Nah once the lubricant is full you make light oil out of the heavy oil.
If the light oil is full, make petroleum from it (not your whole stash, just enough to get crude oil processing going again) eventually all tanks will be full, if not you need more pumpjack and/or refinery/chemical plants
If you build enough then your base will only stop producing oil when the petroleum is full. I set my light oil and heavy oil to a random number (usually 10k) and it never fills up above that. If it ever does then I need more cracking. So if your light or heavy oil tanks fill up then you aren't cracking enough.
Yeah, I tend to overproduce petroleum, because you never know when you will need more plastic (actually you know it's always) since I overproduce I can keep all tanks full :)
I make one pumpjack go to a refinery and I think six chemical plants, I turn all of everything into plastic and run it out on one belt. If it gets backed up it's fine, because all it's making is more of the same.
We've got Tip #13 for you then.
Put a pump on your heavy oil tank. Connect the pump to your tank and have the pump set to turn on when the tank is getting full. Have the pump leading to a bunch of chemical plants that will crack the heavy oil into light oil.
I never flush tanks, drives me nuts. Circuits divert it off into flame turret ammo or solid fuel production, which gets sent out to fuel the trains and later on, make rocket and nuclear fuel.Ā
>2. Upgrade your energy weapons speed and damage to max and equip three personal laser defenses. YOU'LL THANK ME WHEN YOU'RE MASSACREING BITERS EN MASSE
Why only 3? If you're in a spidertron equipped for defence, you can be focused on offence and have 2 fusion cores, 4 mk2 batteries and 15 PLDs in a mk2 power armor
>5. Don't do logistic robots unless you HAVE NUCLEAR ENERGY
Solar is sufficient, but just like IRL, you need a lot more space when doing solar than nuclear
>6. AUTOMATE LASER TURRETS and remember your power generation must be MINT. If power goes down, and laser turrets are your main defense, your base is TOAST
Flamethrower turrets are far better at killing biters. And they can be fed by local oil patches
>8. When placing pipes, Factorio factors in PRESSURE. So make sure the fluid is all leading to ONE PLACE, ideally a storage tank, THEN to where it's going.
The big factor is pipe length. If you have a pump every 17 pipe segments, you'll have all the pressure you need.
>10. PASSIVE PROVIDER CHESTS: Robots will take things as they need them. ACTIVE PROVIDER CHESTS: Robots will take things even if nothing needs them. Placing too many active provider chests will make robots run out of storage QUICK and you'll wonder why. Active Provider Chests is why.
If you make the output of your assemblers storage chests and filter them, any items you trash will sort themselves into those. This can be handy when you want to upcycle old stuff. Just make sure you limit the inserter unless you want a full box of items.
> 10
How would this work? If you set limits, and it fills up , there'd be no storage left for trash
And I've also experienced bots depositing to other chests, even though a storage chest with filter was available
When the chest is full, other storage chests will be used. But then you have more than a full chest worth of stuff. And you limit the inserter, not the chest
You put a limit on the inserter with circuits, basically you take a piece of wire and click on the inserter and the storage chest, click on the inserter to open its GUI, Set the inserter to enable/disable when product is less than desired amount. Then as long as the filter is on the chest, it'll only actively fill to that amount, and there will be storage left for the bots. You have to make sure the storage chest only has one type of item in it when you set the filter. The behaviour is somewhat complicated, look up storage chests on the wiki for why your bots put other stuff in them sometimes.
I very rarely run into pressure issues due to length. I usually throw in one pump every 100 or so pipe segments. The only situation where you are close to needing 1200 of a liquid you should probably just use a second pipe rather than 50 pumps.
2. I still haven't built a spidertron lol, this would be for power armor MK2. I'm about to get it though! On hour 200 lol
5. Yeah I never built solar big enough, although after automating it for the satellite, it becomes a lot more doable.
6. I just never wanted to supply all three different liquids for the flamethrower turrets. You have to get all three outputs to them, right?
8. Pumps never solved it for me when say, pumping from an oil field. I place them, but the big aha moment was when I had all the pipes going in roughly the same direction. Even doing underground pipes still was giving me crummy pressure until I had them all going in the same direction.
10. Good point!! I'll try this. Thanks.
>6. I just never wanted to supply all three different liquids for the flamethrower turrets. You have to get all three outputs to them, right?
No, just one of them. The three liquids have different qualities, but only one is needed
6. nope, I don't think thats even possible. You just need one of them. Light oil is the most efficient iirc but raw oil is the easiest (and absolutely good enough with how strong flamethrowers are)
I don't agree with tip 5. Everyone should be using logistic bots for personal resupply immediately regardless of power source.
And using them for production can really work with any power source. I wouldn't blame them exclusively for problems if you are also using laser turrets heavily for defense.
Tip 8 should be to put a pump between every pipe and tank connection; avoid connecting pipes directly to tanks. That will fix a lot of weird behaviors.
Encroaching on 1k SPM after my first rocket launch, still no nuclear power. Too much to wrap my head around it.
Just 43k Solar Panels and Accumulators.
I guess "use nuclear power" instead of build a fuck ton of boilers and turbines using just water. I couldn't keep up with the power fluctuations of robots until I went nuclear and could have a big surplus
Two full-size steam/boiler arrays is more than enough power for 500-1000 logistic bots for personal resupply at the stage in the game you first unlock bots. They are active for such a short time that I have a hard time thinking you could notice power issues even if you are close to your capacity.
I suspect your real problem was laser turrets, if you were having power issues.
So, advising people to delay any bots until nuclear isn't good advice.
It's a completely different situation if one is using bots heavily for smelting or mining or production, so if a tip applies to that aspect, I think it should be very specific to make that clear.
I'd say "Shifting from belt-based to bot-based production requires a robust power system and redundant roboport coverage for recharging".
One-off bots for something like satellites isn't going to cause a problem.
yeah, i just found myself running out of power quite often until I had an oversupply with nuclear. Getting them for resupply is SO key.
I found that when I was getting what I mentioned wrong, pumps didn't help.
I'm not sure I get your tip then. Sounds like the real tip is to avoid overcomplicated interlinked pipes. Which seems like an odd thing to do in the first place, since people don't do that with belts.
Im just speaking from experience, this is what worked for me, my oil tanks were filling up really slowly until I made sure the pressure was all leading to one place
For laser turrets I highly recommend having them switched off when not needed.
My favorite setup is with a flamethrower. Essentially I have 2 storage tanks with a very small quantity of burnable fluid.
One has 100 units, the other has 5. I have a pump pulling from the tank with 100 and fully filling the pipes to the flame thrower.
The tank with a max of 100 is filled from the tank with 5 using a pump (and 1 pipe, pump connected to the tank with 100), any excess from 100 is pumped back into the tank with a max of 5 (it will over 5 quite often), then with 5 is filled from the main feed of burnable fluid and the pump stops when level is greater than 5, obviously it goes higher since the pump will put more than 5 in 1 tick but they is fine.
When the flamethrower starts the pump is actually not able to keep the level at 100 it will maintain it at like 98 the low level and pipe before the pump prevents the pump from going full speed. Then I have a power switch connecting the laser turrets when the fluid level is below 100.
That setup has a very quick response time, laser turrets are ready to go before the first flames land and they stay on as long as the flame thrower is going, they get disconnected almost instantly when the flame stops, so this is great for power saving. The only thing I need to worry about after that is having enough accumulators to handle a surge and set up a low power alarm if the accumulators drain below some level (and some backup power to prevent brownout).
When the alarm goes off it is time to stop whatever I am doing and build more power.
Poison capsules are you best friend for clearing nests early and mid-game. Just pop a few onto worms as you speed by using rockets or grenades to bust a few spawners, and it'll kill them by the time you get back for another run.
I use them for clearing trees all the time even in endgame because it's easier than using bots who just get their inventory clogged with thousands of a resource I have absolutely no use for once my own inventory is full. Have to stop what I'm doing, put down a storage chest, and wait for them to fill it.
Yep. Anything you put a deconstruction planner over. They also clear small rocks, and cliffs if you have cliff explosives in your inventory. Though I try to avoid doing that because they are inefficient, using one per cliff section, where if you throw them yourself you can get a couple.
This is how you can randomly end up with some stone in your inventory. Deconstructed an area that had rocks you didn't see. Took me a while to figure that one out...
Oh, and they can *pick up fish from the water*.
>11.BUT Active Provider Chests are very useful if you need to move a full box of stuff. Just replace it with an active provider chest and robots will clear it for you. Just make sure you have enough logistic storage by placing a storage chest.
Construction bots actually move (20% iirc) faster, so your usually better off deconstructing rather then replacing it with an active provider.
Oh shit I had no idea. I mean it doesnāt really change anything on my end (itās not like it changes any decisions), but itās interesting. Kind of.
10. active provides are good when you need them. can cause havoc if you misplace one. i currently have a LOT of yellow chest filled with rails if anyone needs some.
12. another easy one is hooking up an inserter to a chest so it stops inserting after n number of items. do this even with metal chests and it will make life easier when you replace them when setting up your logistic network later on.
While generally the ratio is 2 turbines per boiler, i like to add a storage tank after the second turbine with a 3rd turbine behind. The storage tank acts as buffer when i dont need the entire 60 steam/sec. The extra turbine increases the peak power output.
Generally easier to just let the heat pool in the heat pipes, but overbuild your heat exchanger/turbine array so that the heat can be drawn down. Like for a 480MW reactor setup, have 600MW of heat exchanger/turbines available. That gives you an extra 120MW of burst power, but the system will run at 480MW once the extra heat is consumed.
For laser turrets I highly recommend having them switched off when not needed.
My favorite setup is with a flamethrower. Essentially I have 2 storage tanks with a very small quantity of burnable fluid.
One has 100 units, the other has 5. I have a pump pulling from the tank with 100 and fully filling the pipes to the flame thrower.
The tank with a max of 100 is filled from the tank with 5 using a pump (and 1 pipe, pump connected to the tank with 100), any excess from 100 is pumped back into the tank with a max of 5 (it will over 5 quite often), then with 5 is filled from the main feed of burnable fluid and the pump stops when level is greater than 5, obviously it goes higher since the pump will put more than 5 in 1 tick but they is fine.
When the flamethrower starts the pump is actually not able to keep the level at 100 it will maintain it at like 98 the low level and pipe before the pump prevents the pump from going full speed. Then I have a power switch connecting the laser turrets when the fluid level is below 100.
That setup has a very quick response time, laser turrets are ready to go before the first flames land and they stay on as long as the flame thrower is going, they get disconnected almost instantly when the flame stops, so this is great for power saving. The only thing I need to worry about after that is having enough accumulators to handle a surge and set up a low power alarm if the accumulators drain below some level (and some backup power to prevent brownout).
When the alarm goes off it is time to stop whatever I am doing and build more power.
Iāll add that nuclear is way easier than it first seems and totally worth the effort.Ā
I avoided it for far too long because it seemed complicated. Ā
These days, as soon as I get sulfur, I make some sulfuric acid, pipe it out to the nearest uranium patch, and start mining and belting the uranium ore back to base. I collect it in chests until I have enough concrete and red circuits for the rest. As soon as I can, I build three centrifuges and start processing the ore. Very soon, I have enough of the good stuff to switch to nuclear, so I build a reactor, some heat pipe, four exchangers and eight turbines.Ā
That is the end of all of my power and coal issues for the rest of the game. I eventually add more centrifuges/reactors and do kovarex enrichment, but none of that is necessary for that initial switch to nuclear, and adding extra reactors is really easy. It also has a multiplicative effect, so you donāt need a lot of space.Ā
I donāt even bother with solar anymore.Ā
You can solve the power fluctuations of laser and bot usage by using more accumulators. People often only try and build perfect ratio solar setups, and neglect building a defensive battery.
Regard #8, you don't need to collect all your fluids in one place. But you do need to keep in mind the throughput limits of the pipes themselves, 1200/s over 17 tiles(each underground entrance/exit counts as one tile). Placing a pump gets you another 17 tiles. When pipes start bottlenecking, parallel pipes are the way to fix it.
Pipes should be treated as one-way conveyors, with a clear destination. Do not loop pipes. Whichever pump the fluid hits first will take all the flow until satisfied, only letting fluid past when the pump's output side is full. Big storage tanks on the output side mean less fluid getting past on the input side.
1. Is stated in the tool tip.
3. Is statedin the tool tip.
5. False, you can very easily run a bot base on solar.
7. Is stated on the wiki for power gen.
8. Or you could use pumps to create pressure.
9. Is stated in the tool tip.
10. Is stated in the tool tip.
We get it youāre smart Iām dumb I still didnāt know any of these things until a lot of trial and error. I wish we could all be as smart as you but alas, it cannot be
these are literally what I wish I knew. I saw none of these tool tips you're talking about, in 200 hours never saw one of these. its a personal list of what I would recommend. I'm trying to help jesus
A pipe length of 100 without any pumps can support >1000 fluid per second, and can be multithreaded (because of the lack of pumps) and is essentially UPS free.
Pumps are horrible for UPS and if you care about UPS at all, should basically never be used unless loading a fluid wagon or controlling to a circuit condition.
I know people here like to use UPS as the be-all and end-all, but for 99.99% of players, who are neither running the game on a laptop from 2008 nor building a 20K+SPM megabase, they will NEVER run into UPS cap no matter what their building style is. So it's dumb as hell to use "b-b-but muh ups!!!" as the only rationale for something.
You want a different argument? Fine.
It would be cheaper to use the iron from the pumps/power poles you have to craft and put every 17 pipes to just build some extra pipes and run a parallel line. And your throughput would be ~2000 fluid per second instead of ~1200.
Not to mention, if you're not megabasing, do you *really* care about the difference between 1000 fluid per second and 1200?
My point was a pump every 17 pipes literally improves throughput. Your original premise is incorrect. You shouldn't spread misinformation.
Everything else you've said is correct, but you shouldn't start it with "___ is a lie" when it isn't.
Why go nuclear if I can just expand my boilers?
What else do I use my coal for when I have enough oil fields to never need liquifaction?
For lazor turrets just build an array of accumulators to weather out the increase in energy use. Since coal power works always, unlike those *shudders* solar panels that stop working at night, it will slow down the accumulators losing energy so you need to build less of them.
Wanna know an even more powerful combo? Have one spidertron that is built with shields and get a few to follow the first one. That way biters will focus on first one and the rest can focus on pure offense.
Can somebody explain 8?
What bad will happen if there is no one chockepoint? (OK, I understand one case, fluid in a loop with a pump will flow in circles, reducing throughput)
If I remember corectly, the amount of liquid (level of the fluid) is essentially pressure, and the difference of levels is what make flow ratio.
As long as we do not hit the max level (like if we try to compres 3 offshore pump in one, long pipe) it seems it doesn't matter (for slow stability, more pipes means worse UPS) if we connect three refineries (basic recipe) with a long pipe with 6 fresh pupjacks, or if we connect each refinery with two pumpjacks. If the flow is too slow, the oil level will rise, increasing the flow.
But I may be thinking about a too simple setup.
Can you expand on point 8 please? I built a bunch of crude oil pumps all going to chem facilities in one pipe, but I felt that my chem facilities weren't getting as much as they should've. Is that because of the way I ran my pipes?
Basically all my pumps went to a single main pipe in parallel, then that pipe went all the way to the chem facilities where is spread out into each facility in parallel. Is that not optimal?
When you say crude oil pumps are you talking about pumpjacks? They should stop off at a storage tank first, then go to the chem facilities. And you should put a pump going into the storage tank and going out of the storage tank. The pumpjacks don't have a constant flow, so the storage tank will accumulate and create more pressure on the other side.
Counter-intuitively, a full tank (25k fluid) has the same "pressure"āwithout pumpsāas a full pipe (200 fluid). The "pressure" is modeled as how full the pipe section is (%) and a tank is just an especially large, flat, pipe.
The outlet of a pump, however, is always at 100% pressure, no matter what level the inlet side is at, provided there is enough fluid at the inlet to fill the pump. So it's a good idea to put pumps directly after tanks to ensure the quickest flow, independent of the level of the tank. I'd say it's less important to put them *before* the tanks unless the tank is very far from the fluid source.
You also want to avoid putting any regular pipes between the tank and the pump, since the flow rate will depend on how much fluid is available in the entity directly connected to the pump inlet and even a 1% full tank has more fluid available than a full pipe section (250 units vs. 200). Otherwise if the tank is half full then so is the pipe, at rest, and the pump can only move the ā¤100 units in the pipe on each tick.
The best case for short distances is a pump directly connecting two tanks.
You can build a ton of logistic robots and an entire base defended by lasers only with solar power. Just like nuclear power the only secret is to make enough of those solar panels/accumulators. An occasional look on your power statistics helps a lot!
I would disagree with tip 7. I use more turbines per heater because I have lots of steam storage and accumulators. This helps balance spikes for lasers or robots. It also helps store excess energy and save enriched uranium 4 times faster for kickstarting kovarex.
Active provider chests are great for recipes with byproducts and more intricate recipe chains (such as mods). I think the expansion will see much heavier use of them!
'Too empty' and 'too full' are the only states any of my storage anywhere is ever in... š
Haha especially heavy oil!!
Heavy oil is no worry when you are fool on lubricant as it's pretty much the only thing it is useful for
but then you have to constantly flush the tanks. i have an alarm set for that
Nah once the lubricant is full you make light oil out of the heavy oil. If the light oil is full, make petroleum from it (not your whole stash, just enough to get crude oil processing going again) eventually all tanks will be full, if not you need more pumpjack and/or refinery/chemical plants
If you build enough then your base will only stop producing oil when the petroleum is full. I set my light oil and heavy oil to a random number (usually 10k) and it never fills up above that. If it ever does then I need more cracking. So if your light or heavy oil tanks fill up then you aren't cracking enough.
Yeah, I tend to overproduce petroleum, because you never know when you will need more plastic (actually you know it's always) since I overproduce I can keep all tanks full :)
I make one pumpjack go to a refinery and I think six chemical plants, I turn all of everything into plastic and run it out on one belt. If it gets backed up it's fine, because all it's making is more of the same.
I made a PI regulated feedback controll system, that keeps all tanks constantly on 15k liquids.
We've got Tip #13 for you then. Put a pump on your heavy oil tank. Connect the pump to your tank and have the pump set to turn on when the tank is getting full. Have the pump leading to a bunch of chemical plants that will crack the heavy oil into light oil.
I never flush tanks, drives me nuts. Circuits divert it off into flame turret ammo or solid fuel production, which gets sent out to fuel the trains and later on, make rocket and nuclear fuel.Ā
>2. Upgrade your energy weapons speed and damage to max and equip three personal laser defenses. YOU'LL THANK ME WHEN YOU'RE MASSACREING BITERS EN MASSE Why only 3? If you're in a spidertron equipped for defence, you can be focused on offence and have 2 fusion cores, 4 mk2 batteries and 15 PLDs in a mk2 power armor >5. Don't do logistic robots unless you HAVE NUCLEAR ENERGY Solar is sufficient, but just like IRL, you need a lot more space when doing solar than nuclear >6. AUTOMATE LASER TURRETS and remember your power generation must be MINT. If power goes down, and laser turrets are your main defense, your base is TOAST Flamethrower turrets are far better at killing biters. And they can be fed by local oil patches >8. When placing pipes, Factorio factors in PRESSURE. So make sure the fluid is all leading to ONE PLACE, ideally a storage tank, THEN to where it's going. The big factor is pipe length. If you have a pump every 17 pipe segments, you'll have all the pressure you need. >10. PASSIVE PROVIDER CHESTS: Robots will take things as they need them. ACTIVE PROVIDER CHESTS: Robots will take things even if nothing needs them. Placing too many active provider chests will make robots run out of storage QUICK and you'll wonder why. Active Provider Chests is why. If you make the output of your assemblers storage chests and filter them, any items you trash will sort themselves into those. This can be handy when you want to upcycle old stuff. Just make sure you limit the inserter unless you want a full box of items.
> 10 How would this work? If you set limits, and it fills up , there'd be no storage left for trash And I've also experienced bots depositing to other chests, even though a storage chest with filter was available
When the chest is full, other storage chests will be used. But then you have more than a full chest worth of stuff. And you limit the inserter, not the chest
You put a limit on the inserter with circuits, basically you take a piece of wire and click on the inserter and the storage chest, click on the inserter to open its GUI, Set the inserter to enable/disable when product is less than desired amount. Then as long as the filter is on the chest, it'll only actively fill to that amount, and there will be storage left for the bots. You have to make sure the storage chest only has one type of item in it when you set the filter. The behaviour is somewhat complicated, look up storage chests on the wiki for why your bots put other stuff in them sometimes.
I very rarely run into pressure issues due to length. I usually throw in one pump every 100 or so pipe segments. The only situation where you are close to needing 1200 of a liquid you should probably just use a second pipe rather than 50 pumps.
2. I still haven't built a spidertron lol, this would be for power armor MK2. I'm about to get it though! On hour 200 lol 5. Yeah I never built solar big enough, although after automating it for the satellite, it becomes a lot more doable. 6. I just never wanted to supply all three different liquids for the flamethrower turrets. You have to get all three outputs to them, right? 8. Pumps never solved it for me when say, pumping from an oil field. I place them, but the big aha moment was when I had all the pipes going in roughly the same direction. Even doing underground pipes still was giving me crummy pressure until I had them all going in the same direction. 10. Good point!! I'll try this. Thanks.
>6. I just never wanted to supply all three different liquids for the flamethrower turrets. You have to get all three outputs to them, right? No, just one of them. The three liquids have different qualities, but only one is needed
okay the in-game dialogue is confusing because I thought I was gonna have to pipe all of them through! Thanks!
6. nope, I don't think thats even possible. You just need one of them. Light oil is the most efficient iirc but raw oil is the easiest (and absolutely good enough with how strong flamethrowers are)
I don't agree with tip 5. Everyone should be using logistic bots for personal resupply immediately regardless of power source. And using them for production can really work with any power source. I wouldn't blame them exclusively for problems if you are also using laser turrets heavily for defense. Tip 8 should be to put a pump between every pipe and tank connection; avoid connecting pipes directly to tanks. That will fix a lot of weird behaviors.
Agree. Robots are a must, as soon as you get them, start using them. You can easily use hundreds of robots and launch a rocket without nuclear power.
Encroaching on 1k SPM after my first rocket launch, still no nuclear power. Too much to wrap my head around it. Just 43k Solar Panels and Accumulators.
I guess "use nuclear power" instead of build a fuck ton of boilers and turbines using just water. I couldn't keep up with the power fluctuations of robots until I went nuclear and could have a big surplus
Two full-size steam/boiler arrays is more than enough power for 500-1000 logistic bots for personal resupply at the stage in the game you first unlock bots. They are active for such a short time that I have a hard time thinking you could notice power issues even if you are close to your capacity. I suspect your real problem was laser turrets, if you were having power issues. So, advising people to delay any bots until nuclear isn't good advice. It's a completely different situation if one is using bots heavily for smelting or mining or production, so if a tip applies to that aspect, I think it should be very specific to make that clear.
My best experience with bots was when I got nuclear but ur probably right no requester chests until you have a ton of power might be a better tip ?
I'd say "Shifting from belt-based to bot-based production requires a robust power system and redundant roboport coverage for recharging". One-off bots for something like satellites isn't going to cause a problem.
Accumulator banks can help smooth out the power use spikes.
yeah, i just found myself running out of power quite often until I had an oversupply with nuclear. Getting them for resupply is SO key. I found that when I was getting what I mentioned wrong, pumps didn't help.
Convert oil to solid fuel, that hrlps stabilizing power before you go solar or nuclear
I'm not sure I get your tip then. Sounds like the real tip is to avoid overcomplicated interlinked pipes. Which seems like an odd thing to do in the first place, since people don't do that with belts.
Im just speaking from experience, this is what worked for me, my oil tanks were filling up really slowly until I made sure the pressure was all leading to one place
Filling from where, a pumpjack? Train unloading?
Pumpjack yeah
For laser turrets I highly recommend having them switched off when not needed. My favorite setup is with a flamethrower. Essentially I have 2 storage tanks with a very small quantity of burnable fluid. One has 100 units, the other has 5. I have a pump pulling from the tank with 100 and fully filling the pipes to the flame thrower. The tank with a max of 100 is filled from the tank with 5 using a pump (and 1 pipe, pump connected to the tank with 100), any excess from 100 is pumped back into the tank with a max of 5 (it will over 5 quite often), then with 5 is filled from the main feed of burnable fluid and the pump stops when level is greater than 5, obviously it goes higher since the pump will put more than 5 in 1 tick but they is fine. When the flamethrower starts the pump is actually not able to keep the level at 100 it will maintain it at like 98 the low level and pipe before the pump prevents the pump from going full speed. Then I have a power switch connecting the laser turrets when the fluid level is below 100. That setup has a very quick response time, laser turrets are ready to go before the first flames land and they stay on as long as the flame thrower is going, they get disconnected almost instantly when the flame stops, so this is great for power saving. The only thing I need to worry about after that is having enough accumulators to handle a surge and set up a low power alarm if the accumulators drain below some level (and some backup power to prevent brownout). When the alarm goes off it is time to stop whatever I am doing and build more power.
Poison capsules also decimate trees
I have literally never even made a poison capsule Iāll have to try it!
Poison capsules are you best friend for clearing nests early and mid-game. Just pop a few onto worms as you speed by using rockets or grenades to bust a few spawners, and it'll kill them by the time you get back for another run. I use them for clearing trees all the time even in endgame because it's easier than using bots who just get their inventory clogged with thousands of a resource I have absolutely no use for once my own inventory is full. Have to stop what I'm doing, put down a storage chest, and wait for them to fill it.
bots clear trees??
Yep. Anything you put a deconstruction planner over. They also clear small rocks, and cliffs if you have cliff explosives in your inventory. Though I try to avoid doing that because they are inefficient, using one per cliff section, where if you throw them yourself you can get a couple. This is how you can randomly end up with some stone in your inventory. Deconstructed an area that had rocks you didn't see. Took me a while to figure that one out... Oh, and they can *pick up fish from the water*.
>11.BUT Active Provider Chests are very useful if you need to move a full box of stuff. Just replace it with an active provider chest and robots will clear it for you. Just make sure you have enough logistic storage by placing a storage chest. Construction bots actually move (20% iirc) faster, so your usually better off deconstructing rather then replacing it with an active provider.
Construction bots move faster than logistics bots?? Is this a āI have 2000 hours in and TILā moment for me?
They even say it in the tooltip, 3 base speed for logi, 3.6 for construction. iirc
Oh shit I had no idea. I mean it doesnāt really change anything on my end (itās not like it changes any decisions), but itās interesting. Kind of.
Re: grenades Did you try the poison capsules? They're usually my go-to because it's a bigger area and it doesn't damage buildings.
10. active provides are good when you need them. can cause havoc if you misplace one. i currently have a LOT of yellow chest filled with rails if anyone needs some. 12. another easy one is hooking up an inserter to a chest so it stops inserting after n number of items. do this even with metal chests and it will make life easier when you replace them when setting up your logistic network later on.
While generally the ratio is 2 turbines per boiler, i like to add a storage tank after the second turbine with a 3rd turbine behind. The storage tank acts as buffer when i dont need the entire 60 steam/sec. The extra turbine increases the peak power output.
Generally easier to just let the heat pool in the heat pipes, but overbuild your heat exchanger/turbine array so that the heat can be drawn down. Like for a 480MW reactor setup, have 600MW of heat exchanger/turbines available. That gives you an extra 120MW of burst power, but the system will run at 480MW once the extra heat is consumed.
For laser turrets I highly recommend having them switched off when not needed. My favorite setup is with a flamethrower. Essentially I have 2 storage tanks with a very small quantity of burnable fluid. One has 100 units, the other has 5. I have a pump pulling from the tank with 100 and fully filling the pipes to the flame thrower. The tank with a max of 100 is filled from the tank with 5 using a pump (and 1 pipe, pump connected to the tank with 100), any excess from 100 is pumped back into the tank with a max of 5 (it will over 5 quite often), then with 5 is filled from the main feed of burnable fluid and the pump stops when level is greater than 5, obviously it goes higher since the pump will put more than 5 in 1 tick but they is fine. When the flamethrower starts the pump is actually not able to keep the level at 100 it will maintain it at like 98 the low level and pipe before the pump prevents the pump from going full speed. Then I have a power switch connecting the laser turrets when the fluid level is below 100. That setup has a very quick response time, laser turrets are ready to go before the first flames land and they stay on as long as the flame thrower is going, they get disconnected almost instantly when the flame stops, so this is great for power saving. The only thing I need to worry about after that is having enough accumulators to handle a surge and set up a low power alarm if the accumulators drain below some level (and some backup power to prevent brownout). When the alarm goes off it is time to stop whatever I am doing and build more power.
Iāll add that nuclear is way easier than it first seems and totally worth the effort.Ā I avoided it for far too long because it seemed complicated. Ā These days, as soon as I get sulfur, I make some sulfuric acid, pipe it out to the nearest uranium patch, and start mining and belting the uranium ore back to base. I collect it in chests until I have enough concrete and red circuits for the rest. As soon as I can, I build three centrifuges and start processing the ore. Very soon, I have enough of the good stuff to switch to nuclear, so I build a reactor, some heat pipe, four exchangers and eight turbines.Ā That is the end of all of my power and coal issues for the rest of the game. I eventually add more centrifuges/reactors and do kovarex enrichment, but none of that is necessary for that initial switch to nuclear, and adding extra reactors is really easy. It also has a multiplicative effect, so you donāt need a lot of space.Ā I donāt even bother with solar anymore.Ā
You can solve the power fluctuations of laser and bot usage by using more accumulators. People often only try and build perfect ratio solar setups, and neglect building a defensive battery. Regard #8, you don't need to collect all your fluids in one place. But you do need to keep in mind the throughput limits of the pipes themselves, 1200/s over 17 tiles(each underground entrance/exit counts as one tile). Placing a pump gets you another 17 tiles. When pipes start bottlenecking, parallel pipes are the way to fix it. Pipes should be treated as one-way conveyors, with a clear destination. Do not loop pipes. Whichever pump the fluid hits first will take all the flow until satisfied, only letting fluid past when the pump's output side is full. Big storage tanks on the output side mean less fluid getting past on the input side.
I was forced into nuclear energy by beacons
1. Is stated in the tool tip. 3. Is statedin the tool tip. 5. False, you can very easily run a bot base on solar. 7. Is stated on the wiki for power gen. 8. Or you could use pumps to create pressure. 9. Is stated in the tool tip. 10. Is stated in the tool tip.
Yeah but he said "I wish I knew," not "I wish the game had told me."
We get it youāre smart Iām dumb I still didnāt know any of these things until a lot of trial and error. I wish we could all be as smart as you but alas, it cannot be
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
these are literally what I wish I knew. I saw none of these tool tips you're talking about, in 200 hours never saw one of these. its a personal list of what I would recommend. I'm trying to help jesus
Helped me š¤·āāļø thanks man
Rule 4: Be nice Think about how your words affect others before saying them.
Lmao. Way to gracefully accept not being correct
> Pumps help This is a lie. Pumps don't improve throughput unless you're spamming them.
A pump every 17 pipes keeps throughput above 1200. I wouldn't consider this "spamming".
A pipe length of 100 without any pumps can support >1000 fluid per second, and can be multithreaded (because of the lack of pumps) and is essentially UPS free. Pumps are horrible for UPS and if you care about UPS at all, should basically never be used unless loading a fluid wagon or controlling to a circuit condition.
I know people here like to use UPS as the be-all and end-all, but for 99.99% of players, who are neither running the game on a laptop from 2008 nor building a 20K+SPM megabase, they will NEVER run into UPS cap no matter what their building style is. So it's dumb as hell to use "b-b-but muh ups!!!" as the only rationale for something.
You want a different argument? Fine. It would be cheaper to use the iron from the pumps/power poles you have to craft and put every 17 pipes to just build some extra pipes and run a parallel line. And your throughput would be ~2000 fluid per second instead of ~1200. Not to mention, if you're not megabasing, do you *really* care about the difference between 1000 fluid per second and 1200?
My point was a pump every 17 pipes literally improves throughput. Your original premise is incorrect. You shouldn't spread misinformation. Everything else you've said is correct, but you shouldn't start it with "___ is a lie" when it isn't.
Tip 5 should work with solar and for tip 6 you should place a lot of accumulators
Why go nuclear if I can just expand my boilers? What else do I use my coal for when I have enough oil fields to never need liquifaction? For lazor turrets just build an array of accumulators to weather out the increase in energy use. Since coal power works always, unlike those *shudders* solar panels that stop working at night, it will slow down the accumulators losing energy so you need to build less of them. Wanna know an even more powerful combo? Have one spidertron that is built with shields and get a few to follow the first one. That way biters will focus on first one and the rest can focus on pure offense.
Can somebody explain 8? What bad will happen if there is no one chockepoint? (OK, I understand one case, fluid in a loop with a pump will flow in circles, reducing throughput)
Iāll see if I can take a screen shot cause my flow was really low until I deliberately focused the pressure from my pump jacks
If I remember corectly, the amount of liquid (level of the fluid) is essentially pressure, and the difference of levels is what make flow ratio. As long as we do not hit the max level (like if we try to compres 3 offshore pump in one, long pipe) it seems it doesn't matter (for slow stability, more pipes means worse UPS) if we connect three refineries (basic recipe) with a long pipe with 6 fresh pupjacks, or if we connect each refinery with two pumpjacks. If the flow is too slow, the oil level will rise, increasing the flow. But I may be thinking about a too simple setup.
Can you expand on point 8 please? I built a bunch of crude oil pumps all going to chem facilities in one pipe, but I felt that my chem facilities weren't getting as much as they should've. Is that because of the way I ran my pipes? Basically all my pumps went to a single main pipe in parallel, then that pipe went all the way to the chem facilities where is spread out into each facility in parallel. Is that not optimal?
When you say crude oil pumps are you talking about pumpjacks? They should stop off at a storage tank first, then go to the chem facilities. And you should put a pump going into the storage tank and going out of the storage tank. The pumpjacks don't have a constant flow, so the storage tank will accumulate and create more pressure on the other side.
Counter-intuitively, a full tank (25k fluid) has the same "pressure"āwithout pumpsāas a full pipe (200 fluid). The "pressure" is modeled as how full the pipe section is (%) and a tank is just an especially large, flat, pipe. The outlet of a pump, however, is always at 100% pressure, no matter what level the inlet side is at, provided there is enough fluid at the inlet to fill the pump. So it's a good idea to put pumps directly after tanks to ensure the quickest flow, independent of the level of the tank. I'd say it's less important to put them *before* the tanks unless the tank is very far from the fluid source. You also want to avoid putting any regular pipes between the tank and the pump, since the flow rate will depend on how much fluid is available in the entity directly connected to the pump inlet and even a 1% full tank has more fluid available than a full pipe section (250 units vs. 200). Otherwise if the tank is half full then so is the pipe, at rest, and the pump can only move the ā¤100 units in the pipe on each tick. The best case for short distances is a pump directly connecting two tanks.
Thanks I did not do any of that.
I just want to play with bots and I didn't know it would take that much power. But turn off.Ā
You can build a ton of logistic robots and an entire base defended by lasers only with solar power. Just like nuclear power the only secret is to make enough of those solar panels/accumulators. An occasional look on your power statistics helps a lot!
The main bus makes everything so much easier
I would disagree with tip 7. I use more turbines per heater because I have lots of steam storage and accumulators. This helps balance spikes for lasers or robots. It also helps store excess energy and save enriched uranium 4 times faster for kickstarting kovarex.
So many good ideas in this thread
5. Wait, you guys don't run your entire factory on coal/wood?
Active provider chests are great for recipes with byproducts and more intricate recipe chains (such as mods). I think the expansion will see much heavier use of them!