UPS problems in large base.

[Daffham]

My UPS is now stable between 21 and 23.
My base is quite large with a high production rate.
I have tried to use commands to kill all biters
I have also changed a lot of the belts to underground belts.
I'm using trains to transport materials from hubs around the map, but I also do some production (Smelting copper, iron and some steel) Green and red production off site.
I'm running 15.13 with three mods, "Fast replace underground belt" "Nuclear fission Armor" and "Power Armor MK3"
My settup is
i7-5820 3.3GHz
Nvidia 1070 8 gb Vram
16 GB DDR4 Ram
And it runs on a ssd.

What can I do to improve the UPS, because now the game feels so sluggish.

[Rseding91]

You've simply built more than the game can process. There isn't anything you can do besides don't build that big.

[Distelzombie]

Well you could use all bots instead of belts. That would give you many more UPS, I think.

[Daffham]

Understood. I'm now done with my exams, so I could use some time to replace the whole supply system.
And I think that if I have to sacrifice UPS do have a large base, then low UPS it has to be.

[Aeternus]

The main problem is the seperate belts with individual items on them. The game needs to keep track of those individually, which can get out of hand fast. Replace them with a small train network maybe?

[noobula]

I have a game with 180000 active entities and have run into this limit too.
It looks like a contradicting goal to have a large base and not have so many active entities.
In the debug (f4, f5) there is show-active-state, and I am guessing every entities that does not have a red circle on it are active and each of these entities will take time to update.

So the question is, are there active entities that takes less time to update?
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-82 looks to have some information but I think the distribution of time is likely still the same today.

Some guesses on what may be faster options:
Loaders may be better than inserters (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-128)
Bots instead of belts for short distances.
Avoid uncompressed belts.*

The setup needed to get full compression would likely take up a lot of entities, unless we use bots and loaders. A bot and loader combo will take care of compression; for example, a compressed belt is feed into a provider chest and the bot delivers to a requester chest with a loader unloading to another loader that goes into an assembler. This avoids having a belt with less and less items. For the source of material, the reverse of the above can work too.

The biggest case not taken care of by loaders is train unloading, but most likely the inserts have the shortest update time when moving items between containers like a train wagon and chests.

I am not sure what else can be done if a we want base with a couple of hundred thousand entities while keep UPS high. This is actually a daunting realization for me cause this mean I get to redesign my base again. FUN!
I think a lot of other players have ran into this before, hence the development of bots and loaders... I too have held on to belts and inserters for too long, but at this moment I think it is just the next tier up.

[British_Petroleum]

I switched from belts to boxing+bots, and minimised production buildings using bobs modules, saved a ton of ups. Some people think boxing is cheating, but its better than playing a super slow game

[Rseding91]

Loaders may be better than inserters (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-128)

Loaders are essentially the worse of both belts and inserters. They definitely aren't faster than inserters CPU wise.

[iceman_1212]

I switched from belts to boxing+bots, and minimised production buildings using bobs modules, saved a ton of ups. Some people think boxing is cheating, but its better than playing a super slow game

what's boxing?

[orzelek]

I switched from belts to boxing+bots, and minimised production buildings using bobs modules, saved a ton of ups. Some people think boxing is cheating, but its better than playing a super slow game

what's boxing?

Search for it on mod portal.
There are some mods that allow you to package/unpackage resources and items.
It might be cheaty since one package is an item that has stack of ore when unpacked for example. But it would allow you to make much more or transfer lots of ore through one belt thanks to this. So it can effectively reduce amount of stuff transported for a cost of packaging/unpackaging.

You could also grab bob's assemblers etc. I'm not 100% sure but having one machine thats faster with more modules doing job of few others also helps - you are effectively reducing count of working entities game needs to track.

[GenBOOM]

starting to think we need late game to convert all items into liquid form so that we can use pipes to transport everything instead of belts since the game can handle that much better. should just add it to late game tech right before teleportation.

[Rseding91]

starting to think we need late game to convert all items into liquid form so that we can use pipes to transport everything instead of belts since the game can handle that much better. should just add it to late game tech right before teleportation.

Pipes aren't really better than belts either.

[Kormer]

I'd like to see if something like marathon mod automated could be modified to make all stack sizes 1/10th size, recipes 10x longer, bots/belts/inserters 1/10th speed, etc. What you'd be looking at is the same throughput in old units, but requiring 1/10th the assemblers/bots/inserters. By changing the stack sizes you could still have the immersive experience of a large rail network, but without the lag.

My even better idea is to treat all items like fuel to be used incrementally in recipes. If a cargo wagon has x slots, does it really matter if you have 200x items, or x items each with a "fuel value" of 200?

[GenBOOM]

Pipes aren't really better than belts either.

really? darn, I thought they would be, haven't really tested it

well then we need to have an atom compressor that condenses items and is an infiinite research tech.
could also add some other machine that takes base elements from materials that are of similar make-up and restructures them into the desired item. basically a 3d printer that uses alchemy. why smelt iron ore when its already iron? alchemy! no transport needed. iron ore + copper ore = anything that requires those 2 base items to craft
add a third machine that allows you to combine things and create new elements for sci-fi tech