math-and-meta

[oblique hollow]

its preference

[median heath]

buuut please, go ahead sev
This was uncalled for.

Also waiting until you see how I answer the question before assuming how I am going to answer it 👍

[oblique hollow]

right, sorry

[median heath]

To answer this: If you're actually needing 44.444444444444 and you don't want to deal with overflow, you would need to set it to 44.4445.
But as stated it will occasionally shut down - which won't affect anything unless you're building power right at the edge of your production/consumption line.

[tired viper]

Ok, thanks

^^

[median heath]

👍

[oblique hollow]

that "building on the edge" is a risky play after all

[tired viper]

Nah, I think I'm waaay over the edge of production

[median heath]

True.

[median heath]

The correct way to build power 😄

[oblique hollow]

power storage could probably tank it, but building excess capacity is the better move

[tired viper]

But I'm not yet on tier 8-9 (I'm stalling a little bit)

[median heath]

Just have an entire field of Bioburners to catch you if you need excess 😛

[tired viper]

So I guess when i reach it I'll be short on power

[median heath]

There is no T9.

[tired viper]

7-8 then? I mean Phase 4

[median heath]

Aye.

[tired viper]

One hidden artifact is freaking me out there, on the south east zone.

I can't find it

[tired viper]

Yeah! I finished the factory :D

A whole pure crude max overclocked gives a lot of work, holy shit

the yellow one is the "weak" generator at 44.4445%

:D

[ember fractal]

do you guys sink plutonium?

[median heath]

Indeed.

[bleak pike]

I need help with factory

I put everything into satisfactory tools but for the input it isnt the amount I said I had available

[modern scarab]

did you try changing the output to match what you have?

[bleak pike]

no

wait huh

[tropic crest]

is it possible to have a push pull train on a closed loop lain

[junior comet]

Your train station would have to be closer going backwards than forwards, and you couldn't have one-way block signals

[tropic crest]

ok ok thank you

[frosty owl]

That this isn't either #screenshots or #design-and-architecture

[wind spade]

@green scaffold especially when you want feedback on the alt recipe choices, you should post in a channel where people can write 🙂

also there's never "obvious choice", all recipes have advantages and disadvantages and it depends on you and your priorities and goals, what you want to choose. You can get all alts anyway

[delicate chasm]

I'm about to try piping water for the first time, this is down the ravine below a coal deposit but is it deep enough?

If there's a way to measure precisely I'd appreciate the tip on that too so I can fish for myself next time.

[vapid gorge]

just try placing a water extractor

[delicate chasm]

I uh...can't afford...and it's a long way back up. But I guess that's my fault and it's proper I just go get the mats.

[vapid gorge]

you'd have to go back up to get it anyway and most water that isn't a pond is deep enough. Though generally its easier to not plan factories having to pump water really high up

[delicate chasm]

Yeah, just hoping to get the depth knowledge so I could explore the other direction (there's a longer path if you follow the water to the other side of my outpost) on the way and find the spot. All good though.

I'm gonna bring the coal down to the water and then just generate power here to start with - I don't think I want to jump in to pump stacks just yet.

Thanks!

[vapid gorge]

are you in the grassy fields?

[delicate chasm]

This is the far northwest, if you start in rocky desert or north forest and go to the other biome, it's near the border.

[vapid gorge]

on on that body of water between cliff and desert? there should be a bunch of coal right on the beach

[delicate chasm]

It's a way better building area than my actual start (North Forest) with pure coal, quartz, iron, and copper within a 300m circle along with an impure and a normal sulfur and not too far from caterium to boot.

[vapid gorge]

yeah speed runner cliff

[delicate chasm]

-730, -1170 and the cliffs running east by northeast.

Oh yeah? Did I find one of the actual best in game locations?

Whoa, you've actually explored every inch of this area?
Awesome shop for the map icons?

[vapid gorge]

'best' is really subjective. It has a lot of close nodes good up until bauxite but you're really cramped for building so you gotta learn to build tall. Unless you make a sky base which isn't hugely advisable

[vapid gorge]

ah no this is from an online map. It's full of spoilers. Should have consulted before sharing it

but if you're doing all this this shouldnt spoil much

[delicate chasm]

Oh. I would prefer to not see those but I'm in the wrong channel for avoiding spoilers.

Plus I've pinged those coal deposits so I would be going to check them out after this anyway - no harm no foul!

[vapid gorge]

yeah I tried keeping it very specific to the area

[delicate chasm]

I appreciate the guidance. :)

I'm more disappointed that those aren't in-game map icons, haha.

[vapid gorge]

xD mayber in the future

my old factory on those cliffs. Made everything except nuclear things

[delicate chasm]

I've got 8 coupons set aside for the shop update... Better stash a few more for those.

...nice.

[delicate chasm]

And this is very nice!

[vapid gorge]

very basic. Put together just so I'd just have a bunch of items in teh containers whenever

I demolished it though for this

[delicate chasm]

Just wow. How do you stack up against the truly insane builders for this game?
This is far, far beyond what I can understand by looking at because I'm not far enough through progression to know most of these parts.

Looks spectacular though.

[vapid gorge]

Well I don't think it's easy to compare things since everyone builds in different ways

[delicate chasm]

(I ask because your very basic thing was quite nice too, wondering if you're one of the super architects in the community?)

[vapid gorge]

and I've spent a lot of time on this. Also I use a few basic mods that actually makes this not take literally 100yrs to do

I'd say about 90% of whats in that image is doable w/o mods - but would be extremely time consuming. Probably 200hrs on everything in that image?

[snow dove]

best way to build something that looks nice:

1. think of something
2. build it even if it looks bad
3. decide what you don’t like about it
4. change it
5. repeat
   and build at a small scale when experimenting

[cinder silo]

I love the circles, I just don't like the z fighting that foundations do which horribly limits what I can build 😦

[snow dove]

asphalt limits visiblity of the Z-fighting

[vapid gorge]

there's other ways too

[cinder silo]

That's why I mentioned the limitations on what I can build.

[vapid gorge]

as for 'super architects' I wouldn't say NO- but I do think I do rather unique stuff

[snow dove]

fair enough

[cinder silo]

In addition I use a lot of floor decals, they don't play nice with clipped foundations.

[vapid gorge]

that 'so' was a typo xD , meant 'no' . I'm not that full of myself

[snow dove]

i don’t build with circles cause i don’t like building circles, it’s too time consuming

[delicate chasm]

If I could get somebody else to come do my roof for me, this would be all the protip I need, haha. Been bad at roofing since Minecraft.

[cinder silo]

That's why all my stuff is colossal but is made up of right angles.

[vapid gorge]

unlock the hover pack xD

tbh I wouldn't even try fancy building until you've unlocked most of hte awesome shop and had the hover pack

[snow dove]

eh i don’t like the hover pack for building, i find the power range to be too limited

[delicate chasm]

Hover pack you say...

[cinder silo]

You might get some roof inspiration off this, my explosives factory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZWJchOpd8U

[vapid gorge]

yup! does what it says on the label 😄

But yeah most of it is practice, looking at videos on techniques, and lots of planning

[delicate chasm]

Good insights. Okay, I'll do some more tiering up after I get my first coal power grid operational. Thanks for the info, HQ!

o7

[vapid gorge]

no prob! oh also I've found restarting completely fresh maps and applying what you've learned was very useful for me.. so like I think I restarted at tier 3 5 and 7

but everyone is dif

[cinder silo]

I have a way of demolish and replace when I learn new techniques.

I refitted my tunnels fairly recently to move their power lines and tidy the junctions, man that was a huge rebuild.

[vapid gorge]

oh @cinder silo , been polishing off one of the 2 external hubs for hte uranium rods 😄

[delicate chasm]

I am a gamer who is crippled by that very impulse in long progression games. I'm also prone to getting to a high power level/tier/whatever and then erasing all of my early game stuff on impulse.

I'm trying to talk myself into leaving the evidence of my improvement behind and just move around the map but the spaghetti at drop weighs on my mind...

[cinder silo]

Small example of my tunnel refitting.

[vapid gorge]

the worst bit will be that you'll probably change how you approach your entire method a few times xD

I used to have a whole worldspanning rail system that I just threw away

[cinder silo]

Lots of guts on the outside looks, I tend to keep a lot of that under the floor or inside conduits like this one.

[delicate chasm]

If I ever do that, it'll definitely be a winding path close to the ground going between the ravines and cliffs wherever possible. It's probably more likely that I make a coastal train because I'm not super ambitious about builds but that sounds like something I can pull off.

[vapid gorge]

you say that but it's about 1/10th of the actual guts xD

[vapid gorge]

yeah as 2 lane train systems are easiest and rail is kinda wide it's not suuuuuper easy to keep it low and snaking between terrain

.... but... I do have some ideas for that if you're curious >.>

[cinder silo]

This is a map of the subsurface tunnels I did a huge refit on. (except bottom left~that's plutonium processing under the waterfall)

Back in a bit.

[delicate chasm]

I am, should this move to #design-and-architecture ? My initial thought was an above-below setup, if they can be feasibly stacked without needing to have permanent foundation to obscure the visual. Haven't unlocked trains yet, but my brother has and has shown me some of his stuff.

[dense cave]

subsurface? how?

[delicate chasm]

I think under their own floors, though there are large underground sections (that are getting a rework and you should not build in right now according to Jace).

[mystic moon]

All using hypertubes to get underground
It's incredibly cool

[cinder silo]

Ahh sorry, I wasn't at home, the basic method is here:

[snow dove]

can you just clip back up through the ground where?

[young coyote]

Some say he's still underground to this day.

⛏️

[oblique notch]

mine before the Spire Coast rework on those same cliffs lol

[tired viper]

I sank some computers, holy those big numbers

[fierce ruin]

wait until you see thermal propulsion rockets

[tired viper]

oh god

is the most expensive thingy?

[median heath]

Project Parts give the most points. Yes.

[fierce ruin]

in particular, this one gives the most out of all 4

[median heath]

I build exactly the 4k needed and never make a single other one again.

?

[warm wren]

Okay nuke facility is done Getting an issue with water though... the byproduct water going back around to the sulfuric acid keeps getting out of whack and backing up. It's producing 216 more water than I need, I've got that sunk into concrete and I'm using a VOP, I think it's just a matter of everything needing to get synched up and then it will work.

[warm wren]

Ended up just splitting it out so that the extra water goes straight to the concrete and the byproduct water for the sulfuric goes straight there.

[fair mica]

Looks like meta starting location

[wind spade]

there's no general "best", it all depends on what are your preferences

[fair mica]

move as less as possible

[wind spade]

since "meta" is usually "spread your factories", then I wouldn't call this a meta start

[fair mica]

Why spread?

[wind spade]

less lag, less logistics

[fair mica]

idk, i don't have lag

[median heath]

Why centralize?

[fair mica]

its actually more logistics since you don't have everything at all

[wind spade]

logistics is also "moving stuff around factory"

[fair mica]

same reason microservices is 10 times harder than monolith

[wind spade]

hardly

[fair mica]

you can't modify everything at once since you don't have everything at once

[median heath]

I don't understand either of those references.

[fair mica]

you need to use insanely slow methods of movement till you set up tube cannons

[wind spade]

trains are super fast

[median heath]

I will never use tube cannons.

[fair mica]

trains are very slow

[median heath]

Because they are a bug and keeping them is one of the few dev decisions I disagree with.

[wind spade]

you need 2 trips, there and back. Then you never go there again

no reason to go to a far factory

[fair mica]

if you plan everything at once and have 10005000 hrs

[wind spade]

you make a factory that uses nearby nodes and ships final product to storage. How is that hard?

[median heath]

I still don't get either of those references.

[fair mica]

that factory is suboptimal and all alts since you don't have t8 out of start

[wind spade]

much easier than moving all those nodes to central point and processing it there

[median heath]

Oh but you do. 🙂

Given the game doesn't start until you unlock mk5s 😉

[wind spade]

you don't care about suboptimal until you run out of resources, which doesn't happen at all usually

[fair mica]

okay. You have one server, you have one codebase, one deploy, one config, one set of nodes, one set of 3-rd party services, one version. Having 200 services you have service directory, countless protocols, 200 repos, countless deployments and such. Hence as here you have 100500 factories that you can't modify without a pain and one big factory that you can modify without a pain

[fair mica]

I cannot stand suboptimal

[median heath]

Why would I ever need to modify one of my outposts?

[fair mica]

Cause you don't know what you want it to do

[median heath]

Why would I build it if I don't know what I want it to do?

[wind spade]

it's IT related
monolith = make one codebase that handles everything
microservices = make several separate services that exchange data between each other (good e.g. for payment services or generating documents or something, if it breaks, rest of app still works; but also much more work to keep services in sync and/or exchange data securely)

not relevant at all in satisfactory context

[fair mica]

second part is not true since it omits version hell and protocoll hell, and monorepoless hell.

[median heath]

@fair mica

[fair mica]

also one of 200 services can break alll of 200

[fierce ruin]

anyone to help me build a good iron tower steam

[wind spade]

I'm a web developer and used both without any issues. If you have issues with microservices, you're using them wrong.

[wind spade]

I always build factories with an intent. I don't build "because I have iron available", I build "because I want this product"

[fair mica]

I am a web developer and use 300k+ codebases that are capable of being distributed and that's 10 times as faster to change and not break anything than having 200 repos

[fair mica]

Game not tells what to do, if you just follow objectives it ends in 30 hrs

there's no SPM

Microservice hyping peepos allways forget that you can't know for sure what is deployed when its 200 services if you don't make service coordinator which is a very costly and complex thing that could be substituted to compiler most of the time.

[wind spade]

yes, in many places monorepo is easier to do, but in many places separating a service helped the case. I'm not talking about 200 services, I'm talking about thinking about when you separate things into a service. But again, it's not relevant for here and is also offtopic

[wind spade]

I'm not talking about game telling me what to do. I'm talking about me needing things for whatever reason (personal goals, progression, whatever)

[fair mica]

it is relevant since moving and editing in this game sucks compared to most of other factory games

[median heath]

And here I thought my question was simple. But it remains unanswered 😭

[fair mica]

just like in MS

[fair mica]

i answered it above - you just can't slap Mk2/3 drill and copy paste bluep next to it

[median heath]

Huh?

[fierce ruin]

??

[fair mica]

You can't know what you will be making and adding extra outpost is headache

[median heath]

I asked why I would building something without knowing what it does and your answer is about drills and BPs (that I don't use)

I can, in fact, 100% know everything I am making.

[fair mica]

cause you can't know what you need till the game bores you to point you uninstall it and don't touch for 2 years

[median heath]

There is not a single or or fluid extracted on my map that doesn't know exactly where it is going and why.

[median heath]

Speak for yourself.
I have never been bored playing this game.

[frosty owl]

Please make your issue clearer.
If you're looking for people to play with, you should probably try #looking-for-group-old

[fierce ruin]

ok

[wind spade]

I know exactly what I want. if I build a new outpost, I build it with goal in mind - e.g. "I need some plastic and rubber for storage, so this outpost will make 30/min plastic and rubber"

[frosty owl]

*Plubber

[fair mica]

i can't know what i need since i am too tired to plan

[wind spade]

there's never a reason to touch that outpost again

[fair mica]

its easier to grab most of possible and decide later

not the best but it not makes you head think after you did this for 8-10 hrs straight

[wind spade]

I'm not planning too much either

I see "I need plastic and rubber", so I make factory that makes those

the only "planning" is deciding how much, which is usually 5-30/min depending on what item it is

[fair mica]

It would be unoptimal and would lack something most of the time cause you had no technology/recipes/resources

unless you know this game out which makes it boring

[wind spade]

how is it unoptimal if it reaches the goal it needs to reach?

and it doesn't lack anything

(also I usually take the alt recipes before I build the factory)

[fair mica]

there's no goal

[wind spade]

goal is "make 30/min plastic and rubber"

(in this example)

[fair mica]

If you build according only game sets you you don't need to think at all

[wind spade]

it's not game goal, it's my goal that I set

[fair mica]

i.e. to get to t7 and 8 & all objectives it is very few stuff needed

an then there's no goals

[wind spade]

again, it's my goals, not game goals

although those are very similar usually

[fair mica]

There's no goal, materialising them out of vacuum takes too much brainpower

[wind spade]

if next schematic needs e.g. stitched plates, I usually want to automate stitched plates so that I can afford that schematic

[median heath]

Only 8-10 hours?
Each of my outposts takes me like 2-3 weeks from concept to completion.

[fair mica]

2-3 weeks is usually the time when this game bores me

[wind spade]

I'm starting to feel that this game isn't for you, if you want a quick game with no thinking 🤔

[median heath]

Agreed.

[fair mica]

I guess i need to make scim -> blueprint converter. Interestingly how much shenanigans editing a bluepring allows

[cinder silo]

I've had some installations take months to build test then power up fully.

[fair mica]

it is till last objective tier 8

[fair mica]

copy paste with bluep feature?

[wind spade]

yeah that's not how building large setups work lol

[fair mica]

anyone knows is there a parser for blueps?

[cinder silo]

With the way I build, not really feasible.

[fair mica]

You one of these guys who make 48 constructors in bluep?

[median heath]

The fact the Printer is small is one of the best things about it.

[cinder silo]

I actually don't use the printer at all.

[fair mica]

why we even have size limitation for blueps

[wind spade]

because it's good for gameplay

[median heath]

Ok, counter-question, because for 4 years they weren't adding them...
So "WHY EVEN HAVE BLUEPRINTS?"

[wind spade]

limits what you can copy and forces you to actually think about things

[fair mica]

its bad for gameplay because it makes grind

[cinder silo]

Use a print the size of my emergency power would probably crash the game 🤣

[fair mica]

grind = bad, in every way

[median heath]

This is an entirely subjective opinion.

[median heath]

False.

[fair mica]

grind allways bores

[wind spade]

(again referring to "you may want to change game if you think SF is grindy")

[median heath]

Again, false.

[frosty owl]

You're confusing gameplay with grind and/or what the general objective of the game is

[median heath]

Grind always bores you.
That does not mean grind always bores.

[fair mica]

majority of SF gameplay is : 1) slime grind 2) recipe grind 3) walking grind 4) not having CAD to make CAD requiring things

[median heath]

4????

Nothing in this game requires CAD.

[fair mica]

government needs to make law to allow connectors to CAD or at least blender be implemented since it is a crime make CAD-worthy problem and awfull tools to solve them

[median heath]

Extreme disagree.

[fair mica]

for each game that has 3d editor

[frosty owl]

"Slime"?

2. Is tutorial, though, and (3) can be alleviated or avoided with equipment

[median heath]

Also, genuinely for your own happiness go play something else.
This game will never be what you want it to be.

[fair mica]

you cannot avoid waliking since to put thing you ususally need to change your position

[frosty owl]

You can fly or hover

[fair mica]

still slow

and not convinient

[frosty owl]

You can mod

[fair mica]

i can't get a blender interface here

[frosty owl]

That is a modding issue

[fair mica]

but it is absolutely necessary for everything bigger than motor since it allways gets to unmanageable unreadable blob

and it gets cause you need 100% of volume of a bluep for factories and everything else clipped inside them

[cinder silo]

Unmanageable for you maybe, this really isn't a game aimed at you at all (no offense) but you probably should play something different.

[fair mica]

and you need bluep cause I aint building this ever again by hand

[frosty owl]

I'm having a hard time understanding what you're typing

[fair mica]

Building of big constructs is so nasty so you don't want to repeat it

[cinder silo]

To be completely honest, I'm just going to assume trolling at this point and move on 🤷‍♂️

[fair mica]

i.e. you can't hover from 150 m and edit most of the things since nIcE gRaPhiCs and fog and unreadable NiCe ModEls

als you don't have wireframe

also you don't have hide button

Its not trolling these are bare facts - you can observe only very limited number of things from one screen

You can't immideately look and deduce scim diagram out of it

[cinder silo]

Not a great assumption, you clearly have no idea of the scale on which I build.

[wind spade]

why would I want to deduce scim diagram from factory? if anything, I want it the other way around - make factory out of diagram

[fair mica]

okay, please can you make scim diagram only having this image

[frosty owl]

You can tweak the fog (which is still very much WIP, see Update videos)
You can build support frames with beams... If that's what you mean by "wire frames'? Or like, blueprint beam structures...
You can press "H" to hide the UI and/or your hands

[wind spade]

see above

[fair mica]

nope, i don't want to have 2 models and care about consistency

That's an issue, you're saying it not exist

but people above obviously hit it and wasing time cause of it

[cinder silo]

Oh man that is a shot of a very small facility, what are you moaning about again?

[fair mica]

So what it does

can you read it?

[frosty owl]

Why are you using a clipping hell to prove a point about visibility?
Are things intersecting through one another SUPPOSED to be visible and clear to understand?

[fair mica]

cause I will never build anything twice

[wind spade]

why do I need to know that? I make factories based on plans, not plans based on factories

[cinder silo]

Just a construction block 🤦‍♂️ what it builds is down to the user.

[fair mica]

you basically saying, no you should have 2 models

[frosty owl]

So...?

[fair mica]

so i need to fit everything in comically small bluepirnt

[wind spade]

models for what? I don't understand when I would need "figure out a plan from existing factory"

[fair mica]

1 model in game 2 model in head

3rd model on paper on excel

[wind spade]

wdym?

[frosty owl]

.... So?
How does this pertain to what I asked?

[wind spade]

what's "model" in this case?

[fair mica]

So this is the only way of building stuf that doesn't involve waste of time in unaffordable amounts

[fair mica]

formal way of representing facts

also found this one in scim blueps, can you spot what exactly it does

[wind spade]

scim blueprints aren't "good" usually

[frosty owl]

I'm sorry, but if you're not going to put some more effort into explaining what you mean, I'll leave the convo here.
I'm not understanding any of your answers or seeing how they relate to what I asked you in the first place

[fair mica]

guh. 1) you want to spend as few time as even popssible 2) you avoid all and any grind and repetitions and cut as many edges as even possible 3) game is not suited for that

[wind spade]

so... how is that relevant to anything?

when you build new factory, you build it based on a plan (either made by yourself or by online planner). It doesn't matter whether you use blueprints or not for the build. You still build it based on some kind of plan (or you just do random things and then any conversation about efficiency is irrelevant, so I'm skipping that option).

so 3) game is not suited for you

you're trying to play a game in a way it's not intended and blaming it on the game instead on your preferences

[cinder silo]

He's just taking assemblages out of context and demanding to know what they do from people who haven't actually run them.

[fair mica]

readability is better than original game

[zinc crater]

Don't feed the troll.

[fair mica]

it is bad thing you NEED context and can't see what is going on by looking

[wind spade]

if you wanted to play counter strike-like game in roller coaster tycoon, you wouldn't blame RCT for not being able to play it as FPS game

[cinder silo]

Give it up.

[frosty owl]

I agree with the conclusion you came to.
This game is not about speedrunning factories to achieve huge production numbers ASAP. One can mod it to kinda work like that, but it's definetly not the kind of gameplay the game is designed for

[wind spade]

you never need that, so it's not bad 🤷‍♂️

[fair mica]

I allways need it cause i don't want do fire and forget move the map and build something else

and cause constantly don't know what would i need

[cinder silo]

Figure out what this does (nobody spoil things) , otherwise quit trolling.

[frosty owl]

I think it's perfectly appropriate. If a factory is a mess, it's hard to understand what it does. What's wrong with it?

On the opposite side, if a factory is orderly or even has decorations (like signs) it becomes much easier to understand, even without context

[wind spade]

there are literal signs for you to write info if you feel like you should know something

[fair mica]

i don't know what these buildings are

[placid oyster]

sorry for the necropost but DAMN this looks so epic

[fierce ruin]

google "refinery"

[placid oyster]

I need to incorporate this build style into my factories

[frosty owl]

You're gonna need some Perfect Circles ^^

[fair mica]

because if scim outputs mess you allways can read it

[frosty owl]

What does this sentence mean?

[wind spade]

scim is third party and not relevant to the game

[fair mica]

if you build more than 10 buildings, it is hard to understand what is going on cause it is not possible to observer them all clearly cause geometry forbids of soing so

[cinder silo]

🤦‍♂️

[fair mica]

scim schematic is flat

[frosty owl]

That greatly depends on how you place such buildings

[fair mica]

and it has all info as text

[wind spade]

why do you need to observe buildings? they produce what you initially build them for and you never need to touch that again

[fair mica]

and connections, game make things 3d and hides everything from you

[cinder silo]

And if you know what you're doing, I could tour everything I've built and tell you what it does because I bloody built it!

[fair mica]

cause i need to edits stuff and next time i will edit something bigger than motor I won't be able to recall what is for what

[wind spade]

honestly, go play another game. If you feel like you really want to play a factory game and hate 3D, go play factorio or similar. But I don't think any factory game will be good for you, given your attitude of "things are too slow"

[wind spade]

why edit? just make new

[fair mica]

cause old one unfinished / nonperfect

[frosty owl]

If something is hidden... YOU have hidden it.
The game doesn't magically creates visual barriers around things, it's only you who decides what gets built where and, consequently, what blocks the sight of what

[fierce ruin]

this game isn't meant for someone with a brain capacity of a slug

[fair mica]

game hidden it cause recipe / rate is not shoe everywhere except form gui

[frosty owl]

Please keep the convo polite as per #rules

[fair mica]

okay try doing something in this game without memorizing it

[ember fractal]

If you mix and match buildings it becomes much harder to know what's going on

[wind spade]

name a game that shows recipe / rate anywhere else other than gui

[fair mica]

factorio

[wind spade]

is in GUI

[opaque moon]

That's gui

[fair mica]

nope, in-world

alt

[placid oyster]

thats a gui

[opaque moon]

You have to press a button to toggle the gui interface for recipe/rate to appear

[wind spade]

it's literally "click on building to see what the rates are"

[cinder silo]

Don't let the troll drag you down to his level, it isn't worth it.

[fair mica]

click all buildings to see

to see what entire thing does

[opaque moon]

If you click the building it shows up in gui

[fair mica]

takes ages

[opaque moon]

I don't think you grasp GUI

[frosty owl]

And that's where Signs come in.
Sure, SCIM shows recipes better than Satisfactory if one hovers the mouse over the single machines... But I'd argue that one can do the same by giving a single glance to a room full of machines and seeing what they have on their output belts... Provided they built it in a way that makes things easy to see

[wind spade]

yeah, you need to do that both in factorio and in satisfactory

[fair mica]

manual labor

[fair mica]

nope, factorio world view is an SCIM

on itself

[wind spade]

factorio world view doesn't have rates

[ember fractal]

Label each factory's inputs and outputs with signs that show a picture of the item and it's rate per minute

[wind spade]

you need to open a building to see the rates

[fair mica]

it is 10 times easier to deduce them

and they have straight rates which are easy to remember in vanilla

[opaque moon]

no duh that a constant top-view of your factory is "easier" then a on-the-ground First Person view your factory.

[wind spade]

and in both games you never need to deduce them or guess them after you built something, you either not need them at all or you write them down for future use

[frosty owl]

BUILDING and PLANNING
Aka: Game

[wind spade]

(also, go play factorio then, no idea what you're doing here if Satisfactory is so bad)

[fair mica]

in factorio you need to do this

mainbus that's why

it exists

[placid oyster]

we are not on factorio, and main buses are not very common here

[ember fractal]

Satisfactory logistics aren't the same as factorio

[wind spade]

you're comparing two completely different games, the only thing they share is "you build things that make things"

[ember fractal]

People cross play the games expecting that concepts from one game carry over to the other. They don't.

[fair mica]

And everyone still gets overly defensive and defies obvious truth

not very rational

[opaque moon]

inb4 pollution system exists in Satisfactory

[wind spade]

obvious truth is "you don't like satisfactory because it isn't factorio"

[fair mica]

nope, game renderer is bad for readability of schematics

as clear as day

[opaque moon]

You did it wrong then lol.

[wind spade]

strange that majority of people are completely fine with it. Must be a you issue

[opaque moon]

That's pretty much the overall answer, you'd rather complain then bother to make everything readable for you, when everyone else is able to.

[frosty owl]

Surprised Sushi roll
#screenshots message

[ember fractal]

Game is in early access btw. I expect UI and various things to be improved by 1.0

[fair mica]

Strange majority of people don't have first class honours pure math degree and medal

[wind spade]

they don't indeed. And they don't need them for this game

[ember fractal]

Lol strange flex but ok

[opaque moon]

So we've stooped to irrelevance lol.

[cinder silo]

Failed attempt at flex from some random on the internet more like.

[fierce ruin]

given that you have those degrees id think that youd be capable of more rational thinking but ok

[opaque moon]

^

[fair mica]

what exactly was irrational?

using CAD for problem that needs CAD, using sutomated tool for thing that requires automation?

[frosty owl]

No flex, I think that Pic kinda proves your point ^^
Try making sense of that weird mix of machines without (total game changer) signs

[wind spade]

irrational: assuming game X is same as game Y and complaining when it isn't

[frosty owl]

If they were all making the same thing on the other hand...

[fair mica]

I don't do that, you made this out of thin air and convinced yourself that i do this

We all do this on a regular basis

[wind spade]

only like 10 messages of "but in factorio it works like that"

[cinder silo]

Stop proving otherwise with your lack of actual argument

[fair mica]

how i am supposed to make example if not something well - known

i am not going to write entire thing description from scratch

[wind spade]

you are complaining that isn't like that, hence my initial argument

[frosty owl]

I did notice a distinct lack of writing effort...

[wind spade]

lack of effort in general

[fair mica]

Nope my point: game has issue X. This is bad

[fair mica]

2lazy 2write

[fierce ruin]

so if you don't like it, don't play it?

[wind spade]

game doesn't have that issue (according to majority of players), so the issue is there because of you doing things wrong, not because of game being wrong

[fair mica]

the issue is i don't like 100% of games i played i still want to play at least something

[wind spade]

go make your own games then 🙂

[fair mica]

need 2much resources for this

[fierce ruin]

if you hate them all why not just find something you enjoy?

you aren't being paid to do this

[opaque moon]

Being too lazy to write means whatever you're trying to say is coming up as a jumbled mess and is just getting misinterpreted over and over again, so you can't get mad when we don't understand what you're saying

[fair mica]

I lost capacity of being mad at internet people .

[cosmic lake]

Y'all need to stop feeding the troll 😛

[opaque moon]

A good passtime

[fierce ruin]

free entertainment

[cosmic lake]

hahaha fair enough

[fierce ruin]

its like watching a cat chase a laser

[cinder silo]

Getting boring now though, I'm gonna hit another channel. good luck.

[ember fractal]

I'm gonna actually play satisfactory instead of talking about it lol

[delicate chasm]

Yeah, the ultimate meta is that gaming is a waste of time unless you value your enjoyment of the expenditure of that time. Every game is badly designed and easy to beat once you attain the 'correct' perspective on it. Obfuscations, layers upon layers, split the simple call and response, query y/n nature of our interaction with the game and when those layers are pierced through personal ability, acclaim, or achievement, there is nothing left to enjoy.

[fair mica]

Or, because most of the people just eat that issue. Many things have plam oil, that's an issue. But still these things are consumed by those many. Does this cancel presence of palm oil?

[ember fractal]

Nothing wrong with palm oil

[wind spade]

uhh what

[frosty owl]

I don't think that is true. Games can be complex enough to pose a challenge for anyone unless they have unheard of intellect

[wind spade]

I give up as well, gonna go play Seablock

[delicate chasm]

Read it carefully. It's not phrased as an absolute. Games like that won't have their layers pierced. Chess.

[fair mica]

Its bad for health. As well as palm fat and colza oil

"Nothing wrong"

[formal lynx]

i know this is math and meta but saying there is nothing wrong with palm oil is just so disengaged from reality

[frosty owl]

Reminder that this is not reality

[delicate chasm]

Snap back from math-and-meta
Oops, there goes Greta?

[fair mica]

Reminder that everything is a reality and what is not reality not exists.

[median heath]

Sigh... +1 to the mute list.

[delicate chasm]

Reminder that you create what you believe through manifestation, so in at least one universe, you have never, ever, been incorrect.

[formal lynx]

oooo, who did you mute this time

[median heath]

I always type it immediately after the message that makes me do it 🙂

[ember fractal]

Bruh lives in a simulation and is talking bout reality 😂

[formal lynx]

awww. not the poor dog 😦

[vapid gorge]

Sigh... +1 to the mute list.

[oblique notch]

funny. I muted that guy earlier because he was spouting a lot of the same stuff i get mad at you about.

But ... ive also seen you mellow out and pull back on the "this way is the only way" and ive mellowed out myself on getting mad at you about such things so... i guess we all grow

[median heath]

?

Given I agree with him on... nothing...
"Same" is a bit of a stretch.

[oblique notch]

eh. It was on the modding discord of all places that he was bitching about the 81/45 (or whatever the numbers are) rule and such.

more bitching about how 44.4444% isnt viable

[sand epoch]

Are we talking about moon spamer?

[oblique notch]

🤷

[median heath]

I mean...
I will mention that it isn't a perfectly reachable number.
But I do so just to give the person an informed decision.
Because I am fully aware that there is practically no reason to care that those numbers aren't reachable.

Which is why I don't bitch about them? 🤷‍♂️

[frosty owl]

Coughs in actually appreciating that level of precision

[oblique notch]

yeah exactly what i mean. You've mellowed, at least in my opinion on such things.

or ive mellowed on being annoyed about it :p

[median heath]

Believe it or not, you have made me strive to be more mellowed about such things ❤️

[oblique notch]

damn. we're showing growth.

[oblique notch]

and before i give the wrong impresson, no. Not moon.

[noble timber]

Everything is bad for you if you consume enough of it

[frosty owl]

Except Satisfactory, of course.

[oblique hollow]

and i specifically told them its doable, just that the clock UI doesnt explicitly state "hey you can type numbers AND equations in here you know"

[frosty owl]

Speaking of UI's precision...
The colours' UI values can be tuned with finer control than the UI suggests.
Eg: One can change the darnkess of a colour by steps of 0.01 according to the UI (anything else gets rounded), but inputting different values such as 0.005 does lead to different colors, with different HEX codes, despite the UI rounding the value to (eg) "0.00"

[ember fractal]

600 uranium ore into 14.4 uranium fuel rods into 72 power plants

[frosty owl]

I prefer 300 for my first nuclear ^^

[vapid gorge]

but 2100 is 7x as good!

[storm sky]

is it better to make fuel from oil or make fuel by making it from heavy oil resiude

without using any dilution recipes

[ember fractal]

I might do the 14.4, but only 36 power plants to start off with

[vapid gorge]

can't recall offhand, do a bit of math?

[storm sky]

would but the extra refinery included in the 2nd option is making it harder

[vapid gorge]

figure out how much fuel you can make with 100 oil

Then figure out how much you can make from 100 oil -> oil residue -> fuel

just one more step

[storm sky]

yeah but the net power might be different in each

[vapid gorge]

the net powers from these systems are very minor differences

[ember fractal]

Using HOR alt into fuel will get you more fuel per oil than just going oil to fuel

[storm sky]

but will it net more power

[ember fractal]

Aah, because of the overhead of extra refineries

I think will still net more power

[vapid gorge]

As in the extra machines won't overcome the extra fuel

[storm sky]

need 20 refineries to make the crude oil into hor instead of 10 to make oil into fuel

[vapid gorge]

eh do what you want

[storm sky]

plus the refineries needed to make hor into fuel

what i want is whats going to net me more power

33.33333 refineries vs 10 refineries

[vapid gorge]

and I said that when you look at different processes to making fuel that if a system is making you more fuel the extra power from the machines won't tip the balance. It's a drop in the bucket.

If you don't believe me do the math and math out how much those extra refineries will take

[storm sky]

33333.33333 MW from hor

[ember fractal]

You should go oil - HOR - fuel

Diluted is best, but if you don't have, do the above

[storm sky]

minus the power to for all the 33.333 refineries gives 2333.whatever MW net

2200 MW net for the basic fuel

you're basically right, i'm not going to build triple the refineries for an extra 133MW

assuming ive done the maths right

cant even get 600 oil out anyway so it's going to be a bit less

[vapid gorge]

what you want is diluted fuel

no one uses residual fuel as a main power source

[storm sky]

how much power can i get from 600 oil using the blender recipe

[vapid gorge]

Lots, but there's a refinery diluted fuel recipe too

diluted fuel is something like 3x the fuel of residual

[storm sky]

so about 7GW

from 600 oil

or 10GW

[vapid gorge]

that doesn't sound right

are you going oil - hor - diluted fuel?

[storm sky]

i just multiplied this by 3

[vapid gorge]

should be 20gw?

[storm sky]

600 oil makes 800 hor

800 hor makes 600 fuel

[frosty owl]

Oil to fuel is 6 to 4
HOR to fuel is 6 to 4
Oil to HOR is 3 to 4

[storm sky]

600 fuel makes 3750MW

[ember fractal]

Should be about 20GW using both HOR and diluted. Minus the overhead of the operating

[frosty owl]

Ops, chat didn't scroll for me

[storm sky]

times that by 3 and you get around 11GW

[vapid gorge]

We keep telling you Diluted Fuel, not Residual fuel
600 oil 800 hor 1600 fuel

[storm sky]

i know, but you said times the non dilute by 3 and that gets you the diluted version

[ember fractal]

If you use diluted, the HOR doubles to fuel

So 800 hor is 1600 fuel

[vapid gorge]

no I said dilute is x3

[storm sky]

dilute is triple non dilute?

[vapid gorge]

dilute is 3x what residual makes

[frosty owl]

3 Oil = 4 HOR = 8 Diluted Fuel

[ember fractal]

What it comes down to... Unlock diluted alt and use it

[storm sky]

so instead of making a temporary 3gw set up i should go all out and make a 20gw set up

[frosty owl]

3 Oil = 4 HOR = 2.666 Residual Fuel

[vapid gorge]

yeah I just make like 48 - 64 coal gens until diluted

[storm sky]

ill just slip a HD into the mam then

ive gotten to tier 7 using 4gw so far

[vapid gorge]

yup

[storm sky]

ill go bring the materials over to the oil site while i wait for it to research

thanks for the numbers help guys

[vapid gorge]

have you used satisfactorytools.com ?

[storm sky]

yes

i cant even remember what i originally asked in here

[vapid gorge]

if residual fuel was worth it

[storm sky]

should i bother making it from 600 oil if you apparently cant even get 600 throughput?

[vapid gorge]

you can, it's not hard

just loop the pipe manifold at the end point where machines consume

[storm sky]

whats with all the people saying its bugged and its impossible to fix it then

[vapid gorge]

is this from reddit?

[storm sky]

from some of their qa streams

[wind spade]

those people are bugged

[vapid gorge]

yeah they don't know what they are talking about

[storm sky]

assuming they're lying about mk5 being bugged as well

[wind spade]

it's possible to do 600, just need to build properly

[vapid gorge]

mk5s and other belts were also fixed

[wind spade]

mk5s were never bugged, belt to belt connections were (and those were fixed)

[storm sky]

all good then

[wind spade]

(well mk5s were bugged for a small period of U7 exp iirc)

[storm sky]

annoying how it's 133 and a third fuel gens though

[vapid gorge]

lmao yeah mk5s were terrible for a short while

[frosty owl]

Some are wrong. Others actually mean "too much effort" rather than "impossible"

[vapid gorge]

pipe loops are easy though

[storm sky]

too much effort to make a pipe loop?

[vapid gorge]

some peopel are weird

[wind spade]

some people just build the setup in a way they want and then complain about it being broken, rather than doing research on how it should be built

[frosty owl]

People's perception of them can differ (thus their "impossible" judgement, which I link to bad wording or trying to simplify too much)

[wind spade]

yes, there are setups where mk2 pipes can't reach 600, but that doesn't mean mk2 pipes are broken

[storm sky]

is 600 the magic number because thats the pipes max?

[frosty owl]

Yes. There is no leeway for error.
Eg: if sloshing occurs and flow diminishes, the machines will starve with no way to recover the fluid they missed

If the pipe is instead at <600, after the sloshing is over, there can be extra flow to push in the fluid that was missed before

[vapid gorge]

mostly in my experience with people they get grumpy with pipes because they aren't belts and then when explained simple solutions they dig their heels and coimplain

[vapid gorge]

like having 600 flow isn't hard if you are careful about it. I even have a set up for 600 flow while bottom feeding that reliably works if you're interested

[ember fractal]

Even for ore nodes, 600 is a great number to base your builds around.
Using OC mk3 miner
2 impure nodes - 600
1 normal node - 600
1 pure node - 600 (or more)

[wind spade]

also doesn't help that people see "slooshing/backflow is bad" and go "ok let's spam valves", instead of just looping the pipe (as you can't get rid of slooshing anyway)

[ember fractal]

So late game, it's good to have most blueprints consume 600 ore

[storm sky]

not sure what that means but i'll probably ask for it if i run into trouble

got the diluted fuel recipe on my first try!

[vapid gorge]

if your main pipe is lower than the machine you have to make a pipe going up and that can cause problems if it's not set up right

[ember fractal]

Congrats!!

[cinder silo]

Yep, I had fun and games fixing a system like that.

[prisma kraken]

i go back and forth on this one.. like 10 smelters for 300 is a common sense bp to make, but using that extra 180 or 480 from a pure node is good at times

for steel and copper allow i do try to use the pure nodes together for that and get more out of them

i think for caterium, the pure recipe just spamming out the refiners to consum it makes more sense too

i'm not so sure about copper, in that it really works nicely at that 600 limit

i also am not a fan of leaving the extra sulfur unused

[ember fractal]

True, you can siphon the overflow from a pure node and use your custom 180 blueprints

Or combine the overflow from multiple pure nodes to get another 600 ore hehe

For rare nodes like caterium, you wanna just use pure recipe and maximize the yield

[prisma kraken]

i haven't really found a good case for it, but i like the idea of splitting it 480 + 300

i kinda wish those recipes allowed for the odd numbers of refieries at need clock speeds

[ember fractal]

Can just clock one of the refineries differently to balance it properly

[prisma kraken]

yeah, i know

i just wish they worked differently 🙂

[ember fractal]

Is all part of the challenge

[prisma kraken]

well yeah

btw, with the refineries, doing that as x+1 machines underclocked does save a bit of power

i don't care too much about that as its usually a pretty trivial amount

but worth noting for anyone tha doesn't know

[ember fractal]

I like to keep an even number of machines, hehe. I'm OCD like that

[prisma kraken]

i like there to be some symetry too 🙂

[ember fractal]

The only exception is fuel gens. Sometimes I tack on that extra fuel gen at the end of the double row.

[prisma kraken]

having just built a 1600 tf plant, i uc'ed them all down to 88.888%

[ember fractal]

That's a lot of clicking

[prisma kraken]

beling able to split into groups of 10 was a nice thing

atcually it wasn't too bad, i just bp'ed the gen

[ember fractal]

Ah ok

[prisma kraken]

that was actually a pleasant surprice, getting the bp snapping behavior for free

[ember fractal]

1440 tf is where it's at
320 fuel gens - 16 rows of 20
Or 16 double rows of 10

No clocking needed

[prisma kraken]

i did the 1600 from blended

[ember fractal]

Right, probably because you were trying to max out the pure sulfur node?

1440 blended tf requires 720 sulfur, which isn't optimal use

[prisma kraken]

no, just because i budgeted 600 sulfur for that

[ember fractal]

Oh

[prisma kraken]

plus i've never done that build before so it was something new

[ember fractal]

Turbo blend fuel right?

[prisma kraken]

yeah

[ember fractal]

Hmm 1600 tf would need more than 600 sulfur tho

[prisma kraken]

its actually not too bad, but meh, 300 fuel gens is 300 fueld gens

[ember fractal]

And to consume 1600 tf, you need 356 fuel gens. Are you packaging the extra tf for other uses?

[prisma kraken]

i apologize, its 1200 tf

[ember fractal]

Oh, that seems more right

[prisma kraken]

3x this

not too bad of a build

[ember fractal]

My plan is to do 1440 tf, and use the extra 60 sulfur for ammo production

[prisma kraken]

only thing i really found tricky was the piping into the blenders

[ember fractal]

I might even package some of the tf, and transport it around the map using a train, so I can fuel some trucks. Never tried fueling trucks with turbo

Should be fun

[prisma kraken]

i have the normal and impure nodes in NF split between 780 CC for steel and the rest to a few batteries

i plan on using some of that for weapons

[prisma kraken]

works pretty well for that

i just it as explorer fuel after doing TRA

[ember fractal]

Nice

Using plutonium rods for vehicle fuel produces no waste 😀

[prisma kraken]

i also like just using the HTF recipe for weaons for its simplicity

i've always wondered if that is tolerably radioactive with that use

it doesn't matter too much after the hazmat suit's buff

[frosty owl]

I often use Pure recipes just ti avoid having to tap a new node 😅

[frosty owl]

~7 foundations wide (50 rods stack). I think it can be fine, depending on factory size (and preferences ofc)

[prisma kraken]

i think we all do that now and then

[frosty owl]

I'll be using pluto-powered trucks. I can pass the save to let you see the radiation, if you wish (once done ofc)

[prisma kraken]

kinda seems wasteful having that much fuel sitting in a truck or tractor

sure, i'd be interested

[frosty owl]

I often preach about how cool it would be if vehicles really did take only as much Fuel as they need for one trip (as once advertised)

If they did, they could run with either 1 or no rods in inventory (so no radiation)

[prisma kraken]

btw, has anyone else found that sometimes the scatter uranium deposits are a lot more radioactive?

[frosty owl]

More than what?

[vapid gorge]

i'd rather have death mobiles

[prisma kraken]

i could swear at times that sometimes they're pretty tame and you come back to them and they're a lot more radioactive

i was kinda surprised with one in DD that it killed me w/o a hazmat suit when i tried to get it into a box

[frosty owl]

Practically speaking, I think you can live by staying 2 foundations away from a pluto-truck road, if the trucks don't come quite frequently.
There's HP regen now after all

[vapid gorge]

nah, mods to stop hp regen so trucks can do drive by murder

[frosty owl]

I've heard of issues with weird radiation levels sometimes... I can't recall any detail, but I think there's room for bugs in that regard atm

[prisma kraken]

i think that until they spawn in and are recorded in your save they don't really have the right radiation level or something

too random for me to put my finger on

[ember fractal]

Moon you should test it

[prisma kraken]

if i run into it again as a thing i will

[twilit orbit]

weird question, whats the flowrate allowed in a pipe 4-way junction? is it limited?

[oblique hollow]

no limit

[maiden arch]

i'm very confused on how splitters work....on the image there are 4 splitters in a row with 120 iron coming in....by my understanding smelter on the right would get 60 in and the one on the left would get 15 in....which is not efficient at all.....but almost everyone do splitters like that....which is why i'm super confused rn....

[deft lichen]

this works because eventually the machine fills up

so yes, when you first start this up, the smelters get 60-30-15-15

[oblique hollow]

if a splitter cannot do even splits, it moves overflow to other sides, basically

[deft lichen]

once the first smelter fills up, you cannot possibly fill it up any more, so it gets only 30 and the remaining 90 goes on

this repeats for every machine

[median heath]

Machine is getting 60 but only burning 30.
Once the internal buffer fills it can take only 30. So that extra 30 gets pushed down the line making the first splitter now a 30/90 split.

[deft lichen]

one downside is that it can take a while to start working with big stack sizes and long manifolds, that can be mitigated by prefilling

[median heath]

This is why balancers are entirely just a personal choice of forcing yourself to make things more complex.
Any split you want can be done with a single splitter.

[maiden arch]

i see....i was looking up starter factory layouts bc my own factory started looking like spaghetti from hell.....probably bc i used splitters a little wrong....

[oblique notch]

❤️ I may actually come to like you sev. (note, ive always respected your knowledge, and your ability to do the super precise things)

[ember fractal]

How big of a motor factory should I do?
I'm thinking 40/m
That should be enough, right?

[wind spade]

look what buildings need motors and decide based on how many of those buildings do you think you'll build 😉

[ember fractal]

ima need a couple turbomotors per min and maybe like 10-12 cooling systems

so I think 40 motors should do it

[wind spade]

turbomotors should imo have their own motors made

and systems as well

[ember fractal]

it's just I have a very good layout for 40 motors that takes 600 iron ore, 600 coal, 560 copper ore

i might just do 2 of those then

40 for the turbo motor plant, and 40 for the cooling systems.
and if there's overflow, just sink it

[barren elm]

The neat thing about satisfactory is there's no punishment for overbuilding, worst case scenario your buildings clog up and... that basically doesn't matter at all

So wouldn't worry about "is X enough", just build a shitload and let the resource inputs figure the rest out for you

[prisma kraken]

you can effectively double the prod of that with rigour motor with a small oscillator factory too

[deft lichen]

lag
I'd disagree. While there is no direct punishment, overbuilding can lead to burnout due to failing to keep up with the scale

[prisma kraken]

if you overbuild you really sorta end up soured to the game and can't look at it for a while

[ember fractal]

Yah, happened to me before

[barren elm]

Personally I find blueprints remove all the old mass building placement spam burnout

But each to their own

[ember fractal]

they definitely help

when you need to build a 400 iron plate factory for the thousandth time

[prisma kraken]

i think coated plate & steel coated plate really help with that, but share the sentiment

also bp's don't really help with trains

[ember fractal]

i would rather build longer rail segments than many 4-foundation long ones

[prisma kraken]

absolute agreement there

[ember fractal]

i feel like too many short railways segments will eat away at object limit, in a railways heavy save

[prisma kraken]

i'd really like to see some improvements to the time it takes to lay rails, build the supports, roundabouts, etc

[wind spade]

roundabouts 🤢

[ember fractal]

moon, when you start a new save, are you gonna build a railways grid across the whole map?

[prisma kraken]

i use the term loosely

trains need to turn around somehow

[ember fractal]

i loop the rail at the end of its run

[wind spade]

they don't. They need to be able to go in any direction on a junction and then they never need to turn around

[deft lichen]

I thought railways in blueprints don't connect? Not sure how the one blueprint guy does it

[prisma kraken]

i buld what i need out when its needed

[prisma kraken]

oversized bp mod

[deft lichen]

railway roundabouts are inherently bad and I stand by that

[wind spade]

also any setup where train has to turn around on a junction is bad

[prisma kraken]

i agree, like a 4-way traffic circle isn't a design that scales very well

[ember fractal]

not turn around to the same rail, but turn so it can go back from where it came on the other rail

[prisma kraken]

perhaps there's a better word for what i mean than round about

[wind spade]

yeah that's bad

[ember fractal]

with dual rail system

[deft lichen]

allow the train to properly end up on the other rail rather than relying on a roundabout, taking a detour to do so

[wind spade]

why would train go somewhere just to turn around and go back? why not go in the desired direction immediately? 😛

[prisma kraken]

but if you have 2 rails going in each direction, somehow they need to turn around

[ember fractal]

because you might not be building all your stations right away

[wind spade]

no, they need to go to the rail they need to

[prisma kraken]

is there a better word for that than roundabout?

[deft lichen]

it is a roundabout

[ember fractal]

for example, i built a rail grid, from world border to world border, with closed loops on each end

i'll be adding train stations wherever I need them

[deft lichen]

or do you mean a turning loop?

[ember fractal]

yes

[prisma kraken]

i generally prefer that sort of design, but everyone sorta does it differently

[deft lichen]

a roundabout is a junction, a turning loop is an end of track

[wind spade]

instead of this

do this

[deft lichen]

yeah I assumed you're doing this moonchild/ImDan

[prisma kraken]

right

[frosty owl]

I like having "extra" rail segments to turn trains around for personal use.
Eg: avoid having to travel as long if you switch destination

[prisma kraken]

no argument there

[deft lichen]

I sometimes place X junctions on straight tracks for "maintenance"

[ember fractal]

i'm doing this
red line is world border

train never reverses

[frosty owl]

I... Try to make it so that I don't build differently for maintaince or not... Because I'd forget to change stuff back later 😅

[prisma kraken]

umm.... no need to be dirty 😉

[frosty owl]

That's a clean spoon though 🤔

[ember fractal]

excuse my paint skills

[prisma kraken]

for me every itersection ends up a bit different for me:

[ember fractal]

that's good

[prisma kraken]

that's a clean design, yeah

towards the frontier of my spurs, yeah they look somthing like that

[ember fractal]

i like to branch off of the main rail grid, and then re-merge

all my train stations are just small branches off of the main tracks

[prisma kraken]

my central station is essentially a set of S shaped tracks passing through stations where they can enter and exit at each side of the S

[deft lichen]

I used to do that often, but I only have one such station in the last save

rip my railway going through a tight slope in the titan forest when U8 drops

[prisma kraken]

in any event, my original point was that rails are sometimes time consuming to build due to their size and the fact you really have to build around the landscape

[deft lichen]

true, I still find it fun though

[prisma kraken]

oh, i love the choos 🙂

like it really adds something to the world

and its fun to sometimes just ride them on a tour

there's something really fun about that

but it isn't a small task to build them and the support structures, blah blah blah

[ember fractal]

support structures are a waste of object limit lol

[prisma kraken]

haha

they really add a little polish to it all

imho

[ember fractal]

yeh, agree

it always feels a little wrong to have long stretches of stuff just hanging in the air

[prisma kraken]

i'm also not convince how limiting the object limit really is

i know tunnel rat has hit it

[ember fractal]

i don't think it's a major issue. i just like to keep lag down

[deft lichen]

you realistically won't hit it unless you have factories all over the map

[ember fractal]

the less extra frivolous things i build, the more factories i can build

[prisma kraken]

i won't create overly intricate rail + road+ belt + pipe sorta things

they look kinda cool

but i feel you on keeping the object count down on it

[ember fractal]

i think you gotta balance form and function

can't be too extreme on either

[prisma kraken]

my rail truss defacto style bp is probably about 20 objects

really its just a an 2x8 set of fondations & some 1m walls

[ember fractal]

imo, walling in all your factories is a waste of object limit

i prefer exoskeleton type factories, with floor, pillars, and maybe a ceiling

[prisma kraken]

i don't think it looks bad as a middle point sorta compromise:

[ember fractal]

not bad
the purple is a bit too harsh imo

[prisma kraken]

haha

well that's just personal taste

[ember fractal]

true

it's a very HOR kinda purple lol

[prisma kraken]

my point being is that its not 100's of objects per bp

its funny i use the same color for those pipes

just really like the contrast it makes with the north forest's verdance

[ember fractal]

yeh

[prisma kraken]

i've also seen a lot of rails IRL that just have that sorta little but of color

probably mostly in urban settings, but meh

probably is a little in your face and too vibrant

[ornate mirage]

sorry to interrupt but is there anyone who can help me in design-and-architecure

[wind spade]

why do you ask here? ask in there

[deft lichen]

your question is better fit in this channel

and the answer is that you need just 1 splitter because ratio splitting is a waste of effort, machines only take what they need

[ember fractal]

have the downstream factories regulate your splitters

whatever the downstream doesn't consume gets backed up and split into the other direction of the splitter

[prisma kraken]

i think the answer has been overexplained already 😛

when i started with the game, i had a problem wrapping my head around what happens if you don't perfect split

[ember fractal]

😄

same, i was actually building ratio splitters

like 1:5 and 1:6

[prisma kraken]

i was like thinking that things would lock up or something

well, 1:6 isn't tricky

1:5 is 😛

[ember fractal]

then i played with manifolds and was like "wow, this is so much easier"

[prisma kraken]

yeah, i actually still prefer balancing

and use that when space allows for it

it isn't needed mostly

but like when you're dealing with late game high value products, having a lot of them sitting in a machine is kind of wasted product, and i just practice the balancing when i see it to be easy to do

i agree it 99% of the time results in the same end result efficiency-wise

but i'd rather have the symmetry of even numbers of machines and use the small amount of additional space

i will argue that balancing takes up much more space than manifolds

but that's an argment in itself

[mystic moon]

The only point where I feel like balancing is valid is with radiation

[prisma kraken]

for an 8-way split vs manifold, you're using 7 splitters either way

[mystic moon]

And/or with extrememly low volume products where full startup could take hours

[prisma kraken]

right, like PCC's with pasta

the size of those machines also makes the size argument pretty moot

i also religiously split coal power

i could overstuff the end of the manifold

but its just one more thing to deal with in a build i don't want to be doing over & over and need to 🙂

i'd rather only have to deal with troubleshooting the possible fluid problems

[frosty owl]

Once one strays from having splitters always right next to machines to save on space (so leaving 1 full foundation or more behind machines for logistics) the spacing part of the "balancer Vs manifold" decision-making changes a lot ^^

Eg: turning a manifold in a series of balancers can become very easy like when the outputs are 20 or 30/min, requiring just one more splitter to balance 60/min manifold outputs

[opal locust]

Was doing some math for Nuclear Power down the line

[ember fractal]

yeh

[oblique notch]

Please let me know when you ever hit the object limit. Because I doubt that will ever be a thing for you. 😁

[ember fractal]

i won't, because i actively avoid placing too many things lol

[oblique notch]

So much of this disconnect I find comes from Factorio "language" - because you have limited resources in factorio, you need things to be balanced. You can't afford to have stuff sitting on a belt unused at a certain point.

Which is why I think, unconsciously, so many people assume you have to balance... even if they have never played factorio, they've probably picked up stuff here and there from YT and streamers, and unconsciously express the need not to "waste" resources.

But there is no waste when your resources are literally infinite.

[oblique notch]

You won't anyways.

[fallow lily]

There's situations where balancing makes sense, like when waiting for a manifold to overflow would be very slow.

[oblique notch]

400 + hours in my current world and I'll use 40 to 50 pieces of buildables per machine and I've not hit it yet.

[oblique notch]

Even then it doesn't. The amount of time you "save" is often lost by the troubleshooting and working out the details of any balancer, and you can also save it anyways by just prefilled machines with parts.

[fallow lily]

Depends on the ratio of production rate to stack size.

[oblique notch]

Overclocking/underclocking takes care of that.

Reducing the number of machines needed reduces the time to spin up.

Plus If you build your input parts first and let them fill up while your building the consumption, you start off with a big burst helping to fill the next line

[fallow lily]

I've seen it mentioned in the context of nuclear reactors.

[oblique notch]

That is the only one I find it acceptable, because it reduces radiation sitting around on belts, not because of spinup time

But that's pretty niche. And most players never get that far.

[ember fractal]

instead of a long manifold feeding a long double row
you could instead have shorter rows, and have a master manifold in the front feeding your shorter row manifolds

blue is the master manifold, red are the row manifolds

i try to limit my rows to 8 machines usually
but it varies. depends on the consumption rate of each row

[primal flicker]

I call that a leaf manifold because you can branch to both sides and it resembles the veins in a leaf. Like a fern.

[oblique notch]

It's still a manifold. Just a manifold of manifolds.

But yep, that can be nicer looking for some

[opal locust]

I need a packaged fuel facility to unlock some stuff, but I don't know how to figure out the math for it.

[oblique hollow]

like?

diluted fuel is 1 heavy oil to 2 fuel

and its 2 water to 2 fuel

[opal locust]

This is still in Phase 3, so no Blender for Diluted Fuel yet.

[oblique hollow]

this was in relation to diluted packaged

[opal locust]

Just a temporary facility to give me a supply of Packaged Fuel to use for unlocking stuff, personal vehicles, and jetpack.

[oblique hollow]

its 60 water + 30 heavy oil in, 60 fuel out

just that the water and fuel are packaged

its a single packager for water

and the canisters are made from 30/min plastic

[opal locust]

I could do a simple setup of 2 refineries making plastic, 2 refineries making fuel, turn the plastic into packages, 80 packaged fuel a minute. Then either sink the resin or use it to make a stock of fabric, and take the leftover HOR to make some smokeless powder to unlock a bunch of stuff in the MAM.

Would that work?

[oblique hollow]

sure as long as you have enough HOR and plastic

[opal locust]

Smokeless Powder only needs 10 HOR/min per facility and the 2 refineries making Plastic produce 20 HOR/min total

[oblique notch]

@median heath whats the max a Train station can transport? 1300 something?

[median heath]

50 per Stack
-88.62s RtD
-1083.3 Items/min

100 per Stack
-150.16s RtD
-1278.66 Items/min

200 per Stack
-273.23s RtD
-1405.4 Items/min

500 per Stack
-642.46s RtD
-1494.25 Items/min

[oblique notch]

huh i didnt realize it was affected by stack size.

whats RtD?

[mystic moon]

Round trip

[oblique notch]

aaaah got it

[median heath]

Round Trip Duration.

[oblique notch]

thats why its per stack. makes sense.

[median heath]

Stack Size matters because it affects Time to Fill.

Which everything else in the equation relies on.

[oblique notch]

yeah makes sense.

Any idea of the numbers for liquid, just out of curiosity?

[median heath]

Laura might have that.

I remember it being like 1100ish, but the RtD was abysmally low.

Meaning for Fluid Trains, adding another train actually helped more than adding more cars.

[oblique notch]

huh. funny that.

[median heath]

Thinking about using them for Aluminium.

Because imagine using Instant Scrap, where the water byproduct is 1:1 with the acid need.
So you Fluid Train the water over to the acid and train the acid back to the Aluminium 😂

[ember fractal]

Yep, but it's a faster filling manifold. Relatively speaking

You're distributing among multiple rows, instead of a single long row

[oblique notch]

sure.

that is true

[fierce ruin]

that gives me severe belt bottleneck vibes

[true junco]

I do this A LOT!

Frequently based on whichever input or output will max out a belt first.

In other words: if a particular production line will hit the belt limit after 5 machines. But the input doesnt max out my belts until 15 machines. I will do a single input belt thru a main manifold with 3 branches into 3 sub manifolds. And the 3 banks of machines fed by those sub manifolds will each feed into thwir own belt line via a merger manifold.

[median heath]

Knowing when to "kind of balancer" your manifolds is a really good logic marker for improving builds.

[true junco]

It would... if miss-applied.

But if one applies it as I described, it actually eliminates many bottlenecks.

[frosty owl]

[vapid gorge]

@true junco

So, I think purely solid branching manifolds are possibly fine - but I've had issues using them when there's also fluid involved.

You might have seen my pure copper, steamed sheet set up I've been polishing in #design-and-architecture ? Originally I had a Copper manifold that branched to different floors of pure copper refineries like this.
could not get it to stabalise no matter what , no amount of flooded starts, nothing

Then I just made it one long manifold snaking it's way up and it instantly worked fine. I don't know exactly what was happening but it's something to consider.

Before the change? Everything stuttered, couldn't find a point of failure.
After just changing the manifold style? fluid and solids worked fine.

Thinking about it now, splitting the main branches with Smart Splitters instead set to overflow forward to the next branches might have made the supply more stable? Maybe?

[ember fractal]

[vapid gorge]

though I've had weird stuttering issues like that with purely solid manifolds too that I've turned snakey. Sooo.. shrug

they also started behaving almost immediately when snaked

Might have been a multi dependency issue because the various sub manifolds fed a number of systems that would then combine into another system?

[true junco]

Odd. Ive not had this issue. And almost every single factory ive built for the last several hundred play hours has hinged on fluids.

Essentially, my production paradigm mandates all the "just add water" alts (pure ingots, pure quartz, wet concrete, steamed sheets...)

The only things that have caused me problems are...

1. the packaging cycle of diluted packaged fuel (specifically the packages themselves causing issues)

2. any attempts to load balance causing production lines to stutter. At this point i am starting to believe that load balancers themselves suffer from a significant flaw that ive never heard anyone else mention. No matter how simple the LB the same thing always seams to happen. Ive duplicated others LBs several times and always had this stuttering resulting in material slowing down thru the balancer.

[ember fractal]

hmm, yeh not sure.
I've used sub-manifolds without any issues so far

[true junco]

Oh wait. I just realized it was CoB talking about having those issues. I think I recall them mention a other perplexing issues they have created. Unless im thinking of somebody else.

This can be a complex game. There are certain modes of malfunction that can be achieved by pushing odd boundaries in this game. Such as the odd stuttering of balancers which I've caused in my own experiments for example.

[vapid gorge]

yeah it's possible that part of it was that I was also running the pipes at 600 and any stuttering might cause infinite stutter? Not sure. Just played it safe with long snakey manifolds

[true junco]

A lot of folks say that running mk2 pipes at full 600m^3/min capacity causes problems...

I dont see these issues... unless thats the root of why my power production drops by ~4000MW whenever im far away from my DPF refinery and the fuel power plant it feeds...

[vapid gorge]

that might account for it but I'd have to see the set up

but I think yo usaid you looped your pipes?

[true junco]

Maybe. I dont recall at the moment.

All I know for certain is that when I'm at the refinery/powerplant i have ~42,000MW. and when I am several zones away I have ~38,000MW.

[vapid gorge]

I’ve never heard any portion of production needing to be within distance of a player to act normally.

If you sit at your power station does it function at theoretical max?

I’m assuming you’re on single player?

[oblique notch]

Allright. Just finished this. It still needs refinement and fact checking and error checking, but here. A manual sorta like the Pipe Manual (but not as pretty) for Trains : https://drive.google.com/file/d/170x9dZ24a4TvCnMhyHgkSRUMpkt2Vgkb/view?usp=sharing

[true junco]

I believe so. My fuel generation plant works fine when im there. Minimal fluctuation since i solved the switch from making plastic, making containers, to build the DLP cycle. And shutting down the package manufacturing line. In otherwords. Actively building containers will clog the empty container outlet of the fuel unpackagers. Im 99.999 percent sure i fixed that.

I do admit that it may be related to the flaw with mk6 pipes. Something to do with calculations and the calculation approximation by skipping cycles of long distance factory calculations. What was it? Every X cycles?

[vapid gorge]

Mk2 pipes right? I don’t think you’ve mentioned mods

[true junco]

Defintely no mods. Might one day, but not any time soon.

So. The theory is that doing 1 out of X calculations and multiplying the result by X may throw off the razors edge of a functional max flow mk2 pipe system. Especially with so much of the factory constituting 600m^3/ min pipelines... i suspect that skipping cycles can exacerbate the slighest flubbed data point caused by what is essentially a rounding error.

A rounding error leads to a clogged output for a moment. This saturates the outlet buffer of a machine. The machine stops. Rince and repeate.

[vapid gorge]

I mean it’s possible but did you flood the system before turning it 100%?

If you flood input and output of every fluid stage the internal buffers of the consumers and producers should buffer any hiccup like that

Regardless distance shouldn’t affect that

Even my absolute nonsense fuel power station doesn’t fluctuate like that at any distance. And it should have far more issues

[frosty owl]

Did I hear issues with belts' logistics? 👀

[frosty owl]

To be honest, and I don't mean to be mean, I don't think you should be taken as a paragon in regards to piping 😅
By this I'm not implying you don't know how to do pipes properly, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that you might still be making use of some designs that I wouldn't agree "should always work", meaning I think it's likely you made some sort of mistake when branching the manifolds.

(This opinion revolves on how you used to rely on short pipe segments but you still do a lot of complicated and "weirdly shaped" pipework)

[true junco]

Just 2 issues. Both self inflicted. The 1st being a planned temporary issue which is a non issue for now. The other is a result of experimentation, and may be more of a quirk of game mechanics.

[frosty owl]

I'm fairly confident of my knowledge when it comes to beltwork. If you still have issues with balancers missbehaving (or wish to understand why they did), I'll gladly help ^^

[true junco]

If i stop working so much and get back to the game ill try to set up another malfunctioning balancer... 😆

But from what i recall it was basically just 3 splitters into 3 mergers. Using all the connections. S1 to M1, M2, M3. S2 to M2, M3, M1. S3 to M3, M1, M2.

3 max mk4 belts in, and 3 mk4s going out. the 3 outlet belts would have slight gaps and the inlet belts would stop for a fraction of a second out of every second. So i get the impression there is a slight time delay somewhere between entering and leaving a splitter/merger. Or that a small degree of asyncronity between the mergers/splitter caused items to arrive in a merger simultaneously and thus one has to wait on the other causing a slight delay as the items are shuffled together.

Im well aware that this device was bery likely unnecessary. But i was stress testing the limits of the device.

[oblique hollow]

As for diluted packaged fuel: the best move is to make one packager loop per refinery

the big collective loops suck soooooo much

and you can fit those self contianed loops all into a BP

so its not that hard to build either

[fierce ruin]

how is it possible to use so little RAM?

[oblique hollow]

small save size?

[wind spade]

I haven't yet heard anyone complain about a game using too little RAM

[fierce ruin]

What part was i complaining?

[wind spade]

what part did say I was talking about you? 😛

[wind spade]

yea, I *haven't yet heard anyone *

[fierce ruin]

Oh I see my bad

[storm sky]

one section of my fuel plant needs 132 fuel per minute. I set a valve at the entrance to only let 132 fuel in per minute. but the fuel plant was not working at 100% efficiency, even after leaving it to 'settle' for about 2 hours. I opened up the valve and it suddenly all works perfectly. how come?

nevermind, it's struggling again

nevermind again, i found another bit that still had the 132 valve at the front. but still, why does it need more than what it actually uses?

[ember fractal]

Because valves don't work

Most people will advise you not to use them at all

[storm sky]

news to me

but that explains it

[wind spade]

don't use valves

[frosty owl]

There are no issues with mergers or splitters, but there is room for errors with maxed out belts (the faster, the errorer).
Eg: if there is a long stretch of full MK4s (it's the belt segments that matter) before the balancer, you can expect the producers to slowly pile up items (assuming they're working always at 100% as expected) as a bit less than 480/min reach the end of the belt (a merger/splitter counts as an "end" in this regard as it stops the error from propagating further)
The same applies to the output belts of the balancer, but given you noticed them not being full, I reckon that might not be the issue
Additionally, if the belts part of the balancer itself are maxed out and made of multiple segments, there's a chance the throughput issue might show there too

[wind spade]

they have fixed amount of values, so if you set 132 it may result in 134 or 130 or something like that

(not to mention you don't want exact amounts anyway, as slooshing is a thing)

[storm sky]

can you use them to stop backflow

[frosty owl]

That is pretty much all I use them for

[wind spade]

no. You can use them to stop backflow from one end of valve to another. Any other section of pipe still can have backflow

and since you're gonna end up with backflow one way or another, it's much easier to just accept it, loop the pipe and not care about backflow at all 🙂

[storm sky]

another pipe question, in my aluminium factory im putting the water coming out of the scrap refineries back into the alumina solution refineries, ive got about 500 water coming in from water extractors and the water in the scrap refineries isnt backing up. how come it doesnt clog up

[oblique hollow]

magic

(without any images of your pipe layout thats the only answer thats reasonable enough to state)

[storm sky]

one sec

Part A

Part B

[oblique hollow]

valves can partially enforce a priority into a single junction, depending on the circumstance

and due to the number of them you have here, its repeated for every junction

[wind spade]

tho I'd probably recommend VIP junction or separate setup for processing waste water

[storm sky]

im not complaining, if it works it works

[oblique hollow]

seperating the water is the easiest choice

[wind spade]

yeah, just this may be a bit more magic/random

so higher chance of breaking

[oblique hollow]

you know how much water you make, so you can just combine the refineries that make water with the correct number of refineries that need water

[wind spade]

or just put the waste water in gens/pure recipes

[storm sky]

i tried having only 240 water coming in but it kept running out

maybe it was because i was using a valve

[oblique notch]

they work... just not like someone would expect.

very badly unintuitive and needs a revisit. I wonder if Pipes will be getting a revisit in U8 or after

[oblique notch]

you need to have your Pumps set higher than this for a little while until the system is flooded. Once the system is completely flooded and able to work you can set the pumps back to the exact amount and it will flow pretty well after that. A VIP of some kind if you are going to combine the fresh water and waste is still advised because you dont want your waste backing up.

Even if you flood the pipes and theyre compeltely full before turning on, because its a two part system (Solution in one side and return from Scrap in the other) it will get out of wack the first time you have both running

[storm sky]

i had it going at full blast, 600 fresh water coming in and it worked while that was going but then i turned the fresh water down to 240 and it keeps running out of water

[oblique notch]

and are your Scrap refineries also working at 100% up time?

this is the connection of my fresh water (coming in from the wall - there is an unpowered pump right outside as well) and the scrap produced waste water on the bottom)

To the left of that pump is more refineries, which because the pump prevents fluid from going back from that junction, means they are fed 100% from waste water. There is a little left over - bascically that refiniery on the right needs a combination of waste + fresh - so this combines the two, but prioritizes the waste so it doesnt back up.

normally I wouldnt recommend doing this lol. I would recommend overclocking the refinery right to the left of this picture to use up the waste water that doesnt provide a full input worth, and feed the ones on the right with only fresh, underclocking if need be.

But i wanted 8 refineries here and 8 of scrap for symmetry and all running at the same speed - again for symmetry because im crazy and will accept more difficult setups to make it look good :p

Cause this looks awesome :p

(and theyre even all green in that shot, just for @median heath )

I also do things like use Mk1 pipes and Mk2 pipes in conjunction, which while not really "not a best practice" is something that can make piping more difficult. But i do it because i want the specific look sometime... This one is Top fed, and not looped, but it probably should be looped - but I get around that with other methods to provide the buffer (The loop is the easiest, which is why its the "best practice")

So ... dont necessarily copy my designs because they wont always work without a lot of the little things I put in for compensating. More work, but I do it for the aesthetics because thats why I play SF lol

But some small parts can be done the same - like a similar VIP to my first picture :p

[storm sky]

everythings at 100 per cent when the water is coming in full blast, then when i turn it down to 240 the bauxite refineries begin to lack water

[vapid gorge]

Eh the fuel station was going to be a nightmare in any case. It was done for the design than max output . I was mostly annoyed I only got 93-95% expected output rather than 98%. But some of that would have been from the fact Refined Power machines don’t have spin up times and take time to get to full power so any stuttering really kills it

And I kept the fluid manifolds separate - it was purely the branched belts that got changed that seemed to fix the set up

[true junco]

What if the 3 inputs of the 3/3 balancer are each fed from a seperate industrial container, each of which has more than 480/min fed into it? So the belt between the ISC and the merger should always have >480/min available. The issue is the 3 input belts look full, and start and stop constantly while the outlet belts have interspersed gaps.

This happens even if i put the shortest possible belts and snap directly from splitter to merger.

[frosty owl]

Sobstitute "producer" with ISC and my explanation should hold.
You can check wether the ISCs ARE outputting 480/min or not by feeding them exactly 480/min (via belt-choking, balancing or machine-clocking) and checking wether they pile up items or not.
If they pile up items, try making the belts between ISCs and the balancer MK5, with only one MK4 segment if you need to reduce the input to 480

[true junco]

Well. I dont need to do any of this. I was just experimenting with it. Once i have mk5 belts the entire 3/3 balancer experiment would be made with all mk5s at their max capacity.

[frosty owl]

When that happen, you'll be able to tell for sure wether the throughput issue lies within in/out belts or the balancer ^^

[true junco]

Soon™️

[eager river]

how many water pumps should i use going vertical 16-24m

[median heath]

Did you read how much headlift the Water Extractor gives?
And then read how much headlift a pump gives?
Building descriptions in-game are a wealth of knowledge.

[eager river]

i wasnt sure if thats what that ment but thank you

[median heath]

👍

[fierce ruin]

how do i merge all the screws with only mk3 belts?

[wind spade]

by... not merging it?

the arrow doesn't mean "one belt"

it just means "resources go from here to here"

[fierce ruin]

i'm confused as to how i would balance it correctly without merging it first

[wind spade]

not balancing

[noble timber]

Overflow

[wind spade]

if a machine needs X and other one produces X, you just connect them. You don't need to balance it across machines

[wind spade]

screw constructors make 40/min
rotor assemblers need 100/min

you have several options:

• each rotor assembler gets 2.5 screw constructors, so you make set of 5 screw constructors merging into single belt and splitting into two assemblers
• clocking screw constructors to 50/min and connecting two constructors to one assembler
• clocking assemblers to 80/min and connecting two constructors to one assembler
• clocking assemblers to 120/min and connecting three constructors to one assembler
• etc etc

Tons of options to pick from, definitely not all listed here.

[fierce ruin]

hmm i didnt think about over/under clocking. i think maybe i'll try that. thank you

i always forget about my little slugs

[median heath]

If you had gone to 225 input like I recommended:

[wind spade]

would still be over mk3 belt

[fierce ruin]

i forgor

[median heath]

Let me finish before making assumptions as to my point, please.........................................................................

12.5 Constructors, 5 Assemblers.
12.5/5 = 2.5

So 2.5 Constructors paired with each Assembler. Much easier to visualize how you're accomplishing that.

[wind spade]

OP's issue was "number is over mk3 belt", not "numbers are weird"

[median heath]

And if you had:

Let me finish before making assumptions as to my point, please.........................................................................

You would see how I addressed that...

[wind spade]

13.333/5.333 works the same

[median heath]

Not in the mood for this atm.

[fierce ruin]

it's not that serious 😭

[prisma kraken]

something else not mentioned is hd hunt before mass producing rotors for a few alt recipes

[fierce ruin]

oh are the alt recipies that good?

[oblique notch]

alts are alts. All have advantages and disadvantages.

[wind spade]

alt recipes are different, some save power, some save space, some save resources, some use completely different resources. There's almost infinite combinations you can make so there's never a "best" option

[primal flicker]

I don't make more than 2 assemblers for rotors until after I get steel screws and copper rotors.

[prisma kraken]

well, cast screw was probably created to allow the math for default rotor to be kinder

[fierce ruin]

oh i have steel screws!