Lategame mining options are lacking

[quyxkh]

i can't create such a blueprint because i need to have a gigantic ore field to prepare this blueprint that covers most ore fields.

Start an all-sand no-biter sandbox map and do

Code: Select all

/c
    p=game.player p.surface.request_to_generate_chunks({0,0},64) p.surface.force_generate_chunk_requests()
    for x=100,300 do for y=100,500 do p.surface.create_entity{name='iron-ore',amount=1e9,position={x,y}} end end

then head southeast until you find your orefield.

But it's pretty easy to just keep miner-layout chunks, I have 2×2 and 2×4 and never really bother with more, the time spent dropping bp's is a small fraction of the prospecting and scheduling and all, at best it's a few minutes per outpost of which an extra few seconds are spent arranging coverage.

[FunMaker]

i can't create such a blueprint because i need to have a gigantic ore field to prepare this blueprint that covers most ore fields.

Start an all-sand no-biter sandbox map and do

Code: Select all

/c
    p=game.player p.surface.request_to_generate_chunks({0,0},64) p.surface.force_generate_chunk_requests()
    for x=100,300 do for y=100,500 do p.surface.create_entity{name='iron-ore',amount=1e9,position={x,y}} end end

then head southeast until you find your orefield.

But it's pretty easy to just keep miner-layout chunks, I have 2×2 and 2×4 and never really bother with more, the time spent dropping bp's is a small fraction of the prospecting and scheduling and all, at best it's a few minutes per outpost of which an extra few seconds are spent arranging coverage.

I thought of this before - but it does not change the problem itself. If i did a mistake in my blueprint i have to switch the game or spawn ore. Currently i just want to try to just stomp an outpost as is, connect rails and i am good to go, the goal is that i should have a BP that just covers the whole ore field at once so i don't have to connect each single blueprint of the ore field to the train station. In previous games i tend to have large ore fields - because i did not want to fiddle with connecting dozens of ore fields. But in fact this was a boring time sink because arranging everything did take a long time. Currently i just want to stomp one single bp over the whole field with everything done except connecting the station to the network.

[bobucles]

It's nice that players want to automate planetary features but planet automation is outside the scope of the game.

[theolderbeholder]

otherwise it would be "planetario" SCNR

[Hiladdar]

For this example, I will stick with copper mining.

About the time I launch the first rocket, I depleted the mines from which I using belts to transport the copper to the smelting area, and have 5 different copper mines. Each copper mine is serviced by a L-CCCC train which transports the copper ore to the main base smelting area.

The next stop, is to take a copper field, and set up the miners with a logistics network, with 500 or so logistics robots. Next to each mine I will set up about 75 or so smelters, or 5 lines of 15, with a outgoing copper plate train station which has LLL-CCCCCCCC. Initially this will go to another outpost which manufactures something or the main base. I have separate blueprint, one for mining drills, one for smelting, and one for train station. Fairly quick and easy process.

By the time I get about 5 of these larger mining/smelting outposts done, the next logical step is to set up a copper depo someplace. This depo will be have temporary parking for about 20 incoming copper plate trains and 10 outgoing copper plate trains. This depo can service 2 incoming and 2 outoing LLL-CCCCCCCC trains at the same time, and needs about 2500 bots. At this point, I reprogram all trains that if an outpost needs copper plates, it goes to the depo to pick it up. At the same time the outpost pulls in all the copper plates from all the copper mine / smelting locals. The depo will have a rolling stock of up to 2.5m copper plates. If copper production is low, it is fairly easy to add a new mine / smelting outpost, or when a mine is depleted to just remove it.

While this is going on, I start ramping up mining research, and bot speed. Both of those are the most useful in this arena. Once mining research hits about 500% productivity, I can start decreasing the density of the electric miners on the ore fields. Reduce the number of miners and active provider chests by about 66-70%. This in term will help with UPS.

From my experience several things will help in the end game. Miners which mine a larger area, i.e. a miner which covers the for example that 4 electric miners i.e, 9x9 area and 7x7 foot print, a and produce about the same as what 4 electric miners do. This will reduce 6 miners and 2-4 active provider chests to 1 miner and one active provider chest. The second type of miner that would be useful is one that mines a much smaller area, say a 1x1 or 1x2 area for the edges of the mine, or when the ore you need is close to ore you don't need.

Another thing that would be useful in the end game is to turn mining productivity on and off for specific ore patches in the game. This will help in strip mining a specific area of the map to expand into it. This is with 500% mining productivity, a 1m ore field map on the map generates 6m worth of ore. Great for when you are hurting for resources, but really bad when you want to strip mine are area for base expansion.

A second thing that will help the end game with USP is logistical bots having larger carrying capacity, faster speed, as well as less energy usage to both move and idle the bot. With the right bot, vanilla game bots can be replaced with at a 5:1 ratio, meaning a mining outpost can operate on 100 bots, and the depo only needs 500.

Another way FPS can be reduced is by using larger cargo wagons to transport the ore, as well as larger logistical chests, or some sort of warehousing unit for the depo, and the outposts.

There are several viable mods out that work quite well, some have more bells and whistles then others. Once the FPS hard cap is hit, it requires some more efficient design on the base, faster hardware, or a few mods, or a combination of all 3.

Hiladdar

[torne]

Another thing that would be useful in the end game is to turn mining productivity on and off for specific ore patches in the game. This will help in strip mining a specific area of the map to expand into it. This is with 500% mining productivity, a 1m ore field map on the map generates 6m worth of ore. Great for when you are hurting for resources, but really bad when you want to strip mine are area for base expansion.

If you're going to throw away 5/6ths of the ore in that patch by disabling productivity, you really might as well throw away 6/6ths of it and just not mine it at all, and just build over it If you don't like the aesthetics of doing that, there's a bunch of mods that let you erase ore from the ground (or fairly simple console commands). It seems pretty unlikely that the developers are going to implement an option that makes things strictly worse for the player just to avoid that.

[Molay]

Robotic mining wagon. A wagon that project a logistic zone around it when at a station. The wagon can hold X mining bots, say 400. The wagon charges bots, it has dedicated slots for fuel cells to generate power and charge (upgraded version: fusion mining wagon; no need for fuel). The wagon itself can not store ore. Add cargo wagons to train. The mining bots go mine any ores around it in its zone, and deposit ore in cargo wagons). Once cargo is full mining bots stop. Inactivity condition (or other complicated setup) prompts train to continue to its next station.
If mining wagon runs out of fuel, mining bots can't be recharged and return to it, stopping mining.
Mining bots could cost similar to construction bots, perhaps requiring a new component or existing components (20x gears or whatever) to simulate requiring a mining drill.
Bots are UPS friendly right, probably better than using miners, belts and inserters for same task.

[mrvn]

I started a new 0.17 map and there is one point that bothers me alot with lategame mining. Sure there needs to be a good lategame option for mining where you should get ore really fast and that forces the player to burn his mind to get it working. But the most simple problem in lategame mining for me is that miners can't be placed on non-ore tiles. If that would be possible i could go to an ore field, stomp my blueprint with miners + smelter + train station on the ground that covers the complete ore field and all i have to do is connecting the rail...
But in normal situations it is not possible to create such a blueprint because i can't create such a blueprint because i need to have a gigantig ore field to prepare this blueprint that covers most ore fields.
I had this problem in a previous game and what did i do? Start up another game with RSO extreme settings in sandbox mode so i could prepare blueprints in this game.

So please give us an option to place miners on non-ore fields.

Start up the map editor, make a gigantic square mine field and fill it with miners. Blueprint and enjoy.

[FunMaker]

I started a new 0.17 map and there is one point that bothers me alot with lategame mining. Sure there needs to be a good lategame option for mining where you should get ore really fast and that forces the player to burn his mind to get it working. But the most simple problem in lategame mining for me is that miners can't be placed on non-ore tiles. If that would be possible i could go to an ore field, stomp my blueprint with miners + smelter + train station on the ground that covers the complete ore field and all i have to do is connecting the rail...
But in normal situations it is not possible to create such a blueprint because i can't create such a blueprint because i need to have a gigantig ore field to prepare this blueprint that covers most ore fields.
I had this problem in a previous game and what did i do? Start up another game with RSO extreme settings in sandbox mode so i could prepare blueprints in this game.

So please give us an option to place miners on non-ore fields.

Start up the map editor, make a gigantic square mine field and fill it with miners. Blueprint and enjoy.

Sorry to say that, but the problem with this is: I am not making a bp for only miners but with smelters and train station. If i made a mistake that i get in my normal game i can't change the blueprint because the miners are missing if i build the blueprint, change stuff and create a blueprint again. So i have to switch to the editor everytime i want to change something or improve the bp...

[mrvn]

Why would you put the miners at the ore field in the first place? Make a train station to load ore and a bunch of miners in a blueprint. Then somewhere else build your smelter.

That way when a mine runs dry you don't have to relocate all your smelters. You aren't left with 10k coal from destructing the old smelter. And so on.

Mines are something temporary while smelters are permanent. Don't mix the two.

[leadraven]

Why would you put the miners at the ore field in the first place? Make a train station to load ore and a bunch of miners in a blueprint. Then somewhere else build your smelter.

That way when a mine runs dry you don't have to relocate all your smelters. You aren't left with 10k coal from destructing the old smelter. And so on.

Mines are something temporary while smelters are permanent. Don't mix the two.

Coal? Are you using burning furnaces?
He needs huge ore patch to make/modify a mining blueprint.
It's a common practice to integrate smelters into mining outposts. It greatly unloads logistics.

[mrvn]

Why would you put the miners at the ore field in the first place? Make a train station to load ore and a bunch of miners in a blueprint. Then somewhere else build your smelter.

That way when a mine runs dry you don't have to relocate all your smelters. You aren't left with 10k coal from destructing the old smelter. And so on.

Mines are something temporary while smelters are permanent. Don't mix the two.

Coal? Are you using burning furnaces?
He needs huge ore patch to make/modify a mining blueprint.
It's a common practice to integrate smelters into mining outposts. It greatly unloads logistics.

I don't see how that is a good idea. The number of smelters would depend on the size of the ore patch and you have to ship coal to the mine too. And then you have to relocate 4 or 5 times the number of entities when a mine runs dry.

On the other hand with a separate smelter you can build it for 4 or 8 train cars where each car unloads 2 full yellow, red or blue belts of ore and runs continously. For that you have to feed it from many different ore mines. And as mines run dry you simply add more mines.

[bobucles]

It's a common practice to integrate smelters into mining outposts.

I wouldn't call it common. Early game would have to feed coal to every ore outpost and that's a lot of extra work. Mid game doesn't need the extra train efficiency, there aren't enough materials flying around to care. Late game doesn't have enough tier 3 modules to go recklessly dropping them at every outpost. It is only in the late late late late post game where smelters at mining outputs can be considered a "common practice" and there's nothing common about the post game.

[Ranakastrasz]

I've never gotten far enough to consider it, but the main advantage of smelting at the mining outpost is the doubled density due to plates stacking to 100 instead of 50. This doesn't matter for belts, but it doubles train capacity, which is a big deal.

Obviously this goes double (And double again, plus a bit) for steel, although I have no idea if smelting to steel is also done.


In any case, you already tear down the old mines after it depletes. What was the issue with having to tear down a forge too?

[torne]

I've never gotten far enough to consider it, but the main advantage of smelting at the mining outpost is the doubled density due to plates stacking to 100 instead of 50. This doesn't matter for belts, but it doubles train capacity, which is a big deal.

Well except as bobucles says, in most cases it's not a big deal: if you're before electric smelting then you'd need to deliver coal which makes outposts much more complex and requires more trains to visit anyway; if you've got electric smelting but aren't yet a really massive base then your train efficiency probably isn't that critical as the trains probably spend a bunch of time idle anyhow; and once you're a megabase using production modules and speed beacons for smelting you don't want to have to make a zillion tier 3 modules to put at every outpost because it's expensive

In any case, you already tear down the old mines after it depletes. What was the issue with having to tear down a forge too?

It's not about tearing it down at the end, it's about how much you have to build to begin with, and how much sits idle. As patches deplete, there's less demand for smelters at any given outpost. So.. either you go and repeatedly downsize your outposts as they deplete, or you just leave them there until the entire patch is depleted to save yourself effort, in which case they're just a waste of resources: you could have moved them elsewhere but instead you made new smelters for new outposts, costing yourself more resources. If you're not using modules yet then the resources you're wasting here are pretty minimal, but once you're up to tier 3 modules leaving those lying around doing nothing is very expensive.

Ultimately: a main factory needs a certain amount of plates per minute at any point, and so it also needs a certain number of smelters to supply those plates. If you do the smelting at the main factory, you only need to have that many smelters. Add more production, add more smelters. The only thing you need to do is have enough trains full of ore showing up to keep them running, and all your ore can go to any smelter (in theory at least; in practise you might not want to balance it that much, but you can get as close to this as you feel like). You have to build a good enough train network to run twice as much total train capacity, of course, but the cost to transport a given amount of materials via the train network is usually not linearly increasing as that's the primary advantage of trains over belts in the first place.

If you do the smelting at outposts, then unless you are going to constantly visit the outposts and change things, you're going to need either more smelters overall or more outposts to keep up with the same rate of plate production, because it's no longer the case that any ore can go to any smelter. You can solve this by overbuilding: having enough smelters at every outpost to consume all the ore that the miners can produce; or you can solve this by having more outposts with fewer smelters and just letting the ore back up while the patch is still rich, but either way you need to build more stuff overall.

With the really big bases I've built, the approach I've found works best for me is distributed smelting at the sites where the plates are consumed, rather than where the ore is produced: this avoids the logistical bottleneck of getting a large number of trains into a single giant smelting area, without requiring you to overbuild smelting capacity with the corresponding number of expensive modules: you can put the exact number of smelters at each site to produce the plates it needs, such that they're always running at exactly 100% capacity.

[mrvn]

Also note that you do not need to smelt at your main factory. You start off that way. Then you expand and build a new smelter at the next ore field outside your base. When that runs dry you keep the smelter there but ship in ore from even further away. A satelite factory. You can build 8 or even 16 car ore trains and then have 4 or 8 cars plate trains to keep the numbers balanced in vanilla. Just make sure trains go directly from the mine to the smelter without driving through your base. You can builod it so the two train networks never even touch.

Stack sizes also differ with mods. And with angles mod you have all that ore sorting and multiple smelting steps to consider. No way you want to build those at every ore field.

[FunMaker]

i have done several things. and for me me the best way is "smelt where you mine" it reduces train traffic by a huge margin. If train tunnels would be available i would change to a huge, smart smelting area because train acceleration because of crossing tracks is a huge problem(and i think the relation between locos and wagons is not right in the game imho) .

[bobucles]

Smelting is a big enough operation that it is worth setting aside an entire base for it. That was how I set myself up for expensive/marathon/spaceX. The smelting operation was a belt base and had the vast majority of my train traffic. It was larger than the rest of my entire factory! After being smelted some of it went to a dedicated green circuit base (expensive mode GC are hungry beasts) and the rest travelled a 1 minute trip to my central main island. You'd think the long distance was bad but it actually gave the train network more breathing room since the main base trains were far away from the swarm of ore outpost trains. Good stuff.

[mrvn]

It's a common practice to integrate smelters into mining outposts.

I wouldn't call it common. Early game would have to feed coal to every ore outpost and that's a lot of extra work. Mid game doesn't need the extra train efficiency, there aren't enough materials flying around to care. Late game doesn't have enough tier 3 modules to go recklessly dropping them at every outpost. It is only in the late late late late post game where smelters at mining outputs can be considered a "common practice" and there's nothing common about the post game.

Except your trains bring plates from the outpost to the main base. On the way back they are empty. That is a waste. So you can load a bit of fuel in the train on the way back. Simplest way is to set a filter on the train car to have some fixed fuel slots and the rest plate slots. That's a minimal loss on carrying capacity.

[SirSmuggler]

It's a common practice to integrate smelters into mining outposts.

I wouldn't call it common. Early game would have to feed coal to every ore outpost and that's a lot of extra work. Mid game doesn't need the extra train efficiency, there aren't enough materials flying around to care. Late game doesn't have enough tier 3 modules to go recklessly dropping them at every outpost. It is only in the late late late late post game where smelters at mining outputs can be considered a "common practice" and there's nothing common about the post game.

Except your trains bring plates from the outpost to the main base. On the way back they are empty. That is a waste. So you can load a bit of fuel in the train on the way back. Simplest way is to set a filter on the train car to have some fixed fuel slots and the rest plate slots. That's a minimal loss on carrying capacity.

If you use filters, then the fuel slots will be empty one way and the plate slots will be empty the other way. The end result will still be only half the avalible cargospace beeing used on average. Am I missing something?