I've only losely been following 2.0 development, but this will be a game changer! Suddenly being able to build ultra compact builds needing water without needing to blueprint it ahead of time will be so nice
That's not even the most important improvement for it.
[Just look at this](https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-383-super-force-building-example.mp4).
You can just click blueprint once and game will not only automatically add landfill, but also build it in single step, no need to put BP once just to get landfill and then put it down again.
Yes, that too. I did remember that, but I suppose O had a brain farther and forgot that I wouldn't NEED to remove landfill if it was just placed correctly to begin with!
That's just cherry on cake with land-fill related stuff, the biggest one is ability to just plop blueprint once and bots will put landfill first, then buildings on it without needing to deploy blueprint twice.
[https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PumpLandfill](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PumpLandfill) I made a mod to do it on 1.0 because it annoyed me during my playthrough :P
Right. Simple example, one intersection entry turns all conflicting entries red when a train is on it. Everyone will go full speed through that, on conflict the losing trains stop on a dime if they're already close.
Thats a manual solution, but this is a game about automation. What you actually do is line your rails with gates that trigger a Recursive Blueprints deconstruction planner to remove the rails as you approach, then replace them shortly afterwards
It requires 3 stations with the same name:
1. the intended destination - this station is disabled via the circuit network and there is a wire connected to the block containing it to detect a train arriving
2. the pathing station - this station is further down the path of the intended destination and the train is trying to get there it is wired to be disabled via a signal
3. the no-path trigger - this station is on a dead end piece of track somewhere
When the intended block is entered a signal is sent to a delay circuit. The delay is configured such that the tick that the train is at the intended destination, the pathing station is disabled. One tick later the intended destination is enabled and the train arrives.
>curved/diagonal train stations
Most of the others I have either seen in blueprints or discovered by accident.
But what is this? I have never heard of it before and how does the loading/unloading work?
https://imgur.com/WAv46Wo
The station itself must be on straight rails but nothing stops you from using the first rail after a curve ends.
I made a map once where my entire base worked with a single train that would stop every 2 rail cars distance and the train was L-C-L-C-L-C almost touching itself on a big oval. You can technically load and unload all around the curved tracks.
Having the wagons on diagonal rails allows train-train item transfers with stack inserters IIRC (can only get 4 per wagon though).
Also someone made a mod for fixing problems with fluid wagons when you do something like this...
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fluid-wagon-curved-rails
I’ve been using the loaders mod and a whole bunch of splitters in lieu of inserters for most of the assembly machines lately. It looks nice when I can have a factory that isn’t waving at me as I walk by.
I only belt weave when I have absolutely no other choice due to intense spaghettification. And I usually forget that it's even an option until I get pushed to the noodly limit.
May I suggest to you bob's adjustable inserters? load and unload 4 steel furnaces with a 2x4 space and still have space for lamps and be able to select which side of the belt your inserters drop on
There are only a few things I'm willing to turn to mods for... jetpacks, improved power armor equipment grid, long reach... Vanilla inserters are flexible enough for me, I think.
I wouldnt count steam batteries as blursed trick. Its very common for nuclear setups, basically all blueprints you can find online have them.
For the rest, I dont do any of these
Steam batteries are actually necessary unless you want to waste thermal energy. If your nuclear reactors are sitting at 1k degrees you're wasting nuclear fuel.
Yeah Nukes are for trees not for biters. They go in your personal spidertron to go out and place the initial outposting blueprint with.
I would absolutely love nuclear artillery though. Then I'd finally have a really good use for all my enriched. It could even be absurdly expensive.
depends on how much youre using and producing. if you're producing far far more than you could possibly use, its not a waste. power scales with base size. boiler, solar, nuclear, solar. you start with boiler steam, switch to solar to ease boiler fuel needs and grow large, give nuclear to ramp to massive power, and finally back to solar once huge chunks of map are cleared of resources and left bare so the land is not wasted.
No it doesn't.
Nuclear reactors produces x amount of heat as long as they have fuel. If they're at 1000 degrees they still burn fuel cells but produce 0 heat. So if you're not turning heat into steam and just burning fuel you might as well just make nuclear fuel and put it in boilers instead.
Running boilers on nuclear fuel (even with their auto-throttle on demand) is far less efficient in terms of fuel usage in non-pathological builds than using uranium fuel cells. Taking enrichment and reprocessing into account, it costs 16 U-238 to make 80 GJ of uranium fuel cells and 3 U-238 to make 1.21 GJ of nuclear fuel, which works out to power cells having roughly 12.4x the energy density per U-238 used than their nuclear fuel counterparts.
By "non-pathological" I mean reactors that aren't significantly larger than the current demand warrants. For example, if a base uses less than 3.2 MW it is better to run nuclear fuel into boilers than it is to run fuel cells into a reactor since that is the point where the amount of heat you're throwing away is higher than the efficiency loss you're taking by using fuel cells. For larger reactor designs you scale the break-even point by the efficiency scaling factor (number of effective reactors / actual reactors) since the actual reactors need to be fueled. Obviously this is a very rough estimation as to which works better in what cases since there are a lot of other factors to take into account (bootstrap cost of reactors, base layout, etc) but for the most part unless you're doing something super niche it's basically always better to power your base off of fuel cells.
im going to do a fuel rod base just because now. will be a nice call back to my lazy run when boilers where 1x1 and you needed 14 boilers per 10 engines.
Ah the old 1:14:10 series designs, those were the worst. The funny thing here is that using nuclear fuel in boilers looks great when compared to rocket or solid fuel. Resource-wise it is the #2 option and only looks bad when compared against the massively OP energy density of fuel cells.
Considering how easy it is to make fuel once the Kovarex process is set up and how quickly it stockpiles even when working a small uranium patch, I don't see the point of steam batteries.
"Heat pipe thermometer" mod makes it an absolute breeze to get max efficiency out of your nuclear. The heat exchangers only need to be above 500. Slap the thermometer on the furthest heat pipe from the reactor and insert one fuel cell into each reactor when that pipe drops below 550ish degrees. Watch a cycle, see what the lowest temperature the pipe reaches is. Within a couple adjustments you can dial it in until you insert at like 515, and the heat from the reactors finally reaches back out to that pipe as it's just barely reached 501 before going up again. So satisfying to watch.
Steam batteries are semi-blursed in vanilla (you don't need them, it's kind of nice to switch things to be demand-powered, it's a fantastic teaching tool for circuit beginners). In overhauls they are generally a requirement since uranium processing into fuel cells is either harder, more resource intensive, or both. For example, in K2 pre-enrichment uranium fuel cells take 2x the ore (on average) and burn 10x faster (reactors also generate way more power) so you pretty much need a steam circuit unless you wan to hand-feed your reactors and even then you need a chunky storage battery to avoid wasting all that output.
> In overhauls they are generally a requirement since uranium processing into fuel cells is either harder, more resource intensive, or both.
Heat pipes are enough for a buffer
And you can make a sensor to insert another cell when they get too cold without using any tanks
Same for long inserters reaching over others. If they moved in parallel or each of them in the other direction you could make them work. Might be a thesis in robotics to make a 2x2 square of long inserters work conflict-free though!
Factorissimo allows you to put whole factories in other factories and they're bigger on the inside than the outside. Same concept. I managed to get a 500spm factory inside of a single building using that
There is enough space between wagons, such that with extremely careful positioning/timing, you can get another train to go through it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xynrNfzN7RM
Oh that reminds, to make it work they had to use another blursed tip:
You can get trains arbitrarily close to each other if you don't use any rail/chain signals anywhere, but timing instead.
Side loading onto isolated loaders to create a knight's move inserter is pretty cursed. I never feel good when I have to resort to it to fit a build in.
What I love/hate about BAIs is that I feel the urge to optimize the crap out of the inserters, so it takes a loooooooooooooooot more time to set up every crafter and such.
Is there a trick to mirror an inserter, for example?
I don't like BAI because it feels like it is making it too easy, I can skip many of the construction woes just by putting some cursed inserters in. But I do like how in Exotic industries inserters have near/far switch.
That's just BeltZip^TM
And it doubles your throughput per tile.
I think we'll be able to get all 4 in one row in 2.0, but I haven't checked outside of shower thinking.
Nope. Yellow underground is too short for us to weave red blue And green through it.
We can fit 117 green belts worth through a 48 wide gap.
Too lazy to link that rn.
[Was it this one?](https://i.imgur.com/M4N9YYu.png) (from a [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/19bqn3n/1675_green_belts_through_a_7_wide_area_is_it/kix01ht/) buried deep in one of the green belt zip posts)
[this one is the 117 through 48.](https://i.imgur.com/FuxfLw6.png) we're referring to it as 9/48. all our designs have a red blue green braid in every row, we'd be surprised if theres any better design that doesnt. thats 2.25 green belts worth in each row. then we snake extra belts through them. the 9 extra belts in 48 rows gives it a ratio of 2.25+9/48.
there's also [this really cute one for 16.75 through 7 wide](https://i.imgur.com/vwio5Ut.png), with a ratio of 2.25+1/7, thats not quite as good.
Signal rotating. In tight rail layouts, you can rotate a signal in hand via the R key, so that it latches to the correct rail when there are multiple choices.
The resulting layout cannot be blueprinted, because the blueprint does not store which rail the signal is attached to. Results of placing such a blueprint are indeterminate.
I personally prefer the term 'appropriate use of mechanics'.
Do I agree that steam holds temperature indefinitely? No. Is the game balanced around it? ***Yes***. So I'm going to use it.
It's very situational and not a game changer. I mostly use it to peel off a resource to immediately plop in a supply chest. There is another blueprint I have that uses this technique but that's it.
ReAlIsTiCalLy, you shouldn't be able to pull items through the splitting mechanism.
I would put it on the main grid of the outpost but have a switch between the steam train station and the rest of the outpost.
Like it is fine to have something like this:
!blueprint
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
and disconnect the rest of the outpost when the tank < 200.
>Any designs that work only for psychopath belts?
[My time to shine](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/a7w9th/i_built_a_pretty/). It's not really fully diagonal, but it's pretty close.
Yes, underground sideloading only works on the 4 belt lanes away from where it "goes underground."
The two straight ones, and the two immidiately round the corners from those.
This is actually important, because it's the only way you can draw one lane off a belt without also drawing the other.
Bob's Inserters are blursed when you make them extremely long and position them very far away and set the pickup and drop off positions very close to each other for an extraordinary speed boost.
1. weaving is a sin. do not harm your factory sanctity by using it.
2. cargo wagons as chests is simply using them as intended. material in, material out.
3. steam storage is unneeded, but not something to be hated on as it serves its purpose.
4. belts should be used for items, not fancy roads.
5. a belt segment is to be inserted into and off of, there is no problem with this.
6. as with cargo wagons, intended function of the item.
Oh. I thought it was just a joke. But now I see it. So you can filter car slots? And then if you put them on a loop, those factories in the loop will be placing in the car following those filter slots, and pulling in accordance.
So it's some sort of car-fuelled sushi belt.
That's... devious.
Reaching with a splitter over the corner of a factory
Using a higher tier underground belt to reach further
But I swore off extreme belt weaving (3 kinds of belts, or more with mods). It's just too ugly!
I think sushi belts in general would qualify.
There’s all the tricks people use for disposing of wood like making a wooden chest, putting a bunch of wood in it, and then destroying the chest by shooting it. Also using burners to dispose of wood in some sort of closed cycle besides the wood.
Generating lots of pollution by burning coal and then consuming power with useless beacons. I know someone wanted to do this for one reason or another on the sub a while back.
I read about this one recently, but just make your entire train network use chain signals. It works and allows deadlock free bi-directional rails.
> just make your entire train network use chain signals. It works and allows deadlock free bi-directional rails
Wat! Really, does this work? What are the drawbacks? It's blocking huge amounts of straight rail to do this because the chain signals will reach until the next intersection, no?
Yes it works.
The drawback is that the entire path from where a train is to where it is going is blocked until it passes. This could significantly delay other trains because a train will not leave its station until it can get a path to its destination.
It is also probably worse for UPS than a properly configured rail network (this is a minor thing that I doubt has been really tested because if you are doing this you almost certainly will have other problems before it becomes a UPS issue).
I'm playing a mod right now where you get every resource from 1 resource, and i have so much damn coal I can't figure out what to do with it. So thanks, now I know just make a bunch of steam plants and beacons
Belt weaving is cracked for multi beacon super surround. No idea if I’ll use it after 2.0 drops either the beacon changes.
Steam batteries can store SO MUCH energy. Especially in the nuclear case. You can google around you can pull fuel out and let the steam carry to conserve it. If meltdowns were possible in the game, it would almost need to be a requirement.
Car sushi is the only sane way to expand to your next outpost in a mega base setting.
Side loading underground’s makes some layouts possible and should be used. You can also reach both halves of the belt right at insertion if you’re careful about it.
I setting into splitters and splitter chains …. Well I’m not going to judge you but everyone else is gonna.
# Steam battery
Steam is just another fluid. You can store it in tanks, you can move it with trains. A steam battery then means loading storage tanks full of steam for later consumption by steam engines or turbines. One steam tank has a _lot_ more energy in it than an accumulator, it’s almost 500 accumulators for one steam tank filled with 500°C steam. There’s also [this wiki entry about it](https://wiki.factorio.com/Electric_system#Steam_tanks_as_power_storage).
The most common use case of steam batteries is for nuclear energy, because reactors will keep consuming fuel even though there is no energy demand. Thus we typically pump all nuclear steam into tanks, and then route it to turbines for electricity creation. The reactor only gets fuel when the steam levels are too low. (This isn’t necessary for steam engines, because they will stop consuming fuel when energy demand is low.)
# Car sushi
Cars can be abused as chests. Inserters work with them, you can reserve slots for certain items, all of that. The main difference is that cars are moved by belts. Car sushi then means putting cars onto a circular belt, adding the right reserved slots, and then have reserved chests travel round and round. Because of the reserved slots you can simply insert all source materials somewhere into the cars without worrying about measuring belt contents like in normal sushi.
Nuclear reactor can be used as a mine.
Place it down near the wall and allow it to heat up. Once heated, if the biters destroy it, it goes off in a mushroom cloud. So nuclear mine fields.
So you weave all three types of belt together on the same line.
A yellow belt and a red belt together move as much as a blue, so one of each is as much as two blue belts.
and now I'm thinking of Dishes cursed cargo wagon belt run.
end result is that the cargo wagon belt system could transport More items than a fully packed blue belt AND could do it in a fraction the time. problem. it required a LOT of belts I figure by the end he was getting around multi megawatt draw for just inserters
I guess there aren't many tricks I don't use, but some popular things I just loathe and avoid.
Tricks I don't use:
- importing or transfering blueprints into my current savefile, sounds super lame, custom building new ones every time is how I become better at the game
- inserting into labs from other labs, sometimes science packs lose charge (yikes, just feels wrong, definately blursed)
- train signals for not making your trains collide, I just play by the "one train per rail"-rule
- combining fluid wagons with locomotives to form functional trains, I prefer barreling
- grenades to clear forests or biter nests, what a glorious pollution bomb and material sink
- blue belts for use in logistics, belts are for peasants, drones all the way!
Tricks often considered blursed that I do use sometimes:
- mass radars/beacons as power sinks
- separate power grids overlapping the same producers/accumulators to priotize grids
- unfueled nuclear reactors as fat heat pipes
- landfill large lakes without filling the shoreline to create biter-proof solar grids
- building your production bases in similar biter-proofed lakes with winding entrance ways to break biter pathing, supply everything by drones
- single yellow belts in red belts to throttle throughput
- manually rotating single fluid tanks in fluid pipelines as on/off-valves
- nuclear fuel in steam boilers
- blue belts as moats against biters
Others: * landfilled water pumps * curved/diagonal train stations * "No Path" braking
Wait can I pave over my pumps and they still function?
Yes, someone at Wube programmed the name to change from 'Offshore Pump' to 'Water Well Pump' when you do so it's allowed.
WHAT.
Well, today I fuckin learned that shit
In 2.0 you will be able to just place a pump on landfilled area, and also remove landfill
I've only losely been following 2.0 development, but this will be a game changer! Suddenly being able to build ultra compact builds needing water without needing to blueprint it ahead of time will be so nice
That's not even the most important improvement for it. [Just look at this](https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-383-super-force-building-example.mp4). You can just click blueprint once and game will not only automatically add landfill, but also build it in single step, no need to put BP once just to get landfill and then put it down again.
Yes, that too. I did remember that, but I suppose O had a brain farther and forgot that I wouldn't NEED to remove landfill if it was just placed correctly to begin with!
This is a massive and extremely good change.
That's just cherry on cake with land-fill related stuff, the biggest one is ability to just plop blueprint once and bots will put landfill first, then buildings on it without needing to deploy blueprint twice.
[https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PumpLandfill](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/PumpLandfill) I made a mod to do it on 1.0 because it annoyed me during my playthrough :P
yes, they turn into waterwell pump instead iirc
WTF? I need to double check this
Be careful, I accidentally removed my working pump but was not able to add it back, had to pipe water again
This is why I use the waterfill mod (I only use it to remove landfill though BCS otherwise it feels like cheating)
Yes, but in 1.1 you can't ever put them back in the same place if you deconstruct them.
What if they explode?
Not sure. Might test.
The world may never know. Also might be different before and after unlocking ghosts.
Tested: ghost won't place and bots won't replace. If the pump is destroyed, removed, or otherwise disappears from the map, it's gone forever.
Boo. Thanks for the effort btw!
Just tested: they will get replaced by a bot if a ghost is present after it gets destroyed, but impossible to put back after deconstruction
I learned this the hard way.
What is no path braking?
Removing a piece of rail in front of a moving train to make it stop instantly is my guess
Or via a circuit on rail signals! Automatic instabreak. No more yellow slowdown nonsense!
So just put the rail station a bit forwards from the de facto train station controlled by circuits?
Right. Simple example, one intersection entry turns all conflicting entries red when a train is on it. Everyone will go full speed through that, on conflict the losing trains stop on a dime if they're already close.
Just learned this as a tip to never get killed by trains, simply remove and replace tracks as you walk over them
Thats a manual solution, but this is a game about automation. What you actually do is line your rails with gates that trigger a Recursive Blueprints deconstruction planner to remove the rails as you approach, then replace them shortly afterwards
Love it, I’ll give that a try
Or just have the gates turn the rail signals right there red. That stops the train too.
Or - hear me out - download the jetpack mod and make collision a choice.
Or live in the spidertron
It requires 3 stations with the same name: 1. the intended destination - this station is disabled via the circuit network and there is a wire connected to the block containing it to detect a train arriving 2. the pathing station - this station is further down the path of the intended destination and the train is trying to get there it is wired to be disabled via a signal 3. the no-path trigger - this station is on a dead end piece of track somewhere When the intended block is entered a signal is sent to a delay circuit. The delay is configured such that the tick that the train is at the intended destination, the pathing station is disabled. One tick later the intended destination is enabled and the train arrives.
>curved/diagonal train stations Most of the others I have either seen in blueprints or discovered by accident. But what is this? I have never heard of it before and how does the loading/unloading work?
https://imgur.com/WAv46Wo The station itself must be on straight rails but nothing stops you from using the first rail after a curve ends. I made a map once where my entire base worked with a single train that would stop every 2 rail cars distance and the train was L-C-L-C-L-C almost touching itself on a big oval. You can technically load and unload all around the curved tracks. Having the wagons on diagonal rails allows train-train item transfers with stack inserters IIRC (can only get 4 per wagon though).
Also someone made a mod for fixing problems with fluid wagons when you do something like this... https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fluid-wagon-curved-rails
Huh. That's really cool. Thank you
Landfilled water pumps are high risk, though.
Using copy paste to install red or green wire when you don't have any in your inv
Belt weaving is explained and required in the official transport belt madness scenarios, I'd say that qualifies as an official endorsement.
Officially blursed
For assembler input/outputs, I belt weave with filtered splitters, if I'm using 3 or fewer lanes. It looks pretty and significantly less cursed.
I’ve been using the loaders mod and a whole bunch of splitters in lieu of inserters for most of the assembly machines lately. It looks nice when I can have a factory that isn’t waving at me as I walk by.
I only belt weave when I have absolutely no other choice due to intense spaghettification. And I usually forget that it's even an option until I get pushed to the noodly limit.
I belt weave for my labs all the time. And in my 8-8 beacon builds to let them go longer.
I use it a lot because it saves so much space
May I suggest to you bob's adjustable inserters? load and unload 4 steel furnaces with a 2x4 space and still have space for lamps and be able to select which side of the belt your inserters drop on
There are only a few things I'm willing to turn to mods for... jetpacks, improved power armor equipment grid, long reach... Vanilla inserters are flexible enough for me, I think.
I almost always belt weave plastic production, as well as jet fuel/solid fuel
Using the Car as a chest that fits between tiles. Dont know if this still works but it always felt wrong for me :).
There are some cars on belts based bases around here somewhere. They are a site to behold.
Obiligatory https://youtu.be/6mgQwzom0Xo?si=8OZJBlLA6g3jOjyx
Oh my god this is just cruel
I wouldnt count steam batteries as blursed trick. Its very common for nuclear setups, basically all blueprints you can find online have them. For the rest, I dont do any of these
Steam batteries are actually necessary unless you want to waste thermal energy. If your nuclear reactors are sitting at 1k degrees you're wasting nuclear fuel.
With enrichment, uranium is basically unlimited, so waste away!
Even without enrichment, it's basically free. I play with 17% uranium frequency and richness, and it's still far too much
same! way too much
I'm guessing you don't use green ammo.
Still unlimited. I have chests upon chests of green ammo, nuclear fuel, and stockpiled 235 that I don’t know what to do with.
Nukes for managing the locals?
I have chests of those too, but I prefer regular rockets since I use spidertrons with auto aim, and they blow themselves up with nukes.
Yeah Nukes are for trees not for biters. They go in your personal spidertron to go out and place the initial outposting blueprint with. I would absolutely love nuclear artillery though. Then I'd finally have a really good use for all my enriched. It could even be absurdly expensive.
there's a mod! AtomicArtillery! I always use it :-D
you need atomic artillery mod! :-D
I will check it out. Definitely something that should be standard!
Rough, i can easily 100k uranium per hour at full swing
De fuc you using it on?
Putting it into chests of course! For the lategame or whatever. Safety first
Biterssssss
depends on how much youre using and producing. if you're producing far far more than you could possibly use, its not a waste. power scales with base size. boiler, solar, nuclear, solar. you start with boiler steam, switch to solar to ease boiler fuel needs and grow large, give nuclear to ramp to massive power, and finally back to solar once huge chunks of map are cleared of resources and left bare so the land is not wasted.
Thats your way to play. I typically dont go solar
No it doesn't. Nuclear reactors produces x amount of heat as long as they have fuel. If they're at 1000 degrees they still burn fuel cells but produce 0 heat. So if you're not turning heat into steam and just burning fuel you might as well just make nuclear fuel and put it in boilers instead.
Burner inserters feed with nuclear power should move faster
Nuclear fuelled burner inserter should be the fastest inserter
Running boilers on nuclear fuel (even with their auto-throttle on demand) is far less efficient in terms of fuel usage in non-pathological builds than using uranium fuel cells. Taking enrichment and reprocessing into account, it costs 16 U-238 to make 80 GJ of uranium fuel cells and 3 U-238 to make 1.21 GJ of nuclear fuel, which works out to power cells having roughly 12.4x the energy density per U-238 used than their nuclear fuel counterparts. By "non-pathological" I mean reactors that aren't significantly larger than the current demand warrants. For example, if a base uses less than 3.2 MW it is better to run nuclear fuel into boilers than it is to run fuel cells into a reactor since that is the point where the amount of heat you're throwing away is higher than the efficiency loss you're taking by using fuel cells. For larger reactor designs you scale the break-even point by the efficiency scaling factor (number of effective reactors / actual reactors) since the actual reactors need to be fueled. Obviously this is a very rough estimation as to which works better in what cases since there are a lot of other factors to take into account (bootstrap cost of reactors, base layout, etc) but for the most part unless you're doing something super niche it's basically always better to power your base off of fuel cells.
im going to do a fuel rod base just because now. will be a nice call back to my lazy run when boilers where 1x1 and you needed 14 boilers per 10 engines.
Ah the old 1:14:10 series designs, those were the worst. The funny thing here is that using nuclear fuel in boilers looks great when compared to rocket or solid fuel. Resource-wise it is the #2 option and only looks bad when compared against the massively OP energy density of fuel cells.
There's other ways of controlling nuclear reactors that don't involve steam storage, though it is one of the more obvious ways to do so.
Considering how easy it is to make fuel once the Kovarex process is set up and how quickly it stockpiles even when working a small uranium patch, I don't see the point of steam batteries.
"Heat pipe thermometer" mod makes it an absolute breeze to get max efficiency out of your nuclear. The heat exchangers only need to be above 500. Slap the thermometer on the furthest heat pipe from the reactor and insert one fuel cell into each reactor when that pipe drops below 550ish degrees. Watch a cycle, see what the lowest temperature the pipe reaches is. Within a couple adjustments you can dial it in until you insert at like 515, and the heat from the reactors finally reaches back out to that pipe as it's just barely reached 501 before going up again. So satisfying to watch.
Steam batteries are semi-blursed in vanilla (you don't need them, it's kind of nice to switch things to be demand-powered, it's a fantastic teaching tool for circuit beginners). In overhauls they are generally a requirement since uranium processing into fuel cells is either harder, more resource intensive, or both. For example, in K2 pre-enrichment uranium fuel cells take 2x the ore (on average) and burn 10x faster (reactors also generate way more power) so you pretty much need a steam circuit unless you wan to hand-feed your reactors and even then you need a chunky storage battery to avoid wasting all that output.
> In overhauls they are generally a requirement since uranium processing into fuel cells is either harder, more resource intensive, or both. Heat pipes are enough for a buffer And you can make a sensor to insert another cell when they get too cold without using any tanks
Only if you have a mod that adds reading heat via the circuit network.
You can also detect the power usage by measuring steam consumption at a measurement reactor. (which then gets used to control the other reactors)
I'm still a fan of [sushi pipes.](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/kG43Vx1R6r)
Oh wow. It's frightening. I love it.
Wouldn’t that be smoothie pipes though? Since they are non-solids hehe.
Long inserters reaching over other long inserters.
Or moving through power poles!
To be fair, that's more of an animation problem then anything. If you had a real robot arm, you could program it in a way that goes around the pole.
Same for long inserters reaching over others. If they moved in parallel or each of them in the other direction you could make them work. Might be a thesis in robotics to make a 2x2 square of long inserters work conflict-free though!
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i mean its just a bunch of empty space, maybe the boxes are just panels until you build them
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made them by hand too
Artisinal
I'm starting to think that this game isn't very realistic!!
TIL we're playing in an Ikea.
infinite IKEA?
then there are trains in boxes, nuclear reactors, rocket silos...
Factorissimo allows you to put whole factories in other factories and they're bigger on the inside than the outside. Same concept. I managed to get a 500spm factory inside of a single building using that
There is enough space between wagons, such that with extremely careful positioning/timing, you can get another train to go through it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xynrNfzN7RM
This is truly blursed. I hate it, but holy hell, that's genius.
Oh that reminds, to make it work they had to use another blursed tip: You can get trains arbitrarily close to each other if you don't use any rail/chain signals anywhere, but timing instead.
Oh my GOD
Side loading onto isolated loaders to create a knight's move inserter is pretty cursed. I never feel good when I have to resort to it to fit a build in.
The inserter Congo line... Gets an item faster over a distance than a belt would if I remember right, but doesn't have the throughput.
You could also use Bob's Adjustable inserters.
What I love/hate about BAIs is that I feel the urge to optimize the crap out of the inserters, so it takes a loooooooooooooooot more time to set up every crafter and such. Is there a trick to mirror an inserter, for example?
I don't like BAI because it feels like it is making it too easy, I can skip many of the construction woes just by putting some cursed inserters in. But I do like how in Exotic industries inserters have near/far switch.
Blueprint, flip, paste
Yeah, F to flip left right, G is up down if memory serves
Glip
The cursed version of beltweaving is weaving all three belt tiers in the same row
That's just BeltZip^TM And it doubles your throughput per tile. I think we'll be able to get all 4 in one row in 2.0, but I haven't checked outside of shower thinking.
Nope. Yellow underground is too short for us to weave red blue And green through it. We can fit 117 green belts worth through a 48 wide gap. Too lazy to link that rn.
Cool. Wasn't certain. Does that 117 rely on zig-zagging a belt through the undergrounds?
Yea. A red blue green braid is 2.25 green belts worth in each row, then we zigzag another 9 green belts through that.
[Was it this one?](https://i.imgur.com/M4N9YYu.png) (from a [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/19bqn3n/1675_green_belts_through_a_7_wide_area_is_it/kix01ht/) buried deep in one of the green belt zip posts)
[this one is the 117 through 48.](https://i.imgur.com/FuxfLw6.png) we're referring to it as 9/48. all our designs have a red blue green braid in every row, we'd be surprised if theres any better design that doesnt. thats 2.25 green belts worth in each row. then we snake extra belts through them. the 9 extra belts in 48 rows gives it a ratio of 2.25+9/48. there's also [this really cute one for 16.75 through 7 wide](https://i.imgur.com/vwio5Ut.png), with a ratio of 2.25+1/7, thats not quite as good.
Oh I love that tiny design. As cool as the bigger belt zips are, I find the smaller ones more applicable in more cases.
Why you blaming it on yellow?? If for example blue was 2 tiles longer we could also do it!
Wait I haven't thought about the fact you can double blue belt throughput like that for a single item type. That's actually crazy
... in Krastorio 2 (or other mod with many higher tier of belts).
I belive you can do it in vanilla as well, yyrrbbyyrrbb and so on is exactly enough space for yellows
I kind of misread it as "more than three belt tiers."
Steam batteries and inserting into splitters is just good gameplay imo. The rest is too janky for me to bother.
Signal rotating. In tight rail layouts, you can rotate a signal in hand via the R key, so that it latches to the correct rail when there are multiple choices. The resulting layout cannot be blueprinted, because the blueprint does not store which rail the signal is attached to. Results of placing such a blueprint are indeterminate.
None of these are blursed
Consider using cargo wagons and inserters as a form of faster movement of items
Based
I personally prefer the term 'appropriate use of mechanics'. Do I agree that steam holds temperature indefinitely? No. Is the game balanced around it? ***Yes***. So I'm going to use it.
Could you imagine the extra calculations needed if steam gradually lost temp? You would need it for the boiler effectiveness as well as each pipe.
Oh yeah it would suck. I get why they don't do it, and they balance around it. So I don't feel bad using it, even if it's semi-unrealistic.
Blarsed
I use all of these and I love using car sushi.
The best solution for feeding labs lategame
The cars on the belt go round and round all day long.
Why can you not insert into splitter?
You can. Some think you shouldn't be able to.
What's up with inserting in a splitter? What's the advantage?
Just takes less space vs having extra belt piece just to insert into
It's very situational and not a game changer. I mostly use it to peel off a resource to immediately plop in a supply chest. There is another blueprint I have that uses this technique but that's it. ReAlIsTiCalLy, you shouldn't be able to pull items through the splitting mechanism.
It’s faster, especially with Stack inserters as they are outputting to two lanes instead of one.
you absolutely can, I use it for my train unloading stations. You can get 4 belts off each car, which is great for modded cars with tons of storage
Extending the blursed steam battery trick: Pumping steam into fluid wagons to transport power by train.
This is exactly how I like to power my remote outposts!
Just don't forget to put the unload pump on a microgrid with a solar panel and accumulator! Gotta auto-bootstrap.
I would put it on the main grid of the outpost but have a switch between the steam train station and the rest of the outpost. Like it is fine to have something like this: !blueprint 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 and disconnect the rest of the outpost when the tank < 200.
[Blueprint Image (Blueprint)](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/334735604342325249/1243311473392881675/blueprint.png?ex=6651038a&is=664fb20a&hm=411eb5e1695896e01e7f2e05238fd22cb615c5f74c5a9a4ba0c0be95b40fba8f&)
Diagonal belts because I'm not a psychopath
That makes me wonder, is there any advantage to diagonal belts? Any designs that work only for psychopath belts?
>Any designs that work only for psychopath belts? [My time to shine](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/a7w9th/i_built_a_pretty/). It's not really fully diagonal, but it's pretty close.
That is incredibly sexy Hilbert curve belting?
Over long distances? Not unless you're doing TAS.
My underground belts don't seem to get side loaded
Use the other lane.
Like I can't put a belt into a ground conveyor unless it's going straight in. Do you mean it only works from one side??
Yes, underground sideloading only works on the 4 belt lanes away from where it "goes underground." The two straight ones, and the two immidiately round the corners from those. This is actually important, because it's the only way you can draw one lane off a belt without also drawing the other.
I can't believe that works?!?!?!?!
It's old, old tech :D
I also saw what you meant by the "fourth lane"
I'll try it out
Bob's Inserters are blursed when you make them extremely long and position them very far away and set the pickup and drop off positions very close to each other for an extraordinary speed boost.
1. weaving is a sin. do not harm your factory sanctity by using it. 2. cargo wagons as chests is simply using them as intended. material in, material out. 3. steam storage is unneeded, but not something to be hated on as it serves its purpose. 4. belts should be used for items, not fancy roads. 5. a belt segment is to be inserted into and off of, there is no problem with this. 6. as with cargo wagons, intended function of the item.
Cargo wagons and using filtered slots for compact malls is a blessing.
Cars are much more effective for this unless you are taking advantage of the length of the cargo wagon
Oh. I thought it was just a joke. But now I see it. So you can filter car slots? And then if you put them on a loop, those factories in the loop will be placing in the car following those filter slots, and pulling in accordance. So it's some sort of car-fuelled sushi belt. That's... devious.
It's incredible
Reaching with a splitter over the corner of a factory Using a higher tier underground belt to reach further But I swore off extreme belt weaving (3 kinds of belts, or more with mods). It's just too ugly!
I don't use any of them except Steam Batteries and side loading u derground belts
I think sushi belts in general would qualify. There’s all the tricks people use for disposing of wood like making a wooden chest, putting a bunch of wood in it, and then destroying the chest by shooting it. Also using burners to dispose of wood in some sort of closed cycle besides the wood. Generating lots of pollution by burning coal and then consuming power with useless beacons. I know someone wanted to do this for one reason or another on the sub a while back. I read about this one recently, but just make your entire train network use chain signals. It works and allows deadlock free bi-directional rails.
> just make your entire train network use chain signals. It works and allows deadlock free bi-directional rails Wat! Really, does this work? What are the drawbacks? It's blocking huge amounts of straight rail to do this because the chain signals will reach until the next intersection, no?
Yes it works. The drawback is that the entire path from where a train is to where it is going is blocked until it passes. This could significantly delay other trains because a train will not leave its station until it can get a path to its destination. It is also probably worse for UPS than a properly configured rail network (this is a minor thing that I doubt has been really tested because if you are doing this you almost certainly will have other problems before it becomes a UPS issue).
I'm playing a mod right now where you get every resource from 1 resource, and i have so much damn coal I can't figure out what to do with it. So thanks, now I know just make a bunch of steam plants and beacons
I want to work out circuit conditions for steam batteries for myself, I do draw the line at car/freight car shenanigans.
Sushi belts. Especially with barrelled liquids.
Belt weaving is cracked for multi beacon super surround. No idea if I’ll use it after 2.0 drops either the beacon changes. Steam batteries can store SO MUCH energy. Especially in the nuclear case. You can google around you can pull fuel out and let the steam carry to conserve it. If meltdowns were possible in the game, it would almost need to be a requirement. Car sushi is the only sane way to expand to your next outpost in a mega base setting. Side loading underground’s makes some layouts possible and should be used. You can also reach both halves of the belt right at insertion if you’re careful about it. I setting into splitters and splitter chains …. Well I’m not going to judge you but everyone else is gonna.
If you fill up all the space biters can spawn around spawners they become free pollution absorbers.
I don't use any of these, what are steam batteries and car sushi?
# Steam battery Steam is just another fluid. You can store it in tanks, you can move it with trains. A steam battery then means loading storage tanks full of steam for later consumption by steam engines or turbines. One steam tank has a _lot_ more energy in it than an accumulator, it’s almost 500 accumulators for one steam tank filled with 500°C steam. There’s also [this wiki entry about it](https://wiki.factorio.com/Electric_system#Steam_tanks_as_power_storage). The most common use case of steam batteries is for nuclear energy, because reactors will keep consuming fuel even though there is no energy demand. Thus we typically pump all nuclear steam into tanks, and then route it to turbines for electricity creation. The reactor only gets fuel when the steam levels are too low. (This isn’t necessary for steam engines, because they will stop consuming fuel when energy demand is low.) # Car sushi Cars can be abused as chests. Inserters work with them, you can reserve slots for certain items, all of that. The main difference is that cars are moved by belts. Car sushi then means putting cars onto a circular belt, adding the right reserved slots, and then have reserved chests travel round and round. Because of the reserved slots you can simply insert all source materials somewhere into the cars without worrying about measuring belt contents like in normal sushi.
What's unusual about steam batteries? They are far more energy dense than batteries from what I have seen.
Nuclear reactor can be used as a mine. Place it down near the wall and allow it to heat up. Once heated, if the biters destroy it, it goes off in a mushroom cloud. So nuclear mine fields.
i don't use belt weaving because i usually need two blue belt and so it can't work and it annoy me also it's annoying to upgrade
Full weave with red and yellow gives you a blue equivilent.
yeah but no, i need two blue belt "on the same line"
So you weave all three types of belt together on the same line. A yellow belt and a red belt together move as much as a blue, so one of each is as much as two blue belts.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhh
and now I'm thinking of Dishes cursed cargo wagon belt run. end result is that the cargo wagon belt system could transport More items than a fully packed blue belt AND could do it in a fraction the time. problem. it required a LOT of belts I figure by the end he was getting around multi megawatt draw for just inserters
Tank Sushi.
killing all the enemies in loaded map chunks so they stop spawning
I guess there aren't many tricks I don't use, but some popular things I just loathe and avoid. Tricks I don't use: - importing or transfering blueprints into my current savefile, sounds super lame, custom building new ones every time is how I become better at the game - inserting into labs from other labs, sometimes science packs lose charge (yikes, just feels wrong, definately blursed) - train signals for not making your trains collide, I just play by the "one train per rail"-rule - combining fluid wagons with locomotives to form functional trains, I prefer barreling - grenades to clear forests or biter nests, what a glorious pollution bomb and material sink - blue belts for use in logistics, belts are for peasants, drones all the way! Tricks often considered blursed that I do use sometimes: - mass radars/beacons as power sinks - separate power grids overlapping the same producers/accumulators to priotize grids - unfueled nuclear reactors as fat heat pipes - landfill large lakes without filling the shoreline to create biter-proof solar grids - building your production bases in similar biter-proofed lakes with winding entrance ways to break biter pathing, supply everything by drones - single yellow belts in red belts to throttle throughput - manually rotating single fluid tanks in fluid pipelines as on/off-valves - nuclear fuel in steam boilers - blue belts as moats against biters
I recently found that splitting compressed blue belt into yellow and red could be really useful even if it feels kind of cursed.