The walls are made, but there's a decision to make on where to put them. More space to cover doesn't increase the amount of biters I have to deal with, but getting to and from the edges takes time, and I'm on the clock. Also, lazy. Running sucks. I could build the wall out to cover what I've already built and slowly creep outwards, but I think it best to grab the area I want now before the biters get to it first. They've been steadily encroaching, their expansion fueled by the smog I've been spewing. Because they can't swim and all the good resource patches are near the water, I elect to set the wall between the lakes to the east and west.
Iron, more precious to me than gold right now. And in biter territory. If I want it, I'll have to clear their spawners from the area and push them back. The biters aren't truly active yet so this should be straightforward. I establish a line of turrets and move forward. The turrets behind support the ones in front. The biters are fiercely protective of their bases, but aren't communal. Far away bases won't assist, and once these ones are down it'll be the same as before, except I've got more territory and a wall.
The carnage is both sweet and painful. Quite painful, really. If you ever find yourself on the planet make sure to check out the local fish. They're good pain relievers, and like all meat will heal wounds quickly by eating. Mmm, tasty.
Biters not scaring you if they're so easily killed you think? After all I'm already destroying their bases and taking territory. Can't be too dangerous? Then you've forgotten that they evolve. No sooner did I get the wall up and turreted that the biters evolved two new forms.
The new red biters are tougher, stronger, and all around meaner. Takes a lot of my current bullets to take just one down, much less a swarm. Better bullets is on my ever growing list of things I want to build. Copper jacketed steel rounds should do well against the new armored biters.
The other form is weaker and less armored, but able to spew acid from afar. Even works over my fancy new wall. How rude. Easy to kill, but hard to prevent damage from them, so they'll wear my turrets and walls down.
Frustrating. All I want to do is build and get off this planet. Not spend time killing biters and getting hurt. What a waste.
[Dan speaking: Quick belt tutorialish thing:
So, belts. You've probably seen them already, they move items on the ground forward, so I can get items from point a to point b. Simple and straightforward. But if you want to take advantage of what they can do and really get a well designed base, there's other things you want to keep in mind.
Each belt has two sides that don't mix. Inserters will only move items onto the far side of the belt, and if a belt is pointed into another belt, it will only spill items onto one side. If you keep track of which items are on which sides, you're able to do things like improve throughput by ensuring both sides are used or to have two sets of items on the same belt.
Good example of this are my furnace lines. The line on the left has ore+coal, in between is a furnace that needs ore and coal to produce plates, and outputs those plates onto a belt, with a similar setup mirrored on the other side. Beauty of the setup is that if I were to have two sides of ore and another line of coal, I'd need to change the belt setup anyway, as they only place onto one side. There are other designs for later, but this one makes for a great early game setup as it's cheap and works well with the starter buildings.
As well, there are splitters. You can see them here along with the underground belts (that do what the name implies). Splitters work both to split a belt into two belts or two merge two belts. They've got two input belts and two output belts, and take and give as equally as possible. This setup here is a balancer, and works roughly to take each input lane and output it as evenly as possible.
And here's a more zoomed in image of the belt lines in the main section of the base. Belts go horizontally, split off by splitters for factories above. Crossing is handled by having some go underground.
If anyone has questions, feel free to ask!]
6th Log Entry:
[Dan speaking: random aside:
As an aside, has anyone ever played/heard of the game Neverwinter Nights 2? It has an infamous quest door that you spend a substantial time getting unlocked by doing a weird set of quests that have little to do with the actual door. Fun, and meaningful in a way, but that one door is almost all of act 1. Feels silly when you finally return to open it because you've likely forgotten why your party actually went to do all those quests. Factorio can feel similar, but with you setting those goals. I set a goal to get oil production up and running. But wait, iron production is a little slow. Let me fix that, then steel, then oh dear. There's another biter attack and so on.
This will be the main reason why random bits and pieces of the factory change, but aren't mentioned. Part of the charm of the game is this distracting quality - nothing is ever quite done, so there's always something to do.]
The plan was: build a wall, get oil, use oil to make fuel for the base, ?, get off the planet. We got the first done, but strangely, building a wall did not magically make everything better. Biter attacks continued to expand and ammo production became a bottleneck. The new ammo is quite effective, but not the most efficient. The steel refining process takes longer than I'd like, so the obvious answer: make more steel production. I make the additional steel, and iron ore becomes more of a problem than it already was, so we go grab more. There's an entire field sitting up there, waiting to get exploited. I look at my power and coal production and think "yea, we can squeeze this in". And it works, steel production is booming, the network is holding, and life is, well, not good but better.
We're throwing steel and copper down the drain in order to kill the biters, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I'd rather not have any more of this kind of destruction happen.
 |
I take this cool picture meaning to show the devastation, and manage to get the one frame where the depowered sign isn't showing. Not pictured: none of the miners have power |
But we're close. I've got everything I need to put this together, and the time to do it. I've got my pumps set up. My refineries are spewing waste like there's no tomorrow, and the tanks are filling with intermediate liquids that I can use for the stuff I really want - fuel, batteries, and plastic.
Remember when I said we could squeeze it in? Know what we can't squeeze in? Refineries and pumpjacks.
Red is bad. We're not generating any power whatsoever. Let me explain. Power generation works simply: miners take energy and produce coal. Coal is put into boilers, which create steam. Steam is used to run generators to produce power. The cycle continues. Until more power is being used than is generated. Now each building runs as a percent of total power. I'm not requesting much more power than I can generate, so I don't notice the change. 95% power looks similar to 100%. But the miners notice. They generate a little less coal, and I was already producing barely enough coal to meet demand. The boilers run out of coal to burn, and the power supply drops accordingly. By the time it's noticeably slowing objects down it's too late. Everything's stopped.
It could be worse. I've got plenty of ammo made and my defenses don't rely on electricity so the walls will hold while I get things sorted out. I race down the line, picking up coal as I go. There's a decent amount left still traveling on the belts. More than enough to hand feed the boilers and get things going again. Add a few more generators for more power, and things are set. A slight base change later, and a new setup is built: the oil refineries produce gas for the furnaces at the north to burn, and the boilers run off of coal - none of the coal goes north. More crude is grabbed from the west, and things seem mostly set. Next step: use the oil products, and figure out a way to generate more power.
[Dan speaking: Quick tutorialish for pipes and liquids:
Liquids are a different beast than the other material products. For one, you can't carry them. Any product that is made from or produces liquids can not be made by the player. Instead, they're held in pipes or in the temp storage every production building has (one stack's worth of the item. Each liquid stacks to 100)
Pipes work by pressure, but can only hold one liquid at a time. You'll see me keep my pipes very separated because of it. Nothing quite like accidentally hooking up a pipe and having to remove a whole slew of them to get rid of the unwanted liquid. Add on that pipes (unlike belts) block movement of the player, and keeping the separate with liberal use of the underground variant becomes a necessity.
Same picture again, I've got my refineries setup like this. Refineries take crude and put out heavy oil, light oil, and petroleum gas. (in that order) The setup is built so that I can extend it easily to the west, while keeping the area open for movement. The tanks up top store liquids like a pipe, but store 25k units instead of a pipe's 100. Be warned, pressure is based off of percentage filled. A tank that's 50% full will output as if it were a pipe with 50 liquid.
Refineries are odd for the new player, and a common hiccup. Pipe mechanics are new, as is having a production cycle that outputs multiple items. If one type fills, the entire refinery stalls, but early game you likely only want petroleum. Hence, the three storage tanks. Storing the liquids gives me time to utilize all of them, without much of a worry of backing up.
As usual, if you have questions, feel free to ask! I'll try to answer them quickly.]
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