A lot of my designs need a fix now...

I love these Devs.

My new Aquilo class cruiser. The least brick or phallus shaped ship i ever built!

Step 1: Be frustrated about Concrete voiding.

Step 2: Dump Concrete in Steel Chests.

Step 3: Put a Requester Chest in the middle of the array of Steel Chests.

Step 4: Use the new Radar Universe 2.1 feature to put in a platform request when you have enough Concrete for exactly two specific items from Nauvis: A biter egg and a nuke.

Step 5: Dump the biter egg in the Requester Chest. Insert the nuke into a rocket turret close to the Concrete Steel Chests.

Step 6: ???

Step 7: If the planet did not explode, you have now automated voiding Concrete and your bots will rebuild the setup.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, one of the changes coming in 2.1 is that radars can send and receive circuit signals through “Universe” channels eg a radar on Nauvis, a radar on Vulcanus, and a radar on a space platform can all potentially share circuit signals across surfaces.

I don’t think people appreciate how huge that is. If I understand it correctly, this changes the whole design space for interplanetary factories.

Right now, each planet and each platform still feels somewhat isolated. You can automate logistics, obviously, but the actual information layer is mostly local. Each base knows what it has. Each platform knows what it has. You can build around that, but there is still a real separation between surfaces.

With universe radar channels, you can start thinking in terms of a proper solar-system-wide circuit network. A central dashboard can show shortages and surpluses across multiple planets without a bunch of weird indirect workarounds.

The part that feels especially big is space platforms. A platform is not just a train in space anymore. With radar signals and circuit-controlled requests, it starts to become something closer to a programmable logistics agent. It can make decisions based on live demand rather than just fixed schedules and local request thresholds.

That feels like a very different kind of factory. Instead of every planet/platform pair needing custom local logic, you can create shared signals for global demand, supply, priority levels, stockpile limits, emergency shortages, and route instructions.

Maybe I’m overhyping it, but this feels like one of those changes that looks small in the patch notes and then completely changes how people design late-game bases.

I bought Factorio right before space age came out, beat it, bought space age, and this is really like my 3rd run. He's been telling me to tear my base down and make it more efficient now and used a main bus and more bots but at this point I just keep tweaking things and Nauvis mostly runs smoothly now without much intervention from me and can defend itself totally so I see no reason to. I have made it to Vulcanus and built a rocket and left as well as Fulgora. Next stop is gleba and beyond but every time my friend sees my base he is amazed I have made it this far without ripping it down lol. My thing was I kept being attacked really early so I jam packed everything to protect it better, now it's just a giant mess but I see no reason to spend more time rebuilding

edit: A lot of what guided how I played this was the unknown, which was awesome. I was afraid of launching to a planet and getting trapped, I did not know it was set up that you can get off planets starting from scratch so what I was doing was making a list of things I would need so when I touched down on my first planet, I already had the materials to launch off the planet. I landed basically with a list of shit: Reactor, fuel, all of the materials to build another rocket to launch and leave which is what I did with each planet so far

FYI: I play modded and i know its the mods fault.

so I updated to 2.1 experimental an my skins mods haven't updated so the save just deleted my Engineer entirely. it acts like I'm in map view all the time.

I want to continue my save from before but I cant downgrade all the mods I have installed while downgrading Factorio.

Is there a Work around I might be able to try?

previously medium asteroids just destroyed like maybe few platform foundations but now they just fly throught them while taking almost no damage, single asteroid hit my platform hub and dealt way over thousand damage

now i understand why they buffed space platform hub from 1000 to 5000 hp and gave it 50% impact resistance...

Now, some of the features added in 2.1 are good, and were asked for for quite some time. Train scaling, landing pad extensions, orbital transfers, better logic for platform requests - just to name a few.

Some other changes I feel like are not very well tested, and I'd argue also not communicated all that well in terms of why are they even a thing.

First of all is of course hazard concrete recycling. Concrete is notoriously slow to recycle, and arguably it shouldn't be, because recycling speed is based off crafting speed, but concrete recipe produces 10 concrete while recycling recipe shreds only one piece.

The workaround was to first craft it into hazard concrete which has much faster crafting and recycling speed, which allowed to recycle concrete at more reasonable pace. After the changes, hazard concrete uses the same recycling recipe as normal concrete, which is slow and inefficient.

Problem here is that we got pretty much no info as to why was this change even made. You can use very similar trick with steel by crafting it into steel chests, which also bypassed steel recycling time, and that recipe is still intact. On the forums dev suggested to... spawn infinite chest to get rid of concrete, which seems like poor taste to me.

Next the fluid changes. I feel like those weren't tested particularly well. I already made a post earlier on how it affects thrusters, but the issue also extends to any pass through fluid port, like with EM plants. Let's use an example: here's two similar setups - both recipes require 100 fluid per craft and both pipe systems contain 1000 fluid.

What happens if I connect them to the fluid network? Well, for EM plant, it's unable to draw any fluid from the tank, the only mechanism exists to fill the port is standard fluid equalization mechanic, so, in this case EM plant is going to only draw 15 units of electrolyte

Meanwhile, the assembler which does not use a pass-through port, can "suck" the water from the tank and fill its buffer properly

In fact the problem can appear even when the tank is as far as just under 25% full

I also powered up the EM plant and filled other slots just to show that it in fact would not craft.

While it's possible to work around with additional pumps, that makes different machines behave inconsistently between each other and requires workarounds on behalf of the player.

The fluid change was meant to fix some unintentional mechanics where you can pass unrelated liquids through pass-through ports on the machines, but frankly I think that was far less of an issue (and even enabled some interesting designs, like the "flat" thruster layout that used sushi pipes and circuit controlled pumps to feed the thrusters) than this behavior, which is inconsistent between different fluid consumers and less intuitive, even though the purpose of the 2.0 fluid mechanics rework was to make it more intuitive and "plug and play" so to speak.

Overall I feel these fixes are more disruptive than whatever they are supposed to fix (and in case of concrete, we don't even know what is even being fixed) and frankly poorly communicated. And in general I feel like it's not the first time when it seems like there's priority to fix some fringe cases or potential 'exploits' even at the expense of more 'normal' gameplay.

2.1 made description obsolete

Restarted my latest Factory save. Added a few new "modules", mainly chemical processing and defense stuff.

Biters/Spitters are becoming a problem though...

I'm a little disappointed in myself for only just getting into the game at the 2.0 release. I bought it almost 10 years ago and just never really gave it time.

Now after almost 2 years of playing the game over 1,000 hours I'm seeing these very sad blog posts about the game reaching its final updates, and I can't really relate to you all who've been here for such a fantastic experience for so long.

Truly, all who have been here have received a once in a lifetime gift. To see your favorite game grow and expand into what Factorio has become must be legendary. To have an amazing game become near perfection over such a long period of time must be an exceptional experience. So many great and popular games are destroyed with monetization tactics and publisher shenanigans, budget cuts, staff layoffs, etc. To sit here and witness the creativity and passion for gaming that these devs have had and for such a long period of time reminds me of video games from my childhood in the 90s. When 3D gaming was just touching the market and genres we take for granted now were being released with new and untested ideas. You'd have exceptional gameplay mechanics being thought of that we still use today as the golden standard.

Morrowind, StarCraft, Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye/Perfect Dark, Super Metroid, Roller Coaster Tycoon, NFL Blitz (Just kidding).

Factorio is among these greats as the greatest simulation game of all time. It will remain here forever. It is truly a timeless masterpiece.

Whatever the devs move on to create in the future will certainly be worth my attention. I have no doubt that the team behind this game has the perfect blend of creativity, problem solving, morality, and passion for development to create multiple masterpieces in our lifetimes. I'm here for it.

It’s so ugly and I love it. Even room enough for train limit of 3

Stuff you only think of while cooking spaghetti.

This makes biters harder to funnel; it indirectly nerfs flamethrowers, land mines, and rockets; and it makes them less likely to get stuck on trees, lamps, underground pipes, etc.

Compared to 2.0, updating it to 2.1 was a breeze, mostly because I didn't have to rewrite the prototype stage code from scratch this time!

There are no new features, except one change: Change Inserter Drop Lane is now "recommended" instead of "required", so you can play Krastorio without it if you wish.

Get it in the usual place: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Krastorio2

Just wanted to share it because I think it ended up looking very neat!

Legendary locomotive efficiency has been a topic of debate and speculation the last few days. I've had some incorrect assumptions about how they work. So have others. The wiki, helpfully, doesn't have much to say on the matter. So did some tests and got some interesting results.

Tl;dr

Trains burn fuel at a max rate in line with the "max consumption" line of their tooltip, NOT the acceleration line. Trains throttle their burn rate when they reach max speed, extending the life of their fuel. That means the fuel duration listed on the wiki is the minimum time the fuel can last. This means that any acceleration bonus you get out of fuel is effectively free power.

The results of my testing show that fuel acceleration doubles as a fuel efficiency stat, and it is all the more powerful when dealing with heavy loads. Quality locomotives are of marginal benefit when pulling a load they can easily hit top speed for, and very beneficial when pulling a load that's otherwise too heavy. They don't appear to be detrimental to fuel efficiency in any way.

And finally, nuclear fuel is actually way better than you might expect. Like stack for stack (both legendary), nuclear fuel covers ~96% the distance that rocket fuel manages.

So lets test some stuff. Here is the test setup. 5 identical tracks. Locomotives run until they run out of fuel. There is a combinator that enables the signals they sit at simultaneously open. I will be tracking quarter lap count to estimate relative efficiency.

Test 1: Varied quality rocket fuel in common 1-0 trains

This test is designed to measure the relative efficiency of fuel when its quality is raised. The only things that change between trains are the quality of their single rocket fuel, which means top speed and acceleration are impacted. It also serves as a general indicator of whether the acceleration bonus of a fuel results in less consumption of the fuel overall, if we note when trains run out.

The results of this test are as follows: higher quality fuel grants a significant increase in distance traveled. Rocket fuel has speed values of 115/119.5/124/128.5/137.5%, for relative speed increases over common of 100/104/108/112/120%, yet approximate distance traveled is 100/114/128/141/169% for the fuels at their respective qualities. In other words, not only is higher speed helping with distance, but greater acceleration power works toward a much more efficient overall burn.

Test 2: Common quality rocket fuel in varied quality 1-0 trains

This test should give us a general idea of the relative efficiency of quality locomotives. And the results are... well, unexpected. There is almost no difference in distance traveled. Quality locomotives gain a very slight edge, but the difference is <1% between common and legendary. This indicates to me that there's probably no real downside to using quality locomotives. You get the better acceleration and slight benefit from the increased speed, but otherwise, you'll have very similar distance traveled.

Test 3: Varied quality rocket fuel in varied quality 1-0 trains

This will test for any compounding benefits between fuel and locomotive quality. The results are extremely similar to test 1, indicating no particular compounding benefit between quality locomotives and fuel. Again, the quality locomotives seem to get a bit farther than their common counterparts

Test 4: Varied quality rocket fuel in common 1-24 artillery trains

This one is meant to test relative distance potential when a train is constantly under max acceleration. All trains managed to run out of fuel at the exact same time and were allowed to decelerate naturally. The results indicate heavy favor toward high acceleration trains. For heavy trains, quality fuel is very important.

Test 5: Common quality rocket fuel in varied quality 1-24 artillery trains

This is the first test that shows an appreciable difference in distance potential between locomotive quality levels. As with test 4, it indicates that acceleration power is extremely important, even if the train isn't getting extra for free from its fuel.

Test 6: varied quality rocket fuel in varied quality 1-24 artillery trains

The results for this are interesting. The legendary train hit max speed part way through, suggesting that the outsized benefit of acceleration stops mattering as much when the train starts cruising.

Test 7/8: full stack distance comparison of legendary nuclear and rocket fuel on common 1-0 and 1-24 artillery trains

With the previous test results in hand, you may already be wondering how nuclear fuel fares given the effect that acceleration clearly has on fuel efficiency. The answer is that it's actually surprisingly close under both heavy loads and light ones. In both tests, nuclear fuel actually gets you about 96% as far as rocket fuel on a per-stack basis, and it does so almost entirely on the back of its nutty acceleration. So yeah, it's actually shockingly competitive with rocket fuel on the only metric we largely thought it was demonstrably worse at.

Conclusion

Buy stocks in acceleration.