Wourme and I got a good start on this, and it’s way past my bed time. I love this game.
Just popped in briefly to take a look.
Man, if I didn’t have plans for today already I’d be building y’all a proper smelting setup and electronic circuit production at least
Yes, the first thing we each said was that we would not be on very long. And then, oh, look, it’s 3 a.m.
One thing I plan to try is setting up a remote outpost in monster-heavy territory, to see how that goes. And I’ll send the products over to the main factory by train, of course.
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Tesla just made a Factorio open-air factory in real life:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-25/the-future-of-tesla-hinges-on-this-gigantic-tent
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Wow yeah, reading some of the blog posts, sounds way more polished than before. Guess it’s pretty close to exiting early access?
It sounds like they’re not really adding content for experienced players at this point, but I might still replay it to check out how the new tech tree flows: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-275
Also lol at this
Weak.
Eh, once you know OG Factorio in-and-out you load up a bunch of mods that do weird things to the tech tree and ratios and it’s a whole new learning experience. Similar to Kerbal Space Program in that regard.
i just want those high resolution monsters baby. gimme those 3d-rendered 2019 donkey kong-ass sprites
Version 1.0 comes out in about a week. I have intentionally stayed away from the game for a long time in anticipation of this.
Also, someone made a mod that allows trains to jump.
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I still haven’t revisited Factorio and now they’ve added this sort of thing.
Also, they recently announced some enhancements to the trains. Since trains are basically my favorite part of Factorio, I’ll have to play the game again one of these days to see that as well.
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I started playing this again the other day, and unsurprisingly I’ve been spending way too much time in it.
My intention was to finally try out the Space Age DLC, but I guess that kicks in only after you reach the end of the original game. I’m getting fairly close to that, since I already know basically what to do.
The title screen shows off some of the different biomes, and I’m looking forward to seeing at least one of them.
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Sorta, the end of the original game is now shortened because launching a rocket is now an integral part of space platforms so it is much much cheaper to do so. Pro tip, you will need more rocket launch pads than you think you do. Take your normal and at least double it is my recommendation.
Also, while it may seem like an interesting idea to start over on a new planet, space platforms are intended to ferry materials. No need to build assemblers making belts there when you have assemblers making belts at home (Exceptions obviously when you’re already established and can take advantage of the strengths of each new biome). There is no wrong answer to which new biome to try first since you will eventually go to every one of them, though Gleba tends to throw people off the most. And your bases at these spots will tend to feel like outposts more than proper builds by the time you got the science and unique material set up for shipping back home. Thats okay, expected, and baseline.
I’ll come back later with my pyanodons journey, a mod pack that really complicates factory making.
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Tonight I was constantly being hit with waves of enemies that were making incursions despite my turrets, so I decided to go hunting once again. My usual method is to tediously build leapfrogging chains of turrets but this time I decided to try the tank, which I don’t think existed the last time I played.
I loaded it up with explosive shells, which I’d been spun up an assembly machine to make the other night, not knowing when or if I’d end up using them.
That combination is very effective. Luckily, I noticed just as I was about to head out that you can give the tank an electric shield just like you can your character. That saved me many times as I roamed around and cleared out Zerg nests.
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Right so, Pyanodons. It’s a really complex mod and like AngelBob they are both trying to emulate real life processing of materials. You don’t just shove iron ore into a smelter and out pops iron plates (you can, but it is incredibly inefficient), you will get tech that will let you grind it up in a jaw crusher to process it, then screen it to get varying levels of graded ore, which can either get passed on or further crushed to get the grade just right, and then shoved into a smelter for more efficient plate production. And of course, having to deal with the different byproducts of these processes, particularly ash from the burner machines; you will be inundated all through the early game and then shift between having too much and having too little as you research means to use it directly instead of as overflow.
On top of that though, that wasn’t enough so eventually you will get to make futuristic sci-fi stuff, like genetically modifying animals and plants with cultured earth DNA so they can be factory-farmed for things like manure (key ingredient for urea early on which you need to separate out for the cyanic acid that goes into melamine which gets combined with six other materials to make more efficient batteries). But your burner stage is extended, and in fact in cases like assemblers are the more efficient option for a while, and the sheer number of different processes you will be making builds for means it is a slow, deliberate pack. My current save is 433 hours, albeit sometimes idle in the background while my focus is elsewhere, but playtimes of that length are expected especially played solo. One of the first big milestones is making your first “green” circuit, something that a normal game would be nonchalantly putting out in less than half an hour, because that is the first time you get access to splitters. Here, you have to make some of the components like vacuum tubes and resistors first.
It took some time for me to really wrap my head around doing this, because when you know like 19 different ways to make syn gas all at different levels of technology it’s hard to decide what needs built and where. Many people suggest doing things like busses or street blocks of railways because that reduces the decision-making for where; if it’s all centralized or you have a designated amount of space to work within then the focus is more on arrangement of the pieces. I did street blocks for my Seablock run years earlier so I decided once I got trains (only 200 hours in!) to just make a few trunk rail lines and then slap stations off that as I went.
This isn’t the full extent of the place but it does a pretty good representation of the sprawl. I’m especially happy how this section worked out where due to being bounded on three sides by resources but big enough to fit stations for my train length it accumulated stations over time to fill the spaces between.
You have from left to right, then bottom upwards
- basic resource extraction (alien flora)
- “temporary” arrangement for mining fluid
- hydrocarbon catalyst and mid tier construction material production (nichrome)
- alternative use of processing borax for glass production (and an acid for much later uses)
- concrete (yes that single assembler is enough for 20 a second)
- limestone overflow from other locations to make inefficient cellulose
The Py Alien Life part of the mod is the most interesting part of my factory but also the most irritating. Your first introduction starts off simple with seaweed. There are samples floating in the water along with fish and with a single collection and a facility you can make more. Pretty earth-like, not much to it.
The plant life seems to stay like that, once you got a sample you can propagate relatively easily. You can get more exotic forms like enormous fungus that you need for “flavonoids” initially, but eventually expand use for other animal food, or in this particular case, implied that their mycelium network helps other plants to flourish.
The alien animals though, they are much more involved. You get introduced to the vrauk, a scaled up equivalent to an ant, which you need to farm mostly for their formic acid. Their pens need cocoons to make more vrauk, which are generated in facilities called “reproductive complexes”. Both need modules that are just more vrauk, so you start with these pens and complexes running very slowly until you can get more vrauk. They need at least three or more ingredients for the least efficient recipe, going up to 8 or more with the most efficient.
To process animals for their materials, you need to send them to slaughterhouses to get cut up into parts and their fluids. That means you will need a robust system to handle the overflow of byproducts like guts, l*rd bones and so on. I elected to send them on to recyclers that grind it down to generic biomass for other uses but even that hasn’t been enough for the quantities I’m at.
Or the cottongut, essentially smart mice you need to make a type of science. As you can see, it is supported on-site by a lot of other alien plants for a trickle (ie less than 0.5 a second) that gets sent to a facility that implies they retire to a nice farm elsewhere for some bioscience technobabble.
But the worst so far is the py’s equivalent of a parasitic wasp, the arqad. Once they’re established they drink tall oil and make petro-combs that can be centrifuged for “easy” bitumen or hand them a special comb and a notHorse to make honey. The keyword is “establish”. You don’t start with a queen from your recombinant efforts, you get a couple of drone arqads and a handful of eggs to parasitize vrauks with. Then you have a few hives devoted to the task of maaaaaaybe generating a queen every 100 production runs. And then you have to continue with those hives because the queen will eventually be exhausted making more eggs on average once every 1000 production runs.
Of course at this point you need lots of power. Your basic electric assembler? It takes ~1MW to operate. And your starting power generation from the default Factorio is nerfed; boilers only generate 7.5 steam a second instead of 15 and the steam engine is only half as efficient on that temperature giving only 3.7MW. Below was a typical setup in the early game and you can see how much ash is returned.
Now I have available actual powerplants that use molten salt to transfer heat from consuming processed coal into pressurized steam. Instead of something like 47 MW from a full lane of coal I can get 473 MW instead. And apparently I now need more ofthem because I recently built a set of centrifuges for getting albumin out of blood and they take 258 MW a piece!
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It sure takes a lot of work to get ready for a trip to a new planet. About a month into my new game and I still haven’t done it. Between packing my mobile platform with things I think I’ll need and making sure my home world is ready to run mostly on autopilot (since I have no idea how hard it will be to get back if I need to).
I’m probably being overcautious but that’s okay because it’s fun either way. And like that it’s a big, mysterious step. Kind of wish the title screen hadn’t even shown me what the other planets look like. I expect to take off sometime this week, but I had the same thought last week.
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One neat thing that really takes the pressure off your first trip away from navis is the ability to equip your tanks with robo ports and construction drones
If you just supply them with extra repair kits, walls, and ammo this can get you through most crises remotely since you can just pilot them around from the map and fix or beef up any problem areas even if there’s a break in your roboport coverage.
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This “advanced Factorio” stuff sounds great, but I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of commitment at this point.
I once tried those mods that dramatically expand Starbound with a few friends, and that was one of my all-time favorite video game experiences. This reminds me of that, but I imagine this one goes much further.
I would say if you have a few friends willing to tinker in a multiplayer server then that’s where py really shines. There is typically too much stuff for one person to handle, in between setting up new builds, then tracing down shortages now introduced or that were lurking as “bugs” in your logistics that have finally surfaced, then figuring what your next step it does sometimes feel overwhelming. I imagine having someone dedicated to certain areas of factory work like resource extraction, exotic farming/spinning up new genetic lines, hydrocarbon processing (as usual, pipes are a nightmare), or logistical bridging would help that attention switching and maintaining focus.
But I wouldn’t jump directly into this if it is the first big mod experience in Factorio. I had added some of QOL stuff that wasn’t present in the main modpack, for example the loaders that are part of the train stations that let you input/output a full belt line are incredibly convenient! You would have to know a little what you don’t enjoy and navigate the mod listing in-game to do this tweaking. Otherwise I would suggest alternatives like: Krastorio changes enough to make it feel different from the base game while still maintaining the same level of friction of play mechanically. There’s the older combination of AngelBob that has a heavy focus on metal processing but is about middle level in complexity if pyanodons is our highest. Nullius does their own full conversion of being on an airless, lifeless planet poor in heavy metals like copper and bootstrapping it to earth-like conditions. Or if you want a similar level of incredibly intricate complexity there is Space Exploration, the precursor to the expansion pack.
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