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Factorio: Space Age

factorio.com

131–140 of 363 posts

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#131
> In the previous news about the expansion FFF-367, we declared that the content will be technically a mod taking advantage of the updated engine. What this means is that a lot of the improvements will be for all players, regardless of them having the expansion or not.

This is such an amazing way to release a second version of a game! Reminds me of libraries that publish major version updates that don’t add anything just remove deprecated stuff.

Its what real refactoring is all about - changing the platform so that the new problems are trivial to solve. Since factorio is all about refactoring, I’m so happy they took this route!

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#132
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just use city-block blueprints and never really worry about signals. However, the foolproof advice I've gotten from r/Factorio has been to put chain signals at the entrance and exit to every junction, and to make sure there's enough space for your longest train to stop behind a rail signal (and you wouldn't mind having it stop there). I can also recommend the cybersyn mod (or LTN). Once you understand one of these…

Trains are my favourite part of the game, and I always make myself a massive bowl of train spaghetti. I love watching my trains automatically find their way across my messy maze of train tracks. My simple rules: * Trains can only stop on the section after a regular signal. If you don't want a train to be able to stop in a certain place (like on an intersection), don't use a regular signal in front of it. * Make sure…

For refueling I've recently been using the cybersyn mod, which let's you easily create a refueling stations that your trains will automatically go to when they're low on fuel (with exactly how "low" they need to be being configurable in the mod settings).

I just plop down a refueling station, and a requester station next to it that refuels the refueler and I'm done. Don't have to worry about it again.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#133
Looking forward to it. My only wish is that they add something like Recursive Blueprints to the base game, so we could build von Neumann probes.

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#136
> We decided to go with the approach of having a small number of predefined planets, which represent your progression through the game.

I am a bit sad about this, procedurally generated worlds with "infinite" universe would have been really cool.

But anyway, I know I will sink too much time in this :D

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#137
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence. The signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not entirely sure I still understand them. They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for me.

They’re sort of understandable. When someone described it to me as the blue signals checking the status of the next signal (blue or colored) and doing that, everything made a lot more sense. They’re still sometimes hard to debug because there’s no visualization but I always end up feeling that the issue was my fault

Blue signals just mean that some, but not all, segments ahead are blocked by a signal.

Also, this video[1] by Soulless Gaming on "How to Fix Train Path Errors" has a lot of useful tips on train/signal troubleshooting.

[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gmsep-xJXkI

Re: Factorio: Space Age

#138
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't put trains and smooth in a single sentence. The signals required a lot of patience to learn and I'm not entirely sure I still understand them. They are by far one of the most painful parts of factorio for me.

There's certainly a learning curve - it's a form of programming that must be learned.

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Re: Factorio: Space Age

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily at the exit. Normal signal: train stops if there's a train in the section ahead (or it's reserved for another train on a conflicting path), otherwise train goes. Chain signal: train stops here until it can get a mutex on a path past another non-chain signal. So if you have rail sections (small letters) and signals (capitals) a - A - b - B - c - C - d in a row on a plain line and A/B are chain signals…

"Chain in, rail out" is the standard advice. However, if you search around r/Factorio you'll see there's debate about whether that's the best advice for beginners. Chain both in and out is supposedly the foolproof method, and apart from stations, rail signals are just an optimization. Though I've played a lot of Factorio, I've never really felt the need to dive deeply in to signals, and I'm happy to just use the fool…

The train needs to reserve the whole next contiguous sequence of chain signals to be able to go, so the foolproof method makes it sound like each train reserves the whole path from one station to another. It makes sense, but I like to do the optimizations, then, and allowing trains to stop in longer stretches where they can.
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