What I meant to ask is whether there is any specific item post-steam (in a run that eventually includes all 7 sciences) that you would bus and is not in the screenshot.

[wind forge]

Hmmm. A lot of that depends on what you're making on-site vs off-site. I'm noticing a bunch of electrum stuff in some form that's missing.

[stable wadi]

Oh yeah I was going to use airships for those this time. Felt bad to bus them for just one use. I also had a super long sushi belt last run snaking through my base to connect YP science to the labs near RGBM science. And pure chromium on the bus just for rubies. Definitely flying those over instead.

[fiery walrus]

a bus is useful for organizing the base so that resource types are always available easily, instead of like going oh damn i cant get nickel and chrome over to this side of the base.

its not really useful to put intermediates on a bus unless they are used in a lot of recipes for other intermediates. science and mall ingredients aren't useful to put on a bus inherently.

[stable wadi]

Mainly I want to plan ahead for belts coming out of my scrapyard that will go in the bottom of the bus

[fiery walrus]

so in summary, look through intermediates, not through mall or science recipes, for common ingredients

and put those on the bus

and also, exclude them from the bus if you plan to put them in the same area. Like bolts rods plates reinforced plates beams etc dont need to be a bus its all made in the same area

and besides that, make sure every basic resource is available

also, i might want to put air filters on a bus to make air products more easily available than going through the chain of graphite and gold on the production site

but also just bussing those gases might be better. neither of these are technically the most basic form of those resources though, but its useful still.

[stable wadi]

I'm experimenting with a bigger bus after last run (#1217770763701190749 message) with the general idea to bus complex intermediates and only "retire" them and close ranks with their neighboring belts to reclaim the bus width they took up when I'm confident they'll stay unused for the rest of the game (which only seems true for bronze intermediates so far)

[fiery walrus]

I think its best for a bus to prefer items that share the most uses in recipes, which is typically the least complex items

[stable wadi]

Interesting, I avoided bussing the basic ones because I figured they would bloat bus width the most and starve more machines downstream if I only bussed half a belt each (since ingots can be stacked but basics can't)

[fiery walrus]

i was making a list of things i'd put on a bus in ir3 and i realized its a lot of work looking at the recipes and deliberating

but ill show you some of that progress just for the mentality of it

copper
tin
iron
steel
gravel - nothing needed with stone or stone brick, gravel derives silica very simply and gravel itself is useful. so no silica on the bus
liquid concrete - used in a lot of different things made in different places
gold
coke - coal isn't used in anything, crushed coal isn't used in anything, coke derives a lot of things
graphite - product of graphitic coke which isn't used for anything, and removes need for belting bitumen around by belting graphite which is used in a lot of things
plastic - used in red circuits and graphene which would just need compressed air and plastic

no need for silicon since its just 1 step from coke and gravel, even though silicon is used in a lot of things, its saving 1 easy step so not worth it

liquids:
water
steam
oil
compressed air

a lot of work to look at the recipes actually and decide this kind of thing somewhat optimally

[stable wadi]

That's a good point about coke and gravel. I guess I should retire the stone right after the row that makes boilers and trees. Just need to upgrade the gravel belt to red eventually since FactorioLab says I'll need 1.2 yellow for science alone. I completely overlooked compressed air since last run I had a grand total of 2 air separation machines (and could have gotten away with 1) to jumpstart all the yellow/rocket part pipes with nitrogen and helium. But I guess a pipe beats bussing air filters which is what I did last time.

[fiery walrus]

i was looking at complex intermediates like red circuits and looking at their ingredients to see if they're shared and if they are shared if theyre not too complex to make on site. for semiconducting triodes its shared by red and blue, but theyre very simple imo. just silicon which would be gravel -> silica + coke and tinned wire from copper and tin ingots and gold foil? so i wouldn't bus semiconducting triodes but the process informs what i want on the bus still.

it ends up being a lot of work cause you need to think about both directions of the recipe tree

[supple pecan]

is that barss to the right of lead? might as well just bus the brass gears if that's something needed in science

brass ingots and brass plates aren't used for anything besides brass gears

though i don't believe brass gears have a lot of recipes that use em either

[fiery walrus]

id just alloy brass where its needed if it only has 1 use

[stable wadi]

I've decided to just airship or bot washer byproducts, plastic (to graphene way up), and rubber (to blue belts way up). Removing both petroleum and ethanol since they can be centralized in a rubber/plastic/high octane area. That narrows my bus from 72 tiles to 62, then 53 after retiring complex iron and 44 after retiring complex steel

[fiery walrus]

oh no, i need to redo my gold setup a bit so i can get pure ores from it

instead of always smelting

and i know i need new logic to determine when to switch to hot washing it.

[wind forge]

Since you're asking about things you've got excess too, I wouldn't bother shipping any of the base metal derivatives, like why bother with the iron plates/pipes if you're bringing iron ingots down?

Same with steam and water, especially with electric boilers present in the mod

You'll find you almost certainly don't need the pistons either, and having rubber and copper means you can take out the heavy copper cable

[obtuse scaffold]

Yeah send the ingots and make the intermediates on place, stacked ingots are really good to bus instead of intermediates

[stable wadi]

Steam is a good cut since plastic, rubber, lube, hydrogen, really all oil processing could be moved under the bus. Water is needed for gold plating solution and fertilizer. I could A) pipe water to onsite both products but fertilizer would be annoying with both platinum and hydrogen needing spaghetti or airship trips. Or B) make both products under the bus and bus gold plating solution, but fertilizer would then need nitrogen shipped down. I'm going with B for now.

Heavy copper cables are used in big poles, substations, big roboports, laser turrets, electric turrets, steam turbines, junction boxes, and hull sections aka science. Each locked behind a different research so I'd have to remake the cables every time. Rubber is used in belts, medkit and things I handcraft (equipment, module programmers, and repair kits).

I guess onsiting pipes, pistons, reinforced plates, beams, and small frames isn't that different from basic intermediates. But large frames and motors feel just annoying enough to keep on the bus.

Gravel could be retired-in-place after landfill, tarmac, rails, and liquid concrete which are close together. Glass, silicon, and rubies only use silica. I also have a spare lane for graphite, cutting compressed air, graphitic coke, bitumen, and heavy oil, and making onsite diamonds easier. I don't need as much bronze as I thought so that frees up another lane for lead plates for nuclear items.

That leaves liquid canisters (nitrogen to fertilizer, CO2 and fertilizer barrels to advanced forestries, oxygen from advanced forestries to rocket parts), pure ores (chromium, gold, platinum), and sciences (yellow, purple, space). I figure 1 airship with inventory filters could go around in a big loop for those.

[quasi temple]

Why am I doing this to myself

[supple pecan]

could use the (somewhat expensive) waterfill explosives to create some local water for pumping

though it’s really annoying since it needs an adjacent water source

[glad copper]

ah how did you get lakes so big?

[quasi temple]

It'sa mod

Island World if my memory serves me

[glad copper]

gotcha

[quasi temple]

but one really needs something capable of moving over water and inexpensive for this mod

that's why Cargo Ships mod is also in use

also I managed to find a bug feature in Klonan's Transport Drones

[stable wadi]

Ah, an infinite troughput "pipe" 😄

[spiral creek]

Do tell

[quasi temple]

As far as Cargo Ships mod is concerned, Road and Fast Road from TD are type of water

which means you can pave a road to a dead center of your base and force a ship to sail there

which means there's a threat of being run over by oil tanker in places rather unexpected

[spiral creek]

That’s hilarious

Those ships are so slow though

[quasi temple]

they are, but they also haul a thousand stacks

once i fire up new basic processing plants for coal, copper and oil i'll tear off all old ship depots and place them somewhere with better access

[stable wadi]

I realized there is no such thing as "producing under the bus". There are literally no items there unless I spaghetti everything so I would actually be producing near the base of the bus. But I would also have to run long belts all the way around for the few items still needed at the current tech level like stone, wood, and rubber.

So for my new bus concept I'll just bus whatever's needed at each tech level instead of forcing a spartan lategame bus to work early game. CCs stacked on top of each other represent different stages with early game in the bottom rows and lategame in the top row.

For example, stone belt becomes gravel belt when bricks are no longer needed. Gravel becomes silica when gravel is no longer needed. 1/2 belt glass in bronze age becomes an unused lane, its role taken over by a belt of stacked glass by iron age. The empty glass lane is later reused for blue circuits. Fluids in the middle row are bussed temporarily (if at all) for early and midgame.

Boiler fuels aren't bussed at all and airships also save a ton of space. I'll just need to handload 9 nickel ingots to produce enough hydrogen for the first ship.

[fiery walrus]

oh , airships cant just hover over and idle while loading/unloading you have to set it to circle?

thats very strange

why doesnt this load items onto it

it unloads on the other one

???

i moved the chest to the bottom side and then it worked?

it says 16 chests

oh i know. i used picker dolly to move the chest into its range

and that doesnt update it

i also tested it like this, using picker dolly to move it out, and it did pick up from that moved chest

i wish wube implemented picker dollies, because its annoying to have so many weird edge case bugs

[spiral creek]

The cut and paste feature is performing a lot of those functions currently

[wind forge]

People just don’t like the idea that their items have to be removed from a chest and reinserted

[stable wadi]

Out of curiosity I compared the fuel consumption of circling vs normal back and forth flight...it seems identical lol. So circling doesn't seem to do anything other than visually telegraphing a backup or shortage. But a chest connected speaker would be a more reliable method since you don't have to be eyeballing that exact area to notice the alert go off

[fiery walrus]

is there a way to get them to just stop when theres no need to move

i dont think there is

at least the fuel consumption is super low though

[stable wadi]

Tbh what really bugs me is doing this with construction vehicles like the heavy roller. I imagine you're supposed to load it up with every item by casually driving around over transfer plates. But in reality, much of my "mall" is handcrafted from intermediates and areas with a lot of spaghetti and DI are barely walkable, much less driveable.

So instead I keep it in my pocket like a roboport and for building just place it and dump my whole inventory into its trunk, then mine my inventory back to handcraft things. This way I'm not restricted by the vehicle's speed or collision. For example, heavy picket in my pocket + transmat sounds genuinely more efficient than constructrons for smaller blueprints. I could even make use of its inventory with packing tape since the issue of voiding steam cells doesn't exist for powered roboport equipment.

[stable wadi]

Maybe I will drive around for the first iron. I assumed it would be a never-ending chore but it's just 1 trip to beeline the first train and a pessimistic amount of tracks. Beats running 2 insanely long belts and cleaning them up later or installing mini trains that I barely use afterwards

[stable wadi]

Overhauled my smelters to improve upgradeability. Stone and bronze furnaces leave space for steam crushers and electric furnaces leave space for washers. I excluded electric crushers since those will be mostly onsite at mines and would make the smelters insanely long (they're already more than double original length). Airship stations carry off byproducts.

Washers switch to cold if the chests have more than X items specified in a CC. If I haven't researched hot yet the CCs can be disabled to force cold. If the belt jams for about 5s then crushed ore passes through. Electrum gets a dedicated column and switches to cold if pure platinum backs up the belt. I was going to compare gold x 3 with platinum x -7 but realized the machines already "know" the correct ratio.

[sturdy flicker]

I am still amazed in the wake of SA that this thread hasn't died, rather flourished, also very happy IR3 has that damn complicated, that any "tedium" factor of SA's various loops are quite manageable.

[sturdy flicker]

The next stage of the design could use that chiral compressed design that lets you create an 8 beacon sandwich of smelters

The one that looks like an offset ladder, and you gotta be real careful which direction the output belt goes with respect to outsertion belt-lane.

[loud smelt]

Getting really annoyed in SA with no mini assemblers for things like iron gears and iron sticks. Just looks so wrong having a normal assembler for those products

[obtuse scaffold]

I went to ||vulcanus|| first and the ||foundry|| kinda feels like that, ||direct casting steel, gears and wires at insane rates and +50% prod||
But i do miss the tiny assemblers, they grew on me

[stable wadi]

Oh right I completely forgot beacons existed since it's been so long since they were cheap. They cost about as much to research as blast/arc furnaces but I didn't feel like designing that far ahead at the time. I'm guessing it would be best to rush blast first for built-in prod and then beacons for cursed modules and then make a whole other design for arc. I'm sure glad I stopped playing with cliffs for IR3 🤣

[wind forge]

Actually, ||regular assemblers|| start to feel like that when you really get to using the ||main buildings||. Definitely not as much as IR3 though

[maiden ferry]

Vulcanus is the modern, industrialized IR3.

[maiden ferry]

It's always fun to figure out the optimal layout for making a tiny piece of metal that fits in your hand with an array of machines 200x times its size.

[stable wadi]

TIL blast furnaces are unaffected by beacons so it is really a hard fork between beaconed electric and blast furnaces. Comparisons:

Beaconed electric costs 1100 yellow research and probably requires nuclear power which costs another 1100 yellow. Cursed beacons give +.25 crafting speed +.08 prod -1.08 P/m per furnace compared to unbeaconed eff1. Prod 3 speed 3 8 beacon is like a blast furnace with triple the pollution. And nuclear reprocessing to properly automate nuclear costs 1200 yellow...I will not miss DIY balance with editor in SA.

Blast furnaces cost 500 purple. Very cheap research and uses 16.7% less pure ore to produce the same output but pollutes twice as much as eff1. So I would want to spam some advanced forestries (-pollution +oxygen -CO2 that would pollute even more if vented) for 900 purple, design a chunk aligned blast smelter with integrated air filters, or get artillery for 1200 yellow.

[wind forge]

It's decisions like this which make science multiplier runs useful. It's really easy in Vanilla to simply get upgrades to technology you have before you have time to try it out

[quasi temple]

I am starting to think I've made some crucial mistake in desing of my new oil refining facility

and that mistake feels like using pipes to transport fluids

if i calculate correctly, then under effect of 5 speed mods 3 a barreling machine performs at roughly 90 fl/s, which is about 33 times worse than practical maximum of long range pipe transport

but that practical maximum is not achievable within the plant that manufactures fluids itself, not without very generous spacing and more pumps than what i am already using

nor do each of the machines require such throughput of delivery

[wind forge]

Yeah, in 1.1 you need to consider fluid throughput in your calculations

It's simplified greatly in 2.0

[hexed turret]

What do they have in common?

[sturdy flicker]

If you're going for IR3 beacons at any point, I'd recommend rushing electromagnetic plants for making the charged electrum crystals (or whatever they're called) and keep passively making them, because there is no way to speed up making them ie, modules except to scale up with more plants.

Like, get the blast furnaces, but the next should be EM simply due to the earlier you start, the better.

[quasi temple]

i am slowly clawing my way back to a semi-functional factory

it'll still take ages before I can resume doing science, but it's late-game spm-wank anyway at this point, so it's no rush

after steel mill becomes functional it'll be time for tin processing, glass, bronze, two basic sciences and finally setup for blue science

[fiery walrus]

getting close to finishing my starter base, i just need to make blue circuits now

and then thats yellow science done and i can start work rebuilding everything properly

blue circuits unfortunately look like the hard part

[willow bronze]

#1217770763701190749 message

remember this?

IR3 was the idea. space age is the execution

[sturdy flicker]

yeah, the ag-towers and how they're laid out made me remember how you built those carbon-neutral chunks ^^

[fading quest]

blue circuits are far and away the hardest part of IR3

[fiery walrus]

yeah im pretty close to finishing them

but i keep running into things i already made but didnt make enough of lol

like i made electrum sheets to be plated for yellow science packs, but now i need electrum sheets for the whatever things, so now i need another gold ore crushing setup and so on

lots of that

they are super hard though

field effect nano mesh

[stable wadi]

Found a nice seed with tons of trees, close but not overlapping ores, and iron/oil/gold nearby. Cliffs are disabled (enable for a good laugh) but everything else in the screenshot is default

[stable wadi]

Finally settled on a burner tech mall design. Stages 1-8 are handloaded and automate basic intermediates (bricks are looted from the crash site and DI at the stone patch). Stage 9 replaces chest inputs with a belt. Stages 10-13 add big assemblers, starting with copper beams. CCs show alternate big assembler recipes (I later realized top left could also make pipes).

[sturdy flicker]

I feel like this is the only entity in SA that comes remotely close to the puzzle that was IR3's cryo/condenser plant, as well as the whole complicated mess that producing and electrum derivatives was.

Even then, 2.0 lets you mirror outputs, which takes a bit of fun out of what one had to do in IR3

[fiery walrus]

well thats new, my base can turn off by having too much power, and not being able to burn off natural gas stopping plastic production

im also playing with alternate beacons, which enables SE wide area beacons. and one of those costs 80 field effectors.
im only running 1 supermagnet atm, so it would take just under 3 hours to craft one beacon at this rate lol

wide area has 7.5 module power and 14 distribution range and costs 20x.
vanilla beacon has 1 module power and 3 distribution range.

so in terms of module power, it seems equivalent to 2 rows of beacons, which is pretty good it can be hard to hit that many beacons in some setups. in terms of distribution though it seems like its more expensive. but id have to build two setups and compare i think

in a row beacon setup, the larger you tile it you approach 1 beacon to 1 3x3 machine but itd usually be 2 beacons to 1 3x3 machine starting out. So the question is how many machines can a wide area beacon support. and its probably close to that 20x

I just realized i never used the gas or blast furnace

blast furnace seems very useful for silicon, but not really relevant otherwise

gas furnace is very energy efficient, so its not useless i guess

but im also not tearing up 300 electric furnaces and wasting a bunch of materials to make 300 gas furnaces

[hexed turret]

Natural gas furnaces are a scam

You sometimes have to throw away natural gas, sometimes you might have too little; they cost a fuckton to make; and an electric furnace + 2 eff modules use the same amount of power, just add a petrochemical generator to burn the natural gas instead. 1 generator is for 9 furnaces.

[supple pecan]

natural gas you prolly just turn into ethanol or hydrogen, dont think it’s worthwhile to use the gas furnaces

ethanol -> rubber, plastic, and/or combine with petro to make that one fuel i forget the name of
hydrogen -> whatever stuff needed for yellow sci (i forgor)

[quasi temple]

high octane fuel is such important product for me

with cargo ships and distances between patches measured in kilometers

[fiery walrus]

i do want to try hof for power

[fiery walrus]

damn, i was hoping hof would be kinda crazy but its not

90 petroleum (36mj) + 30 ethanol (12mj) = 120 hof (72mj). 1.5x multiplier, doesnt support productivity.
vs
60 petroleum (24mj) + 60 165c steam (1.8mj) = 2 coke (12mj) + 60 natural gas (24mj). 1.4x multiplier, supports productivity
and 60 natural gas (24mj) = 60 ethanol (24mj). 1.0x multiplier, supports productivity

but looking further, breaking coke and natural gas down into hydrogen for hydrogen cells looks like the real winner

300 hydrogen = 40mj
2 coke (12mj) + 60 steam (1.8mj) = 120 hydrogen (16mj). 1.16x multiplier, supports productivity
60 natural gas (24mj) + 120 steam (3.6mj) = 240 hydrogen (32mj). 1.16x multiplier supports productivity.

[fiery walrus]

this is the numbers for 1GW base off of hydrogen.
and 600 oil/s isn't that much for 1GW, you can expect like 100 oil/s per field. chem plants are pretty cheap so i can spam efficiency modules, and bring the total factory consumption to 24.4MW for this, full speed would be like 130MW.

next i should see what 1gw nuclear looks like

but i suspect comet ice will really make hydrogen shine as a energy source

[fiery walrus]

Oh, i just saw, the oil processing makes almost half the necessary natural gas, so those numbers arent correct

[wind forge]

I'm not really reading through your numbers but check something about matrix solver and using your outputs as inputs and the layers of factory

[fiery walrus]

unbarreling machines are actually really unwieldy in practice

because they are 1x1

for example lets say you want to do bot based oil processing with barrels

the refineries put the outputs 1 space apart, so theres no way you can take out filled barrels and put in empty barrels

because you cant use long hand inserters, because that would require 2 wide buildings

you can make it work if you use a 90 degree inserter mod

if it was longer like this, or if the unbarreling machine automatically output similar to a mining drill, probably by having a tiny inserter than can occupy space inside of the machine, i think itd be a huge improvement

[fiery walrus]

another idea

or even this

more compact, but worse ups

[fiery walrus]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Kux-SlimInserters

these would go so hard actually. i could fit it down to just 1 requestor chest and using trash unrequested

Alright, last one i promise. But this is the best design i think is possible as it shaves 1 block off horizontally and 2 vertically from the last similar design

[sturdy flicker]

Consider using Merging (Logistic) Chests.
A lot has to be said for being able to reach the same inventory across a 2x1 or 3x2 or 1x5 footprint, and then that footprint also having bot-access.

Its often more fiddly, though certainly much more compressible to have inserters that deviate from the standard "pick up at x|y, drop off at (x|y)+2"

But I'm certainly giving these a go.

--

tfw you realize SA's "mini assembler" as actually just the normal assembler compared to the footprint of the cryolab/foundry/EMPlant

[obtuse scaffold]

weird part is how the big building (foundry) is what does the initial intermediates (cables, gears) and the small buildings (assemblers) do the finished product

[sturdy flicker]

At least it serves the same purpose, just in a swapped paradigm. You're attaching multiple end-product makers to a single intermediate maker, rather than fitting as many of each seperate intermediate makers within a directional footprint of the larger end-product maker.

[sturdy flicker]

Oh, last thing, you could get that compressed a bit more horizontally by wiring the Heavy and Petroleum inserters to the same with a limit condition to allow two types of filled barrels, without one overtaking the space for the other.

As long as your refinery and bot speed nicely sync, there needn't be a focus on storing as much as possible.

You are already kinda doing it to share barrel supply to the heavy and light oil canners.

[obtuse scaffold]

yeah mixing diferent buildings is cool, and because the foundry is so much better than assembler 3 you can make some spicy direct insertion stuff

[fiery walrus]

after some thinking, i did manage to make it even smaller

well, not it. but a hybrid design

i put them all side by side for comparison, middle one is new

it actually occupies less tiles than the all loader version, because the all loader one hangs off the side by 1 block, technically that one can tile diagonally, but its hard to do so in practice with the beacons im using, and it doesnt look tidy enough

[hexed turret]

Barrelling machines are awkward to use, but I think in the end they do save space compared to a larger machine.

But they would be much easier to use if their inputs went through the machine

To allow lining them up next to each other

[sturdy flicker]

chaining them more like, would be a much better solution. Basically make them function like boilers/heat-exhangers, where they consume a liquid but allow said liquid to pass through both ends and share to other entities.

Would allow for such a config:

========== (input belt)
vvvvvvvvvv (inserters)
++++++++++[<--barreler fluid source]
vvvvvvvvvv (outserters)
========== (output belt)

[hexed turret]

That's what I had in mind too

And if u are instead using a recipe that is outputting fluid from barellers into a pipe, rather than inputting from pipe into them, just rotate them 180 degrees.

[stable wadi]

After building a steam bus mall for an hour out of a shoebox like the one I'm replying to I decided to make a better scaling starter base with fewer finished items made available earlier. I originally wanted to use Steam Stage 1 as the starter but even that was too big and expensive, so I made a "Starter" starter base. Furnaces and boilers were also staged to save time setting up furnace stacks. Extra space was reserved for ore washing (#1217770763701190749 message). Cliffs are assumed to be disabled.
Mods - Staged Blueprint Planning, Industrial Revolution 3: Powered Loaders & Ingot Stacking, Merging Chests, Train Control Signals

[stable wadi]

The "Starter" was too slow so I added 2 big assemblers. I'm starting with bots and apparently steam pipe interface raises total consumption from 5505 steam/m to 9255 (starting derrick outputs 6k and dropping). The fluid network stores 15k but most of that is needed for normal machine operation. So I added enough steam tanks for 2 stacks of steam cells (1 in chest and 1 backed up into pipe interface).

[fading quest]

you're expected to supplement the derrick with steam from boilers; it's not supposed to be your only source of power

[fiery walrus]

dont forget vents are cyclic resources if youre planning on using only vents for power

[stable wadi]

I wanted to delay boilers until my big starter which could craft 2 water pipes at a time plus undergrounds. In freeplay I started out with 3000/m (I'm guessing that's the lowest point in the cycle) so the tanks never had a chance to fill up. But I only browned out after removing that one pipe between stages and forgetting to replace it. So machine uptime must have been lower than I expected with all the recipe switching.

[sturdy flicker]

Long time no see, but I managed to mod in the small 2x2 roboport as a private mod to use.
Works great ^^

quality and everything

[maiden ferry]

woah that's awesome!

[hexed turret]

How did that go?

[quasi temple]

such a shame this mod is dead in water

i can't fault author for not working on it, but it's sad nonetheless

[spiral creek]

It still lives on in my heart

[quasi temple]

it still lives on in my hdd as an unfinished insanely huge boat based playtrough

[spiral creek]

You have a disk drive?

It’s 2026 who has a disk drive

Does factorio run on windows XP

[quasi temple]

i have three of them

i also have two nvme's

also disk drives are still in backup business

[obtuse scaffold]

there are mods that bring the assets into 2.0 but you have to manualy download the assets, its a bit wonky but it doesn't violate the licence and its something

[sturdy flicker]

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/IndustrialRevolution3Patchset

This ongoing project manages to get it working fine in Vanilla 2.0 + Elevated Rails. Work is being done to adjust it to fit into Space Age + Quality.

Then, as @obtuse scaffold mentioned, there's all these individual entity-reskin mods which utilize the textures from IR3. Very useful for ongoing runs where you just want to change one or two things.

https://mods.factorio.com/search?query=IR3 Assets 0n0w1c&factorio_version=2.0&sort_attribute=relevancy

[wind forge]

Just popped in coincidentally today and wanted to congratulate you on your work, it's not easy, not just from a techincal perspective but also from a "I want to respect the spirit of the original modmaker" perspective. Kudos to you.

[spiral creek]

The guy has literally come after people with legal threats for not respecting the license agreement so there’s not much choice there

[sturdy flicker]

You'll have to thank @0n0w1c and @Shemp for that. I only ported the 2x2 Roboport , and even then not exactly in a perfect way. 0n0w1c was kind enough to make the final touches and post it for seriality, ie. part of the lineup.

[wind forge]

In that case, thanks to all of you

[wind forge]

I am aware, but even then they didn't have to go through the effort at all

[dense palm]

Hi everyone, I'm the author of the IR3 Patchset. I usually prefer to converse in mod portal Discussions, but if anyone wants to chip in with feedback or ask for help, I'll check on this thread occasionally.