Yes, you can use one line to go both ways, that works fine. You can actually do it without a loop like a back and forth shuttle by putting engines at either end (which is simpler if you only plan to ever run between two points) but the loop method makes it easy to integrate with a bigger network later.
Yeah, I just plugged in the last bit of the train and the automation works.
Now to actually set up the stations!
Woo. Just finished the game.
Never built a train. Seemed kinda pointless. Just lots and lots of conveyors. Probably a few tens of kilometers worth, which I regularly upgraded.
I’d built about 40 GW worth of power and used most of it by the end. Quantum whatsits with 4x sloops and 250% overclocking can eat the juice. I could have easily multiplied that if required, though.
Didn’t fully automate all of the final deliveries. They were all pretty small in number so it wasn’t worth spaghettifying things vs. just delivering to containers by hand. I wish it had Factorio-style drones that could do that kind of thing, though.
The portals will be nice to get to my power plant and back, if I continue playing at all.
It’s probably true, the simplest way to play would be to use massive foundation roads packed with belts crisscrossing the whole map.
But where’s the fun in that? I build trains so I can have TRAINS!!!
Getting the 1000 coupons for the golden nut isn’t going to be anywhere near as difficult or time consuming as the wiki suggests. I think it’s because those calculations were done pre-1.0 when they didn’t account for overslooping nor the ballistic warp drive which is extremely valuable in terms of coupon points. I’m already at around 850 coupons. And while coupon cost goes up quadratically, and it is taking quite a lot of sinking just to get an additional coupon, it’s not going to be the 50+ hour project the wiki made it sound like it’d be.
Portal networks are quite expensive to run with a constant supply of singularity cells needed. Definitely an end game feature. Given that there’s some loading time between using them they’re not even very much quicker than a network of hypercannons but it’s still cool to use all the tools available at your disposal (which is why I still use trains and trucks instead of just belting everything).
My main factories are pretty stable and reasonably optimized at this point and I’m producing all the products except nuclear related stuff. I’m much better at understanding how to design things now and I have a lot more alternate recipes available to me, but I don’t really want to gut and rebuild my existing factories. Instead I’m just going to start a completely new one with better design than the originals off in some other corner of the map and let the original factories keep doing their thing.
Now is probably the time to figure out nuclear, too. Some forum posts made it sound complicated but I haven’t really looked into it. I need nuclear hand grenades to complete the MAM research trees in any case.
So I keep getting sidetracked - I have about a million projects planned out, and balancing them all is quite the juggling act. By which I mean, I don’t even try, I just focus on one thing at a time until I inevitably get distracted and leave things unfinished.
My main goals haven’t changed. I want to set up automated production chains for computers and other high tier electronics, as well as quartz resource chains and sulfur resource chains (ammo, explosives, etc…)
To facilitate this, my second goal is to set up a rail network. What I’ve done so far - a single one way rail that does not loop, and makes 4 stops (Oil field, computer factory, edge of the coal plant crater at a site full of iron, and my main base) - should be sufficient for now. Eventually, I’ll make a fifth stop at my steel plant, a sixth and seventh one at two more Caterium nodes along the south west edge of the map, and then back to the oil field. That should create a closed loop.
If I’m feeling up for it, I might make that loop a two way system, too. That would be good for efficiency, since some factories may need to do a lot of back and forth trading. But it’s also a big pain in the ass.
I also suspect that I will eventually want to get more resources from far afield, so this loop won’t make up the entire train network or anything. But I can always add two way lines that branch out from the main loop, run to a node, and then run back.
To @Dr.Strangelove’s point about conveyors, I think that’s the big benefit of trains - once I build a rail network between factories, sending more resources or items around is just a matter of adding another train and scheduling it. If I had been running conveyors, I’d need to add entirely new belts for every tiny change.
So in a way, this is future proofing!
All that is far in the future, though. For now, my big project is actually copper sheets.
It looks like they are a major part of electronics development, and I don’t have any copper at the place I plan to put my computer factory at. I do make plenty at home, and since a rail line already exists, I just have to load them up and send them over.
…
…
…
But …
What if I need boatloads more copper for wiring and cables and the like?
I better make more efficient use of my copper, right?
And I did just unlock the recipes for Pure Copper and Steamed Copper Sheets…
Sigh. I’m building a copper refinery.
So far, I have identified a lake that’s near my copper, built a big water tower, and piped it the short way over to the current copper sheet factory.
However, I have been mulling that over, and I think next time I play I will adjust my plan. Instead, I’ll build a new copper plant in the shadow of the water tower, as I will later bring in additional copper from other nodes.
I should be able to get 300 copper sheets a minute from a single normal copper node which I hope puts me in essentially set for life territory (but if not, expansion is trivial).
Mostly my conveyors just go across rough terrain. I did build a skybridge eventually and have some conveyors on it, but mostly I just wound them around the terrain.
I only placed with track placement a little, but it seemed like foundations were absolutely required since it had such strong curvature constraints.
Trains are crucial in Factorio for high throughput but without advanced automation features they’re a pain.
Not necessarily. You can multiplex conveyors easily enough with smart/programmable splitters. Once demultiplexed, you can use programmable splitters to redirect overflow to a sink. Doesn’t get stuck that way.
So I set up a nuclear power plant. It was pretty easy, so when people talk about it being complicated to balance they must be talking about when you reprocess your fuel to avoid waste. I haven’t done that yet, I’m just belting it out to a far pier over the ocean.
Incidentally, I get why the game does this for complexity/difficulty reasons, but I hate how it reflects the public attitude towards nuclear power. You have 100 coal and fuel plants? No problem at all. No waste, no damage done to the environment, you’re totally fine. You have a nuclear plant? Ohhhh, super dangerous, you’re going to die if you get within a mile of it and now you have so much horrible waste to deal with! Do yourself and this planet a favor and just build 500 fossil fuel plants instead!
It gives me my first good use case for using drone transport. The plant is way up in the corner of the map and I don’t particularly want to make the infrastructure for encased steel beams and electromagnetic control rods up there, so it makes sense to send them in by drone.
One quality of life feature I’d like to see – and it’s so obvious that there must be some technical reason it’s difficult to implement – is allowing you to upgrade entire belts at once. It is extremely annoying that you have to upgrade it segment by segment. Sometimes that means running all along a 2km long belt making sure you get every twist and turn, and sometimes it means you accidentally fail to upgrade a small segment of a belt somewhere and so the whole belt is bottlenecked to that speed. I don’t understand why they won’t just make it so that belt upgrades propogate down the line.
From what I’ve gathered from other sources, each belt connection is by entity, so each belt segment is it’s own piece. It’s why, if you delete a splitter and rebuild it, only one of the belts will work. So while items at least pretend to switch seamlessly from belt to belt, there’s actually a transition. It’s also why you can’t paint an entire factory at once, unless you modify the original swatch.
There may be a way to fix it in the future, but it seems difficult.
No, I get that, but I don’t see why you couldn’t simply evaluate what other entities it’s connected to, and keep upgrading those too until you hit an end point (a splitter, a machine, a storage box, etc). If you have a belt from one place to another that’s 10 segments long, it should be pretty simple to figure out “these other 9 segments are on the same belt, let’s upgrade until we hit the storage box at the end of this line”
Well I did it. I got all the achievements including the golden nut. Wasn’t nearly as time consuming/difficult as I thought it would be, it took me about 19 hours after completing the space elevator objectives, mostly just dumping the now unused spaceship products.
I guess if you were starting over again, you could get a lot of coupons just by running around to various ore nodes, plopping down a refining and then a basic constructor/assembler line, and then sinking whatever it makes. It’d only take a few minutes to set up and you’d be sinking constantly for as long as you played, but coupons aren’t really essential so I suppose it doesn’t matter. The ballistic warp drive really dwarfs anything else, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few warp drives are more valuable than 100 hours of sinking concrete or something.
How would you power all of that?
A couple of Quality of Life improvements I’d love to see:
- An overview screen, showing how much of each resource is being produced, and how much is being used, each minute. Ideally it’d let you drill down: “Crap, where is the plastic being used so much? Oh, making computers and supercomputers.” and then you could go to those factories to fix the problem. A similar overview screen showing power usage (with drill-down for what different machines are making) would be super useful as well.
- Smart storage, that automatically displays what’s stored therein (“multiuse” or “junk drawer” if it’s more than one item). If possible, show the intake and outflow per minute, averaged over the last ten minutes; but this might be way too much to track.
- Similar to @Senorbeef’s idea of upgrading an entire track simultaneously, two track ideas. First, the ability to “flush” a track just like a pipe system: remove all the screws currently on the track, so you can rejigger it for steel pipes instead (as I just did when I switched my rotor factory to an alternate recipe). As it is, switching input on a line of factories is tedious; the best way I’ve found to do it is to route the end of the belt into storage until the main line is flushed, then repeatedly deconstruct and rebuild belts/lifts into factories until all the old items are gone. Second, the ability to reverse direction on an entire track. Several times I’ve set up a whole belt system, only to find when I reach the destination that I started the track going in the wrong direction, due to a bad connection with a conveyor wall or a lift or splitter or something, and I have to redo the whole thing. It’s human error, but it’d be great to be able to fix it all at once.
- A harness that lets you ride drones without getting knocked off. C’mon, the drones are awesome, and that’d be super fun. Come to think of it, a control harness for the flying mantas would be awesome too.
I’m still working to complete Phase 4, and goddamn this is a lot. I’ve finally got setups to build the propulsion rockets and the assembly directors, but nuclear pasta and field generators are not up and running yet.
I got my drones set up to supply the battery factory to power the drones. By my numbers, I can now run another twenty drones to various locations. Once I update my power plant, I’ll be sending them everywhere and maybe possibly building the phase 4 factory.
I got nitro rocket fuel going, and with two blenders making it, I can power more than 100 plants. For the foreseeable future, power is not an issue for me.
I only have one drone, and it is using my legacy turbo fuel. I guess I could set up a whole bunch of drones using that fuel, but as yet I don’t need to.
I wouldn’t start doing it until I had a few coal generators up and running, but a few miners, smelters, and maybe constructors for basic products doesn’t cost that much energy especially if you underclock (using more machines to produce the same output while underclocking decreases the energy per item cost significantly). Just enough power to make a few cables or concrete would add up over the hours you’d just leave it alone to sink in peace.
Not that coupons are terribly important. There are a few ones that are functionally important like the half foundations and various wall connectors, but you’ll get your first 50 or 100 coupons pretty easily anyway.
Hah! Written before I set up particle accelerators. Need to go back and quick-build another couple dozen power plants.
So I broke out the spreadsheet to really create a maxed out perfect efficiency diamond base that generated dark crystals and time crystals, using 2400 coal and 1800 limestone I do the math, hook everything up, cross-link several nodes so that the extra capacity of some nodes will balance out with the lower nodes, and I hook everything up and… a few of the particle accelerators are running at about 87% capacity. Hmm, I did the math, what’s going on here… I’m going from machine to machine trying to figure out why they’re not at capacity… there was one small segment from a coal node to a splitter that was the old level 3 belt instead of a level 6 belt. kept the whole system from running at full efficiency, and because it was a small segment feeding into a splitter it wasn’t obvious that the line was working too slowly. This is definitely not the first time I noticed that a line was working mysteriously slowly due to one small segment of slow a slow belt somewhere.
It did make me realize one way to check the throughput on a system where you’re specifically trying to max out resource nodes is to just go to the miner and see if it has anything stored. If it’s got an item backup, then it’s not getting all it’s production out there, and you’ve got some sort of logistics problem.
If you haven’t already you should check out EVE Online. Often called spreadsheets online.
I played it long ago for a few years but I kidjanot it helped me at work because I learned to make some pretty slick spreadsheets. And, as good as mine were, there were some who made truly beautiful spreadsheets. Far beyond what I did. I’d go so far to say I got at least one raise at real-life work because of it (they never knew about the game but spreadsheet skills is a skill whatever you use it for).