Jul 28, 2020
I love love love this castle!!
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I love love love this castle!!
Oil Processing Simplification and Blue Science Changes
I've been refraining from writing another guide post about science packs, while the discussions about changing some of the recipies in recent Friday Facts were still ongoing. But as of now, the only change is to chemical science, which I already did anyway. So here's an explanation of the changes as well as a quick update to the blue science guide from last time. Afterwards I'll get to work on the remaining two science packs, when I can.
The changes described here are already live in the most recent update to the experimental and include changes to oil refining and chemical science. As discussed in the recent Friday Facts, these changes are meant to make it easier for new players to get into chemical processing. For this, the basic oil processing was greatly simplyfied. Instead of crafting each type of oil and having to balance those, the basic processing now produces exclusively pertoleum gas.
Unlike previously, the basic processing no longer takes crude oil in both inputs. The inputs are now dedicated to only one type of input, so you no longer have to remember which one is for water if you want to make switching over to advanced oil processing easier. This will also avoid the problem of changing the recipe the refineries are set to, which previously caused the new "can't mix two fluids" warning if there were still refineries with the basic recipe in the pipe network.
The other two liquids often seemed much less useful to new players. You're just going to put all heavy oil into making lube and then crack everything down into petroleum, once you get advanced processing. The new update changed some things to improve this. I already talked about the previous change to requiring solid fuel in blue science and even praised it for making your first chemical build more straightforward, since you could now make plastic from petroleum and put everything else into crafting solid fuel. At least until you get advanced oil processing.
Now it is even more simple. Since you only get petroleum out of the basic processing, you can then craft plastic and sulphur from it without having to worry about any of the other liquids. The first still goes into making red chips, while the latter replaced solid fuel as an ingredient in chemical science packs.
Only after you unlock new research using your first couple of blue science packs will you get the other types of chemicals. Heavy oil still goes mainly into making lube, while light oil is now an ingredient in rocket fuel. So aside from that, you can still use it mostly for cracking into petroleum or use it for making solid fuel.
The only downside to this is, that it doesn't incentivise crafting solid fuel early on, like the previous recipe change did. You still need it for rocket fuel of course. But having blue science require solid fuel was a nice mid-game incentive to make lots of it and use it for your steam engines, trains or even your furnace lines. Now it's been relegated to "that intermediate product you need for rocket fuel" again.
Since rocket fuel now also requires light oil, this means a new liquid that needs to be piped down the main bus for those of us who build using that principle. I usually don't put all the liquids on the bus, only lubricant and sulphuric acid, since those are needed in more advanced recipes. I keep the other chemicals in their dedicated oil processing area and do most of the crafts there.
With these changes an early blue science build could look something like this.
I chose to make sulphur locally since it crafts pretty quickly and you don't need a lot of it. So no need to go overboard with chem plants for now. And making them in a dedicated area and putting sulphur on the bus doesn't seem worth it due to the low demand and not being needed in any other recipe (besides for making acid). That's up to you though
Now that the blue science changes are hopefully final and won't be changed again in the foreseeable future, purple science is up next!
Below the cut is the revised chemical science pack build.
More Filter Applications
Besides making an entire cargo wagon with one type of item, you can also mix them. This is another application where filters come in real handy. Let's say you want to make green circuits and need to bring in iron and copper plates. If you want, you can make a train that has a filtered inventory so it fills up half the cargo with iron plates and then drives on to the next smelting area to fill the rest up with copper plates.
Outputting them at the intended green circuit factory can then be achieved in an orderly fashion by using filter inserters. That way, you can choose exactly where each type of item is going without having to use splitters.
Another possible use for filter inserters is for mixed ore patches. Sure you can filter all the belts with splitters, but setting that up can be quite laborious. It also isn't good for your belt throughput! If you have a full belt of mixed ore and split a fraction of it off, then you'll never get a full belt's worth of throughput. Depending on the size of the ore patch this might not be a problem if you can extract enough lines of belt anyway and merge them together. But still, you just hate to see this don't you?
The easy solution is just filling your train with all the various ores you're getting from the mixed patch (with no filters on the cargo wagon itself, just fill it up with everything you've got!) and then send the train off to go through all the trainstations that take iron/copper/coal/stone one after the other! For each station, schedule the train to leave as soon the number of the respective item hits zero and then go to the next.
If you use filter (stack) inserters at all your trainstations, then only the correct items will be taken from the cargo. Mixed ore patches are no problem at all with this approach, no filtered splitters needed!
Another classic use of filtered inventory slots is a "building train", i.e. a train with all the items necessary for building trainstations, outposts, defences or what have you!
You have to filter the inventory slots, because your inserters don't know what or how much they're supposed to put in the train. And of course you want to be able to send it back to base to restock automatically without having to do it yourself.
So you can set up filters on your wagons to make sure you get a certain number of stacks of the items you want. Without these filters, your inserters would just fill up the inventory with the more readily available items and leave no room for others. Here’s an example of what my building train looks like:
Fourty nuclear bombs may seem like overkill, but you never know how many biters you might run into when scouting for new ore patches! ;)
One thing of note here are the rail tracks in the very first cargo wagon. This is really helpful, because you can reach the first wagon while riding in the front of the train. So if you run out of track in your personal inventory, while manually driving your train and putting down rails in front of you loony-tunes-style, you can just grab more rails from the cargo. The other wagons normally can't be accessed from the front of the train.
Setting up the building train in a new save used to be a lot of work. But you don't have to worry about that anymore, since trains and wagons can be blueprinted now! Meaning you only have to do it once and can then use it over and over again!
The various types of filters can really make your life a lot easier, so it’s good if you know how to use them and keeping the possibilities in mind when building!
Cargo wagons with item filters
When building a large train network, I like to make sure my factories don't get "contaminated" with wrong items if there's a mistake somewhere.
For trainstations that output items, I use filter (stack) inserters. Using some circuit conditions and a constant combinator set to the desired item, you can make sure the inserters won't grab anything else. This also helps when manually driving a train with building materials and stopping near an output station. No more power poles and transport belts clogging up your smelting lines!
That's it for output stations, inputs are a little more bothersome to set up. I like to set filters on my cargo wagons to make sure only the correct items are loaded into it. You can [mouse-wheel click] (default controls) on an empty inventory space in your cargo wagons to choose what can go in it, similar to the hotbar.
If you want to filter all your trains manually this way, that would be a lot of work. Just imagine, having to [mouse-wheel click] on each square, selecting the correct item from the pop-up menu, oh no...
Luckily, Factorio has several copy and paste-features! Similar to being able to copy ( [shift]+[right click] ) the recipe of an assembler and paste ( [shift]+[left click] ) it onto another one, you can also copy filters. This applies both to a single filtered inventory slot inside a cargo wagon, as well as one wagon's filters to another!
So instead of mouse-wheel clicking over and over, you can set one filter and then use [shift] to copy it to all the other inventory slots.
And once you have one entire wagon set up, you can just copy the entire wagon's filters onto another one! Which means you only have to set the filters on a wagon for each type of item once and then you can just copy them as needed.
So, just hover over the filtered wagon, [shift]+[right click] to copy the wagons settings. If you hold [shift], the entity currently “in the clipboard” will be marked green. Now hover your mouse over the wagon you want to copy (it will get marked in yellow) and [left click] while still holding [shift].
But since we can now blueprint trains and wagons, I decided to be even more lazy and made a blueprint with all the more common items you might use trains for. Just plop it down, delete all the ghosts of items you don't need, build the ones you want and then copy those to the train you're setting up! They also come with color-coded train engines, which can be copied as well.
Side note: pasting one train engine onto another will also copy their schedule. If you're only trying to copy colors without overwriting the current schedule, take a little detour through the trainstation! You can paste a train's color onto a station and vice versa. Similarly, pasting a trainstation onto another will also copy the station's name. If you don’t want that then again, take an extra step in between and go through a train engine.
Pretty sure making this blueprint cost me more time than not having to set it up once at the start of each new game will save, but well! If you're not willing to spend an unreasonable amount of time on coming up with an only slightly faster solution then what's even the point!
If you'd like to use my lazy solution you can find the blueprint string after the cut.
Just remember to deconstruct the thing once you're done or you'll have a bunch of trains sitting in your train menu doing nothing!
Blue Science 0.17
Assuming you have build military science, the chemical science pack is the fourth one you will have to build. So you're probably thinking you've got this! But if you look at the ingredients for blue science, you'll notice some new icons you haven't seen before. As the name implies, this science pack requires you to get into processing chemicals!
Anything involving liquids is admittedly a little different from the game mechanics you'll have encountered so far. And based on all the cries for help- I mean forum posts, lots of people struggle with it at first. I know I did! So I will probably make a more detailed post about the way oil processing works in the game, but for now I just want to give you all you need to get started on blue science.
When you look at the recipe for blue science, the easiest ingredient is engines. These are pretty trivial to make. Just a normal assembly machine, getting all the ingredients in and that's it. They have a pretty long crafting time, so you should build a lot of assemblies to get a regular supply of them. Then you need to belt in gears and pipe (either made locally or on the bus, depending on your preferences) as well as steel. At this point in the game, that last one might be a bit of a bottleneck, so this is the perfect opportunity to scale up your steel production.
Once you've done this, you'll need advanced circuits, which require plastic, as well as solid fuel. This is where you'll have to start getting into fluids. A little trial and error will usually lead you to successfully using pumpjacks to produce the raw, crude oil. Unlike ore patches oil is infinite (there is a little more to it, but we can ignore all that for now), so just build enough pumpjacks for all the spots in a nearby oilfield and forget about them. Afterwards you can pipe the crude oil into a refinery and this is where it can start to get tricky.
There is a new feature in 0.17 that prohibits fluid mixing, so you can't actually make any really big mistakes anymore. Just know that each type of fluid should go in its own line of pipes and that if ONE of the fluids is backed up, the whole refinery will not work anymore. Because each crafting cycle produces all three types of liquid. Meaning that if you're not consuming one type of liquid at all, all three of them will eventually get stuck. Below is a very common layout for piping the three dirrefent fluid in a compact way that doesn’t mix any of them.
The problem of refineries getting stuck because one liquid is backed up has actually been alleviated by the recipe changes in the 0.17 update, due to the introduction of solid fuel as an ingredient for blue science. It used to be you just needed lot's of petroleum for making plastic and the other types of fluid where kind of just sitting there until you unlock more tech that makes them more useful later on. So you would build fluid tank after fluid tank whenever they backed up and your refining stopped.
With the new recipes you still need petroleum for plastic, but since any of the three basic types of fluid can be made into solid fuel, you can just turn all of the the other two into that and they won't back up! Now the only thing missing is some coal for the plastic production and you have all you need for blue science.
A very basic oil processing build for getting the plastic you need for red chips and the solid fuel for science could look something like this:
Side note: solid fuel also works as a great source of, well fuel. It works for both smelting and steam power generation. So you can use a splitter with output priority towards you science and any overproduction of solid fuel can go into power or smelting to save you some coal! Just make sure the coal line you're merging the solid fuel into doesn't also go into e.g. plastic, grenades or other things requiring coal specifically.
With the oil processing set up and operational, you can just belt the solid fuel and the red chips (once you've got the plastic I'm assuming you can take it from here) into your blue science assembly and you're good to go!
I already explained how to get the ratios for a science build in the last post, so I'm not going into the details of that for this build. If you want to, you can use my blueprint for a simple oil processing build that'll at least get you as far as blue science or the science build itself, there is a blueprint string after the cut.
Map Gen and Research Queue
If you want to explore the new update, you might want to start a new game. If you do so, you will see this new menu for the map gen settings:
It's still similar to the previous menu, nut instead of selecting different frequencies, size, richness etc. from a drop down menu, you can now modify the settings using these fancy new sliders.
The last update introduced the possibility of generating a preview of the map with your current sttings. This has been further improved! You no longer need to go back to the world gen menu to make changes to the settings, you can just modify them right there in the preview screen, which makes it even more convenient!
If you change the settings, the preview will automatically be refreshed, though you can turn this off in the top left corner, if you want to refresh manually. Here's some examples of what the different settings look like, while the map seed remains the same. This feature is really helpful to get a feeling for what the different settings actually do, which can be a little unintuitive.
There's also the more advanced setting, which I usually don't touch. Changing the pollution settings too much can really break the entire mechanic and you’re probably better off leaving them as is. Only some settings, like turning pollution off entirely and modifying the crafting and research costs, can definitely be used without problems. But there's also another new setting here, regarding the new research queue!
Now the queue can be completely turned off, if you don't want it. You can also set it to only become available after finishing the game, i.e. after launching your first rocket. I'm not sure why you would want to do that, though. I guess it would come in handy for queuing up the infinite technologies you want to research.
But it's also really helpful right from the start of the game, so I suggest just turning it on! It's set to "only available after finishing the game" by default, so remember to change this if you want the queue! You can also turn it on during the game with the command "/c game.player.force.research_queue_enabled = true". BUT: like all console commands with an "/c" at the beginning, this will disable achievements for that savefile!
With the feature is enabled, using the queue is very simple. If you click the "start research" button for an available tech, but you're already researching a different technology, it will go into the queue slots next to the active research. You can queue up to six techs this way.
One minor complaint: you can't (currently) change the order of the scheduled research projects. So if you change your mind, you have to cancel the previous techs. This is achieved by clicking the red X on the bottom of the queued tech.
Another great feature though, is that you can plan ahead and research techs that will only become available after your current research is done! For example, if you're currently researching automated railway systems, you can already schedule the rail signal project to be next! All the immediately available projects are marked yellow, while any tech whose pre-requisite you currently have in your queue are marked orange and can be scheduled for research as well.
This ability to schedule tech for research that requires other techs first, is probably why you can't just change the order of the queue around. I hope the devs come up with an solution for this though, because just drag-and-dropping them around would be really nice.
Anyway, that's it for this week! I had some free time, so I started a new world and have been playing through the 0.17 version. But more on that in the future! For now, I'll just say it's so much fun, I almost forgot to write a post today, because I was too busy actually playing the game, haha!
Train Schedule Improvements
Since the last few posts were train related, I thought I would keep the theme going and talk about a few more new train features.
First of all, there's the new GUI which makes setting up schedules for the trains a little more intuitive. You click on "add station" to add a new destination. A neat new QoL improvement here is that all the stations your train could actually reach are on top of the list, all the other ones are marked red. This is really usefull for when you have separate train networks where not everything is connected to each other.
You can still select them if you want, however (for example if you're still working on your rails and want the train to start going as soon as you're done connecting everything). If you have several stations with the same name, this menu will also count how many there are.
Afterwards, you can change the wait condition. There are two new ones here "passenger present" and "passenger not present" which check to see if someone's in the train. It can only check if someone's in the train though and not how many. So in multiplayer you still have to make sure you're not leaving your friends behind in the middle of nowhere!
If you use multiple wait conditions it can get a little confusing. If you’re using several AND/OR conditions, there’s now a little visual cue to help show you what's going on and which ones belog together.
As you may also have noticed above, there's a green bar on the wait conditions. These are progress bars and fill up over time (for "time passed" and "inactivity” conditions) or depending on the cargo inventory (for "cargo empty/full" or "item count"). Once the neseccary ones (depending on your AND/OR settings) are fullfilled, he train will go on its merry way to the next destination!
You can also cancel all wait conditions and still send the train on its way. That way, the station will act as a "waypoint" to pass through on its route. Unlike in previous versions the train will not have stop for this, it will keep going full speed without having to slow down! Of course you can use this to set up loops by using two destinations with no wait conditions, like it was shown in the FFF #280!
When setting up a schedule you can click on a stations name to center the mapview in the train menu onto that trainstation. Clicking on the middle icon in the top corner will bring you back to the train. Alternatively, you can click on the icon next to it to switch over to the regular map for a quick look.
Once a train starts moving, the map in the train schedule menu will show the route that the train is taking.
If a trainstation on the schedule cannot be reached, the icon next to it will turn red and a tooltip will help clue you in on what's wrong (for example, when all stations of that name are disabled in a system similar to the one described in my last post).
And last but not least, you can set up "temporary" destinations for your train. By holding [ctrl] over the map (not the regular map, the map inside the train menu!) you can choose the location you want the train to go to and leftclick to let it go there right away (temporary trainstations are always added to the top of the schedule)!
These temporary destinations come with a default 5s wait condition and once they've passed the temporary "station" it is deleted from the train's schedule. So if you need to go someplace far away and are near a trainstation, you can just jump into the train and create a temporary destination where you want to go. Once there you jump out and the train will go back to its regular schedule without a problem!
0.17 release!
Hello everyone, long time no see!
I know I haven't posted in figuratively forever, sorry about that! I was really busy with university, some personal stuff and then kinda got stuck in a loop of 'god, I haven't posted in n months' -> feeling bad about not having posted -> therefore avoiding to write a new post -> 'god, I haven't posted in n+1 months' -> ... and so on.
Anyway, I got my master degree now (yay!), my personal life has gotten less stressfull again and Factorio just got it's 0.17 release, so this is the perfect opportunity to break the viscous circle and start posting again!
Over the next couple of days I will be showcasing the new features, changes and updates. Meanwhile, here are some first impressions:
New GUI! Less confusing, more responsive, easy to use and just all around sexy!
Revamped and improved tech tree, now with the option of queuing up several research projects.
Including some serious changes to the various science packs! Several of my science builds are completely broken now and I’m weirdly happy about it! There is so much to be done!
Lots of new high def graphics, especially the upgraded transport belt, underground and splitter sprites!
Implementing the awesome upgrade planner into the vanilla game. And some other mysterious new features, I wonder what those do, guess you’ll have to stay tuned for more?
And remember, if you're on Steam and want to play the new release, you need to go into the 'beta' tab under the game's properties and opt into the experimental releases!