No time to play myself at the moment, but curious what other people experiences are!
I had work that week, so I couldn’t get much in. The day before I was itching so I started a space exploration save and got a little attached to that even though I never made it past military science. Now I’m playing space age and have just built a rocket!
I’ll add more details:
The start was poor, with widely spaced starting resources, no choke points, and a dry climate which absorbs pollution the least. The only good thing was a nearby small oil vein. So for the first few hours, I intentionally didn’t scale up as not to anger the biters. I actually researched military and gun turrets before automation.
Then, I scaled up but minimized pollution by switching to solar power with only 8 steam engines running, and made many efficiency modules. With that, I could focus on getting bots and trains, and heading to space, and that’s where I am now.
Roughly like this…
For the past couple months, I’ve been having the sudden urge to play Factorio. I log onto Steam after being away for like a year and see that a couple old friends are playing Factorio. Then I see a post on Lemmy about Factorio’s recent record breaking player count. Seems like everyone caught Factorio fever all at the same time.
New DLC just came out a few days ago. I’ve had the Factorio itch for months now but I’ve been waiting for it.
Well that explains a lot
Yeah, it’s also the 2.0 update. There’s a ton of changes even if you don’t buy the DLC. Honestly, I can’t comment much on the DLC because it’s essentially expanding the game directly after launching a rocket, which was the previous “end goal.” It adds 4 new planets, each with their own design challenges and things to unlock. I’m soon going to be heading to my first new planet, but I haven’t done it yet.
I’ve built what’s probably my biggest (mostly) vanilla base yet on Nauvis and I haven’t even left yet. I want to have it situated before I leave. I think my Space Exploration base was larger, but I never finished it and it wasn’t much larger if it was.
I’m really enjoying the fact that we can’t destroy cliffs until later but they’re also much better, combined with the new rail tools. My rail network is all currently really organic with two way rails and sidetracks. Previous versions I just built cliff explosives and plopped down two lane rail anywhere I went, which makes it brainless.
Man, I bought and installed it 24 hours ago, and I haven’t had a chance to even run it yet :-(
Ditto - my excuse is that I’m on a working vacation and have much better things to do but… the temptation is still there.
Working through early game so far. No rocket yet. The smelter stacks are taking shape, just need to find some more ore. Found Uranium before oil somehow…
i still haven’t progressed past oil processing in the base game :)
I’ve got all the Nauvis sciences automated as well as getting my first space platform set up. That’s sending a steady stream of space science down now.
I’ve put in quite a few hours over the first two days, but won’t be able to play for a while now.
Currently torn between trying to set off for another planet or scale up my Nauvis base to better support things going forward. Former seems more fun. Latter seems more sensible!
You can drop onto any of the first three planets with nothing and be perfectly fine, it will just be like half an hour slower than if you brought some extra stuff along. I’ve been raw dogging them for the hell of it and once I’ve got their machines all automated and the basic researches out of the way I’m ripping everything up and qualitymaxxing where that makes sense to do so. Aquilo won’t know what hit it.
I would say you almost need elevated rails researched before going to Fulgora from what I’ve seen. You don’t need to ship them over or anything, but you need to be able to build them.
I wouldn’t say so! There are large islands with small quantities of scrap on them that were more than sufficient for me to get back into space with.
Unless it’s enough to complete that research, then you might as well save the struggle and research before you go. Best case, you come back to Nauvis and unlock it, which you could have done in the first place.
That’s good news - thanks for helping my “gotta have EVERYTHING perfect for this big step” anxiety.
Notably this does not apply to the final planet, where you will want at the very least a healthy reserve of basic resources and probably the stuff for a small scale nuclear reactor for both heat and power. Personally, I’m going to get basic science set up on the three starter planets, then set up quality boosted module production and then make something of a megabase before tackling Aquilo.
It makes sense to go to other planets first since then you can use the new buildings to make the Nauvis base better. As long as you can support a steady stream of rockets to supply the planets, you should be golden.
Yeah, that’s my dilemma. I wouldn’t say I can support a stready stream of rockets with LDS and blue circuits yet.
I have a nice ratioed 45 SPM starter build set up, but because it’s all ratioed then if I’m researching yellow science I don’t have a lot spare to go towards rocket production.
I think I might add a few more resources without going too crazy and then head to Vulcanus. Building a proper smelting setup with foundries seems very cool.
Will be next week before I get to that point though.
At least Vulcanus looks like it can work with resupply at any pace.
Rushed to the rocket yesterday night. Took me about 12 hours. I shot a couple of platforms and buildings up just to make myself comfortable with the new mechanics up there.
Other than that I finally secured my base in a very wide area, so I don’t have to keep rebuilding the defences. But it looks like I still have to. The world generator thought it would be funny when I didn’t have any iron near my starting area. I’m fucking broke on iron and steel. I found a couple of rich patches but they are deep in enemy territory. It’s time to take the war to the biters.
So on today’s menu we have iron and blood.
We have just got to the platform stuff and man, the absence of artillery makes biters way more present compared to pre-SA vanilla game, we even had to dig up mines for the first time to make some perimeters really prepared for the behemoth bitters (though uranium ammo then made it kind of obsolete).
Making robust base defenses is really fun! Especially since you can’t run around and fix it after the fact.
I made a blueprint book for my multiplayer game with my friends, base walls have tileable blueprints that can be upgraded in place, level one just the wall, level two wall plus roboports, level 3 plus lasers etc etc
Now that we’re totally off of the starting planet, the wall is quite extensive. Dragon’s teeth to the edge of laser range, three ranks of lasers in a line, flamethrower behind everything, and two count them two, old school machine gun turrets.
The flamethrower, and the machine gun turrets, provide a little resilience in the event of a power failure. Gives time for emergency measures to get in place. Not that the machine gun is going to do much against highly evolved biters, but it will draw them sideways down the wall rather than into the base
The machine guns are actually better against late game biters than lasers depending on ammo choices.
Also, did you know you can remote drive tanks now, and they have small equipment grids? You can use them as budget spidertrons for interplanetary management.
I did not know that! That’s awesome!
Researching the rocket silo, 46%. Still on yellow belts and inserters, mostly basic assemblers. Trying to stay low-tech to keep from having to expand a lot until I have full logistics.
Biters have evolved enough to be a pain in the assembly line.
Slowly building a wall of belt-fed piercing turrets to encompass base and a few resource patches so I can get some peace.
Think I’ll aim for Fulgora first! It looks so wonderfully weird. Like a dead 70s/80s scifi comic world.
Just a tip that I got from seeing some stuff before launch, make sure you have elevated rails unlocked before Fulgora at least. The way it’s set up, you have to move resources from island to island and can’t landfill, so elevated rails are the only way to move resources mostly. Some islands are close enough that could could sneak them over using a bot network, but you have to get lucky for that.
Space science platform heck yeah!
Space science factory platform is done and working well (Nauvis is the bottleneck for SPM). Once I have cliff explosives unlocked I’ll expand the Nauvis base to a more proper scale suitable for my playstyle.
In addition to that I’ve built an interplanetary platform, but early testing reveals that it needs some work/rework to be capable of making the trip without getting destroyed.
Loving the QoL changes, by the way.
I have way less time to play than I would have liked haha
But currently still on navius, mostly just setting up train stations and testing the new interrupt systems and making new train blue prints
I love the new train system, which is huge with the addition of parameterized blueprints. I’ve gone through three stages with my stations. The first was basic dumb stations, but parameterized so their names and things were selected when you place the blueprint. The second was slightly smarter and enabled/disabled when it needed to. My new one should be set up so I can have cargo trains automatically select a resource to pick up based on demand, instead of being set to a fixed type. I haven’t switched over to it yet though, as I just finished designing it, but it’ll hopefully work and be really convenient. It should work similar to LTN but without needing it.
Ive always liked trains in Factorio, but I’m having more fun with them now than ever before.
Trains is also one of my favorite aspects of the game!
I also made the parametrized train stations first and the variable to for stack sizes is so nice!
I also tried making a schedule with only interrupts for all trains. But that don’t really works because the trains always just goes to the closest outpost. But I have been thinking if I connect every train stop to a radar. I can also check demand for a specific resource before I enable the stop
And for my mall, I thought about making a single fluid train stop for all fluids. Because pumps can have a filter now, so maybe it can work, haven’t tried it tho
You can also set each train stop’s priority via circuit. I’ve been setting it based on how badly a train is needed at that station.
Are you using the radar to check which station needs resources?
I’m using the radar network for dispatch and priority for tie breaking/to make sure the resources are distributed evenly.
All my loading stations are simply called “Cargo Pickup” and all of my cargo trains go to any of them with an opening. Once there, the station reports on the red wire the ID of the train in the channel corresponding to the item being loaded (unless another train is already being reported by another station with the same items).
On the demand side, stations look for the ID on the item they need. They copy the ID into the green network on the channel corresponding to their station name. In the simple case, a station serving copper ore to copper smelters copies the train ID from copper on the red network to copper on the green network. But stations can also request multiple ingredients in which case they have some other symbol in their name besides copper ore. (Of course, here too the copying only happens if no other station is requesting a train on that same channel).
Back on the supply side, the station looks through all the IDs on the green network and sends the ones that match the waiting train to the train. The train uses the symbols to activate an interrupt to go to the corresponding station to deliver the goods.
I just set this up today. I haven’t perfected it yet. One minor hiccup is handling the fact that you have no way to atomically access a channel. So two stations could request on the same channel at the same time, corrupting the ID. But that only happens if the stations are activated to make a demand on the exact same tick. It’s not so much that it’s a constant problem, it just bothers me that it could be.
How I have my new system is any station requesting items puts how many trains it will need to fill all requests (and subtracts inbound trains) into the radar network (using the item it’s requesting as the channel). At the drop off stations, it reads the request and picks the largest one, and that gets sent to the train at the station. The train will then take that item and use it in the interrupt. In theory this all makes sense. I’m excited to get it set up.
Ah nice, I have yet to try out the new radar signal stuff. But am equally exited to test all my theories in the weekend!
An update after getting my system running, one important thing to know is apparently trains need some default schedule for interrupts to function. I spent at least an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with my circuit based interrupt until I tried putting a station destination into its schedule and it just started working. Now I just need to replace all my stations.
I’m now decoupling my bus from the furnaces and making them train based. I’m excited to see it all working and being demand-based.
I’m now thinking about making my furnaces material agnostic and the outputs just get sorted by type. Maybe that’s a project better left for later so I can actually play the DLC…
Edit: I realized why it needed a station in the schedule. It can’t read the circuit network unless it’s actively stationed at the station. If it’s just sitting there but not actively set to be there, it doesn’t receive the signal. That’s reasonable I guess, but good to know.
Playing the vanilla Space Age campaign in multiplayer using the Factorio discord / Reddit community “monthly map” seed. Last night we had up to 11 players joining to help out, on Nauvis as well as Fulgora and Vulcanis. I’m pretty impressed how deeply the team integrated Space Age into the existing tech tree that we’re all so familiar with. In order to reach all the benefits we’ve been used to having for endgame, you’ll need to go to all the planets.
It’s also been nice to see that the rocket launch requirements have been slimmed down so that 1) you can easily use rockets as mere transport and 2) so that multiple players in multiplayer can launch their rockets and not break the bank.
I got the “getting on track like a pro” achievement yay
