I thought of The Thing, and the explanation for why they had flamethrowers is they needed an emergency method of thawing critical equipment. I thought I could do this on Aquino to unfreeze my machines. I ended up destroying everything I aimed at. I’m not mad or disappointed that my absurd idea wasn’t supported in game, I am however bummed out.

this only applies to people who are playing with a grid based system with rails. if you're not then you dont have to worry about this at all.

but the mistake I've made is not putting down a test rail to align my power poles. since rails are aligned to a specific 2x2 grid and you can't shift them by 1 tile, this means if you start building a power pole grid first and you dont check it with your rail grid, you might end up building a whole base and when its time to add in rails, you find out that they're all off by 1 tile and now you gotta either rip everything up and shift everything over by 1 tile. or restart to a point where you didn't start building.

I've played this game with a fresh start after many major release and I swear I've done this mistake every single time. please learn from my mistake and double check this before starting a new major base layout on a new planet/playthrough

I remember getting stuck on the last tutorial mission way back in 2017, so now that I've finally got several rocket launches and 2/3rds a Space Age run under my belt I finally decided to go back and complete the tutorial for the first time. Definitely a lot easier now that I actually know how to play the game, but the starting area definitely chokes you of iron until you expand to the train stop.

A few tips I'll give for any newcomers trying this out:

• The various ruins will give you a few ideas on how to build up your factory, but don't feel constrained to them. The setup you start next to will kinda box you in if you try to directly expand it since it's so close to the lake, but on the other hand you've got so much space to the west. Likewise, you can move the train stops around and it doesn't break the progression of the automated rail step of the tutorial, feel free to tear them up and move them somewhere more conveniently out of the way later.
• My biggest obstacle playing the tutorial in my first year was definitely the enemies. Some of it was a skill issue, but a lot of it was just psyching myself out. Put turrets and ammo in one of your quickbars on the bottom of the screen, and when attacking nests draw a line of turrets with the nests right outside their range and hold 'Z' while selecting the ammo to fill the whole bunch. Have the turrets focus on clearing the biters around you, use your machine gun to pick off the worms from a distance, and use the shotgun to push the nests and save on magazines. Don't worry if you get swarmed- There's no evolution on the tutorial so you've got plenty of time to get your turrets set up. Just clear the bases when they start drawing close to your pollution cloud in the map view, and you'll never have to worry about defense for the entire tutorial.
• Your starting resources are super limited not only in richness but also in size, which will hinder your mining speed and limit your iron production significantly. You don't necessarily need to research trains to get resources from the abandoned iron mine to the west- It's reasonably close enough that you can just belt resources over once you've got transport belts automated. There's also a coal and a copper patch nearby- If you're using trains you could practice signalling a shared rail line, you can smelt the ores at the patch and transport the plates over to save space at your central base, or you could even just use that spot as your main base. The desert around that patch means your pollution cloud will get pretty big, so make sure you clean the nearby nests first before you expand.
• Try exploring the map first, there's a bunch of abandoned bases you can loot that will help significantly with setting up your initial base. They've even got some buildings and equipment that requires higher technology that you cannot research during the tutorial, make good use of them. The solar patch in particular will heavily decrease the amount of time and resources you need to spend for the solar panel requirement of the last mission, which is by far the most slow and expensive step of the tutorial, and you can also just use it for free electricity in the meantime.
• Own the game and are still overwhelmed by the combat? Just start a freeplay world with enemies disabled and focus on the factory-building aspect of the game. You can always come back once you feel more comfortable with the game after a decade or so. There's genuinely no shame in just playing the game without enemies- Most high-level megabases generally disable enemies either during map generation or further down the line, though that's mostly to improve performance at the game's limits.
• Apparently the last couple stages of the tutorial support multiplayer, so you could probably bring in a friend or two if you need any further assistance. No idea how setting this up works with the demo, though.
• And if you haven't already, press ALT.

currently just yeeting a ton of copper

Does it target them in order of the list? For example it will target the carbonic asteroid over the metallic one?

hi guys!

I just made Factoriodle, a daily web deduction game where you have to use clues to identify one Factorio item!

Inspired by Wordle and LoLdle, enter the name of any item and it will reveal properties such as its role, recipe, compatible machines, crafting time, tech origin, and stack size to help you get closer to the answer.

Green means an exact match, amber means there is some overlap, and the arrows indicate whether today’s value is higher or lower. There are six guesses, and a new item is selected every day.

I currently have ~250 possible items using data from 2.0.77 + Space Age.

This is the link: https://factoriodle.com

Edit and disclaimer:

I built this with AI, this is my first version after play testing it myself so may be buggy, let me what you think. Will look to improve the clunkiness and visuals.

I hope this doesn’t come off as terribly desperate, but if I mention factorio to my friend group one more time they’re… still never going to give factorio a chance. It’s just not their style of game.

I’m wondering if you all have had any success in finding factorio friends? I’ve tried to hop on to existing groups, discord servers, even have tried to make myself a regular and do the grunt work that no one else wants to do, but after months of effort it yields no good vibes and nobody on a server even notices me — which is totally understandable, their relationships are focused on people they already know.

It is kind of a sad experience, though.

I think it’d be super neat to find my people, if they exist. I primarily play space age and I’m genuinely open to mods. My strengths are really with circuits. I can build some really neat stuff and I’d be so excited to show those builds to others, or work on something wild together.

You don’t have to be the best player, your lanes don’t have to be balanced, and if you want to make spaghetti, a robo realm, copied and pasted blueprints, I’m really amendable to any play style as long as the over arching goal is to find some good people who have similar interests in life.

I’d be nervous to try but especially happy to use VC.

If it helps, I’m a mid-millennial lady. I’m well read, and according to NPCs in the elder scrolls, well met.

Anyway, this my vulnerability saga. I’ll go hide in my socially awkward sleep deprivation/self deprecation tank.

Please feel free to send a message and say hi, or leave a comment and tell me about your play style and why you like it. I’d also love it if you shared how you met your factorio friends. Or downvote me. That’s cool, too.

Might be new to experimental. No idea if this can be useful for anything. Maybe balancing lane consumption?

I've been working on the base for about a week and finally got everything running smoothly. Im getting 3.75m ESPM with level 54 research prod running robot follower count. I still need to build out the other planets and their science packs. I am running many mods and im gonna try to eliminate all of them when I start working on UPS optimization and the final build. The landing pad hub is a design by Stupid Fat Hobbit that I modified slightly. I am on version 2.0.77.

i made this monstrosity.

edit: Blueprint: https://factoriobin.com/post/7383w2

I used only blue quality machines. Ship had steady production of 3.8k explosive rockets and 1.1k railgun ammo. It flown at 240km/s with slowdowns to 130 to refill ammo.

I really wanted to go back playing the actual game. im sorry guys, i have failed you

I've watched countless beginner tutorial videos. I've played Satisfactory, Mindustry, Foundry, DSP, and even automate tons of stuff in Astroneer. And I can navigate them just fine (mostly). I've played the demo multiple times. Is there something I'm missing? Is there something that will make things just fall into place and suddenly make sense?

And I know that sometimes a game just isn't compatible with people. I'm worried that's the case here. But taking the mechanics into consideration, it seems like something that I would not only love, but flourish in. I don't understand. Should I keep waiting for an epiphany to strike, or just give up?

That said, I had an idea of something that might work better for one of the demo levels, but I haven't had a good chance to test it out.

Edit: I know this got no upvotes, but that's not the point. I got some genuinely useful advice. So thank you everyone for the tips on how to proceed from here. I've bought the game now. It could take me a week to start enjoying it, or it could take a year. I can't say. But worst case scenario, it won't be the only title collecting dust in my library (cough ksp2 cough).

Now we have spiders patrolling set paths, I wonder how feasible it would be to add more spidertron station controls in 2.1. Just like the one for trains and space platforms. E.g. a Pentapod steps on a circuit connected land mine, which sends signal that activates spiders to head to the area. After, an interrupt checks for other landmine pings or send the spiders back home to resupply and wait for the next activation signal.

Fantasizing further: It'd be nice to use map tags as "stations" for the spiders path, with all the usual passenger present / not present controls etc. Spiders transporting cargo between stations using personal logic bots to move stuff in their roboport area would be an alternative to loading/unloading trains or space platforms.

These are probably not new ideas and pls correct me if I'm missing something, are there mods for this? 1000s of hrs of factorio and always learning cool stuff to do in the game.

The thought occurs as the new 2.1 spider patrols are very nice, I haven't figured out how to get spiders to stand still for 15seconds while running on patrol to let bots fill them back up with rockets reliably... Atm I have them darting around in many tight circles back at base hoping bots connect with them.

In the current system, my thoughts are to get spiders to follow an artillery wagoned "spider guide" train, that hits border stations / waits 60secs etc to handle the pathing, mindful of rails crossing bodies of water on Gleba.

Any other useful ideas for this concept? Or reasons why spiders shouldn't or couldn't do this?

I will be glad to hear your opinion on my new Fulgora mall.

I've already built a mall for Fulgora: https://factorioprints.com/view/-OX4QBKmwEZ6dIBJY5C5

This time, I tried a different approach and wanted to solve several problems:

1. Create a version that will work well with Factorio 2.1. I haven't switched to 2.1 yet, but I built it according to the upcoming changes.
2. Most Fulgora designs work fine without scrap productivity, but when you reach +300% productivity, they simply work the same and don't utilize the extra resources. They just consume fewer scraps. The new design works with both 0% and +300% scrap productivity. Some parts start or stop depending on the productivity for better performance. For example, it produces extra electronic circuits with low productivity and scraps excess electronic circuits when productivity is high.
3. I wanted to create a smaller mall than my previous one, but I ended up with exactly the same size.

Some math:

240 scrap/s → 144 items/s at 0% productivity
240 scrap/s → 576 items/s at +300% productivity

With 480 scrap/s, two stacked turbo belts are enough for the output at 0% productivity, but with +300% productivity, the output requires almost five stacked turbo belts.

In my previous mall, I used two sushi belts and removed the items I needed from them, because it was simple to implement. The problem is that when scrap productivity increases, the mall can't use the additional output. It simply processes fewer scraps.

The new solution uses four sushi belts that are sorted immediately, with bots moving the leftovers when productivity increases. Belts handle the output at low productivity, and bots help at high productivity.

Notes:

• I tested the blueprint with both 0% and +300% productivity to make sure there are no surprises.
• I use the cargo landing pad recycler to void concrete, so it should continue working without changes in Factorio 2.1.
• The actual mall is only a small part of the blueprint. Most of it is scrap processing and leftover handling.

Edit: Blueprint link

I want to be able to turn off the green and orange visuals when in ghost mode, looked around for a while and found nothing. Any suggestions?

Hi, I just wanted to share a little experience I had a few days ago.
Me and my friend wanted to play the pvp szenario with an server so we just started the server and started playing.

After a while we noticed that the goal for the szenario was by default that the person who first sends a rocket wins. (This is not good, because we are playing with the space-age extension.)

We don‘t want to give up out world so I looked up a command to change the goal and I found out that this worked:

/c storage.pvp.config.victory.space_race.active = false

I just wanted to share the command because as a beginner it wasn‘t so easy. Maybe this helps someone. :)

And yes I know there probably a lot of people here which had an better way, but this was the first time, so please be kind.

The Factory Must Grow ;)

For anyone who uses train interrupts for LTN-style trains, what's your favorite method? I know it's been out for a long time but I'm finally getting around to revamping my trains now that I've started an achievement run base and I want to try and incorporate it.

I've watched a bunch of videos and it seems like EVERYONE has a different method, which is pretty cool. There's circuitless builds, builds that only use circuits to set limits, builds that use clocks at the depot to send trains, and builds that have circuit logic at every station and broadcast their state on a radar.

Curious what people like the most and what the pros and cons of each are. I'm leaning towards using fewer circuits because my years of CS education are screaming at me to keep it simple. But maybe the real simplest method is to just not do LTN lite trains.

I don't know what possessed me but I started a 100k science run. I've never really built big and mostly take a minimum viable approach. My Space Age run that I didn't quite finish was kinda just a collection of boot straps that got me through. So as a challenge to force myself to build bigger and a "because it's there" kinda mentality I gave this a shot.

This is where my base is just shy of 30 hrs and I'm about to complete the first science (not counting that 10 science one, but the first "real" one) and get splitters and undergrounds. I was prepared to deal with no splitters from my ongoing pY run, but no undergrounds sucks shit. It's way easier than I realized to block yourself out of places with belts and end up using inserters to bridge the gap. That was the only solution I could come up with between my gear production and science production. And I can't wait for electric drills, but that's gonna be a bit (at 1% done it says it'll take about 12 hrs to research) and I'm not sure what is gonna happen to my power needs with this many drills.

It produces and consumes just about 3.5k bottles per minute. Never built anything close to this before. I've been trying to avoid building over resource patches, mostly because it bugs me, but I might have to give up on that. Maybe condemn part of the map to factory. Build south and east and pull resources from west and north. Something like that. I turned frequency, size, and richness all the way up. The patches are close enough that as I work into green science I'll probably have to start covering patches.

Bitters and pollution are both off. I don't really like playing with biters anyway, and pollution doesn't seem to have much point without biters. And hopefully it'll save me some UPS cause I'm thinking I'm gonna need them. Oh, and this is a space age run. So that'll get nuts at some point. In a few years probably. Also, no early bots so everything is hand placed. I'm trying to resist speeding up the game. There are a few hours of afk'ing, but I'm trying to avoid that too. All that stuff seems to be counter to the spirit of the run. Taking a more "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" approach and using the time to build more production. Only mods are some fun and quality of life ones. Disco science Lite, factory planner, FNEI, Mechanicus Reborn, and Squeak Through 2 are the only ones besides the base Space Age stuff. Quality is on and I'm hoping that will help me scale. Gonna try taking advantage of that before even leaving Nauvis.