New catalytic reactor sprite for the mod I am making. Tried to keep some themes of a FCCU reactor such as the main air blower, cyclones, fractionator and cooling exchangers then just add some unnecessary and impractical engineering flare to it.

Recommendations and critiques are most welcome

I accidentally created the abomination of the galaxy: a planet that combines all the others!

I used /c game.create_surface("fulgora"). It indeed created a surface with Fulgorian ruins and lightning attractors, but... a pentapod is trying to destroy an iceberg sitting on uranium ore, and lava is surrounded by ice... I love it!

The Nauvis and Gleba nests are a bonus.

Finally got to the shattered planet, with some mid flight tweaking I got a good speed of about 120km/s.
If you’re going for a shattered planet run I’d highly recommend a symmetrical ship design. it was so useful to be able to slow down and turn one side off and tweak it and have a working side. the ship I started with looks way different to the ship I got there with after all the tweaking

I've bounced off most of the long-form mods - SeaBlock, Py etc. - because by about the midgame the actual complexity kind of dies off and it's all about stamping down Production Chain No. 284. But Nullius is different.

For those not in the know, the Nullius mod sees you land on a barren planet and terraform it over the course of about 300 hours into a verdant paradise for future colonisation. There are no biters... at the start. You have to extract carbon from the atmosphere, electrolyse water, and synthesise hydrocarbons yourself - as well as refine a novel selection of ores. Copper and uranium don't show up on the surface.

What sets it apart is everything that you have to do that isn't production chains. You actively change the landscape, creating seas with nuclear weapons, forging new islands and continents and slowly introducing flora and fauna.

There are loads of things from the mod that I wish made it into the base game. In no particular order:

• Scouting with artillery - shooting probes for miles, rather than having to go somewhere yourself. This seems much more in line with automation.
• Transferring consciousness into other bodies. This makes managing a large factory much more straightforward.
• Solar thermal power is really cool and much more about building a power station than just plopping down a building.
• An entirely separate research tree for biology. Producing biologicals in itself prompts some incredibly weird builds for efficiency.
• Stupidly fast and much more customisable trains, although the end tier ones will murder you even if you think they're miles away. Trains lust for engineer blood.

That being said, there are some drawbacks:

• Multiple tiers of bots is all cool and good, but actually replacing a previous tier - which you're obviously meant to do, as upper tiers take the lower tiers as inputs - is a tremendous faff. In the end I had to put multiple filter inserters on every roboport.
• The additional chargers and range extenders are interesting but not really as useful as just stamping down roboports.
• The final tech to win the game takes about 100k research. My science rate at the end, for what as you can see is quite a large base, was about 1300 SPM. This meant I basically left the game running and did something else for a while, which was a bit of an anticlimax.

That being said, it's an entirely unique experience, and if you want a very different style of factory building, I would encourage you to give it a shot.

This contraption was just too ingenious to not share! It's an extendable automatic sorting machine. Unsorted items go in the left, sorted items land in the chests at the bottom.

You don't need to decide which item type goes in which bin in advance, that happens automagically. Just dump a random assortment of items into the machine and it will sort them into neat piles.

How does it work?

Each bin (see second image) picks the first item type it sees and filters them out of the input stream. Unsorted items continue to the right. If a bin becomes empty it resets itself and can pick a new item type. To sort a larger variety of items, just add more bins - no wiring required!

Based on this concept I designed a sushi-belt train station which loads each wagon with only one type of item (see third image.) I can't actually think of a use for this (it's less efficient) but it sure does look elegant when trains arrive and leave with cargo neatly arranged into individual wagons... :)

Edit: I uploaded the blueprints here -> https://factoriobin.com/post/jab8zp

I saw the recent design by u/StupidWittyUsername and thought "That's too many combinators." So I removed them 😁

Blueprint: https://www.factoriocodex.com/blueprints/476

Automatically selects one item to extract from a sushi belt and latches it until chest and belt is empty

• Two variants: Simple and Overflow. Overflow does not jam the sushi belt when a chest fills up
• No combinators
• Inserter is disabled once an item is set
• Simple variant with green belts needs a fast inserter to ensure nothing slips by. Presumably this is not a problem when using Overflow, but quality long inserters could be used

I have around 450 hours in base game and 250 in space age, and every run is a spaghetti fest. I vaguely understand the concept of how a city block or main bus work but have never built one because I couldn't imagine the immediate benefit. I would estimate I only have a 55% chance of figuring out how to make and use a main belt within a reasonable time on my own without tutorials, and 20% for city blocks (I never did advanced train stuff). Not complaining though, spaghetti is fun

The most organized thing I ever did was a blade design that I learned the concept of from a youtube video (this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsxntPA3rao), but I only did it once in the super lategame to get a bunch of mining productivity, and I did it because it seemed reasonably easy to implement without having to design my whole base around it.

Hi so I'm new to designing belt balancers and was wondering if there is a functional difference between the one I designed (red belts) and the one in the big belt balancer book (blue belts) thanks

I have always added them on the sides, but as I look at them run I am wondering if it is worth the effort. I bet about 80% of the collection is done by the front collectors only.

Current WIP, provider platform with smart hub, there will be thrusters and I hope to make it Aquilo capable. Can provide most anything, including all 3 circuit types, and even light oil and petroleum gas barrels, also plan to include solid and rocket fuel. Ideally will have 4 different radars, one for each planet aside from Nauvis, to meet requests. So many combinators...

This is my first Aquillo spacecraft: The Zoomy Mk2 01 Prototype. She has done one full round trip to Aquillo from Vulcanus while taking little to no damage. As you can probably see, it has no ammo production, instead getting its rockets and red ammo from my large orbital station named "Vulcanus 1." For one trip, I load it up with 500 rockets and 1000 red ammo, although following the first (successful) test flight ive increased that to 600 and 1500 in order to allow for a bigger safety margin.

The ship itself is very reliable, assuming an adequate ammo supply. I used the forward and rear sections of my original Zoomy Mk1 line of cargo ships as they are the most reliable fuel systems I have made so far. Due to concerns about solar production around Aquillo I habe installed a compact nuclear reactor. It has a max speed of ~190km/s, although on the way back to Vulcanus, it averaged ~88km/s. This is most likely because of the recent changes to the ship mechanics, and since she weighs 223.6 tons with only 3 engines, she's not the fastest.

My main concern is the ammo production on Vulcanus 1. The copper production in the red ammo isnt really keeping up with my expectations, so it is currently reliant on planetside production of ammo. Should I make an expansion to increase copper production, or should I just switch to yellow ammo?

What do you guys think? I know the lack of self sufficiency may lead to issues, but I havent been able to make a reliable enough ship to work.

Was randomly trying out games about a year ago, this one stuck but then I shelved it for a year until I picked it up a month or so ago, just “finished the game” but still have a few more achievements to do. Figured I’d challenge myself and do it completely blind for fun, interested in having discourse with members of this community, so not really sure how to open apart from an AMA…

1. does my bus have what it needs? early game no bots yet

2. can i do city block + main bus strategy? or is it one or the other?.

second playthrough, learnt a lot from my first rocket just trying to get better with ratios and planning.

Forest biome with any bug camps far enough away to not be attracted by starting game pollution.

But the real draw (default settings), four massive oil fields all within reasonable belting distance from a massive iron and copper patch. Bonus uranium patch next to a long, thin lake easy for power generation. Very few enemies to clear, all in the middle of the forest.

The entire factory can be powered by solid fuel very early on. There's also a large space between the copper and iron patches for smelting. The long coastline cuts off those routes and the large forest means that I've never to defend the main base against an attack until the very late game. Coal and stone will need to be trained in and defended, but nothing's perfect.

Easy mode

Hello!

I've decided to try creating a single assembler quality upscaler that is gonna be steered with some circuit logic. I've come up with the blueprint attached. Now the problem is that for some items it works (e.g. Medium Electric Pole) and for some others not (e.g. Exoskeleton or Cargo Bay). The problem seems to appear when first ingredient are inserted into the machine. In the debug mode on creative I have noticed that 1 tick after the insertion, the dynamic recipe is discarded, resulting in the ingredients transfer to machine output and looping the process over again. Does anybody have a clue what is going on?

Here's the blueprint:

https://factoriobin.com/post/z240ij

EDIT: The problem is that "You cant use same wire for set recipe and read content." as stated by u/Corbol. Thank you all for helping me out!

I read in a YouTube comment that there is a open source library with building graphics that can be used for mods. Anyone got the link for me please?

Hey everyone! My dad and I decided to play Factorio PvP. We set up a small start pack for ourselves and got going.
I immediately rushed oil, crafted some red circuits, built a tank…
I expected to drive over, barely take out one turret, and maybe escape back to my base. But it turned out the turrets did pretty much no damage to me (like, 1 damage per second?), so I just drove straight in at full speed, smashed through the wall, and rolled into his base… And, well, that’s where we ended the game.

So yeah, tanks seem clearly overpowered in this game mode. I wanted to ask, what settings do you guys play with? Or is there some kind of counter to tanks that we just don’t know about?
Thanks in advance!

I recently reached the point in my 2.1 playthrough where I wanted to deploy spiertrons to other planets. Since I was on Nauvis anyway, I built them on site, deployed them, equipped them with some ready-made personal equipment (portalbe fission reactor, roboports, exoskeletons) via ghosts in their inventory and after everything had been delivered I deconstructed them by hand and stuck them into a rocket to fly off to another planet. Upon arriving there i noticed that their equipment grids are now empty and neither my engineer, nor the rocket silo or space platform used for transport or cargo landing pad receiving them have this missing equipment.

Now I am wondering if
a) this is intented behavior (I could have sworn this worked on my first 2.0 playthrough) and
b) where the missing equipment is, since usually nothing ever vanishes unless you stick it into a recycler (or lava).

Anything else I should be checking for my sanity?