To maximize mining speed you want to maximize miner density. Zig-zag belts waste space (and are slower!), and so do power lines. In your example, for every 36 squares of miner there are 7 squares of conveyor and 1 square of power, so you've covered 82% of the ground with miners. Here's a layout that...

ray4ever wrote:- The ideal ratio is 1 water pump, 14 boilers and 9 steam engines (see power row)

You don't seem to have connected all of the steam engines together here.

I would love to see an N-way splitter and/or a smart splitter.

How do you physically put 2 gears in the same location? If it does but staggers them then it will push other gears around and become a chaotic mess. Coding for that seems like a mess. Two gear entities would never exist in the same location. They would be 0.28 units apart on the belt, as usual. Aft...

AlexPhoenix wrote:How the game must determine or you do all items from stratch or you use smart craft?

Each item in the queue would have a flag for whether it was added manually or automatically. If it was added manually, then it's not eligible as a component of future things being added.

If an inserter has a stack size bonus, so it could grab two items from a chest, then when it grabs one item from a conveyor it might check to see if its target wants more than one of that item, and if so AND if there's a second item within grabbing distance then grab a second one.

I think someone on IRC figured this out. It's 100 or 500 divided by 60, having something to do with the target framerate of the game. So, 1.67 seconds for copper and iron, 8.33 seconds for steel.

I'm with immibis. Unless I'm playing the supply challenge or deathworld and counting every single resource I spend, I've pretty much always got enough resources to build structures as fast as I want to.

So, today while I was having a day off from factorio, I created this: https://github.com/bluecube/factorio-lua-tools We should join forces! https://github.com/sparr/factorio-data-extract I'll clone yours tonight or soon and see if it makes sense for me to abandon mine and work on a fork of yours, o...

If you don't mind picking up coal from multiple containers, try this:

+1 for 3-way splitter or even 4-way one. However the current splitter has uses that 1x1 splitter could not replace (full-speed 1 tile shift, merging), so the new splitter should not be a replacement, but an addition. By full-speed you mean without the corner penalty? If my suggestion existed, you c...

Temporary fix: make your mouse cursor smaller, or a cross instead of a pointer.

I have a feel this is gonna HAVE to be nerfed somehow...it is just WAY too easy to run over those poor poor biters! and not boring the way old tower creeping was in 8.8. Easy nerf: give worms a longer range than turrets. I thought that was already the case, and had based my strategies on it, but ap...

Maybe we can create a wiki page about this? Hopefully the devs will give us a way to share map generation settings/seeds soon. Then that wiki page could include a single copy-able string of game settings and random seed, so that people could play challenges with the exact same map (similar to how t...

As much as I like artificial constraints, I am constantly annoyed by the layout requirements imposed by splitters. Instead of a 2x1 parallel splitter, I would love to have a 1x1 splitter that sends the second flow out sideways. This plus one conveyor (for another 90 degree turn) would almost complet...

If you place your belts 2 tiles apart instead of 1 you will only need half as many underground belts setup since you won't require them vertically ;) There are trade-offs for any configuration. The wider it gets, the more wasted belts and items for the horizontal travel. I think in the end I'll go ...

Sedado77 wrote:but again, it's at the begining... later on you shouldn't have the same problem

I keep re-playing the early game on different settings.

Sedado77 wrote:Maybe having a pipe glowing red when hot? or chilly blue when cold? Just an idea

Or a little light on top of every second or third pipe that changes from blue to red or black to white?

The copper cable one looks like it would be confusing next to a similar icon for just-red and just-green wires

That's all well and good if you know the recipes by heart, but sometimes I forget that electronic circuits are used to make an oil refinery. Also, that's less helpful if you aren't queuing them at the same time. Sometimes I add stuff to the end of a long queue, and having it eat up things that I que...