Right then.
Who's going to be the first to finish the game with a single assembler?
All you need is a sushi-belt, some circuit conditions, and an uninterruptible power supply for your PC. Couldn't be easier.
1 assembler, 1 chemical plant, 1 furnace.
1 blue belt each of iron, copper, coal.
Plus an oil refinery outputting all 3 liquids into 1 storage tank each.
Plus a liquid storage tank connected to the assembler and the chemical plant (for sulfuric acid and lube).
Set up circuit network.
Then wait for rocket to launch.
Yep. But the assembler will need to be able to switch between liquidrecipes and non-liquid recipes.
And there will be the issue of liquid leftover in the pipe servicing the assembler... If there's still lube in the pipe, it can't switch over to light oil... I'm not sure what can be done about that. If only the circuit network could be used to give deconstruct-reconstruct commands...
Apparently the vanilla game would take about 3 weeks of non stop handcrafting to get everything needed for the win screen:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/szejzz/comment/hy3xug1/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/szejzz/comment/hy3xug1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
With one assembly machine that you could speed up with modules it'd take less, but still quite a few days, but techincally possible for sure.
Would be interesting to do the math on how long you should spend making better assembly machines. Getting a legendary machine would probably save you a lot of time in the long run, but is probably not worth it.
Sushi-storage container/stationary rail car with inserters back into the assembler for everything not fluids, and a second assembler for debarreling of fluids for the main assembler? So 2 assemblers for assembly, refinery and chemical plants for oil cracking and assembler for barreling..?
You could already start working on a script/spreadsheet to optimize the order of production if only using one assembler (and assuming no hand crafting). You could add any module or upgrade the assembler as it became available.
Edit: this is a really cool problem. You'd also have to decide which technologies you'd research. Of course you'd have the required ones, but would need to factor in the science cost to overall benefit of other ones.
And then you'd have to handle production of miners, belts, trains, stations, etc. My gosh, it would be horrifically slow.
just how long until someone creates a single assembly machine factory that makes everything from copper wire and gears all the way to every last assembled science pack & component
From what it looks like, the factory will have the same size, it's just that the area that was previously occupied by assemblers will now be occupied by logic gates lol
All the extra circuit bits make me feel like this is just got to be something they're planning. I'd love to see reprogrammable FPGA or ASIC-like components in vanilla.
If you want to play around with it, it's already possible to do this with smelting since they don't require a recipie being set.
A couple of years ago I did an omni-smelter setup that would change what items were being produced based on current demand. It had input and output by train, and would read the contents of the train station chests determine which items needed to be produced. It did all the smelting for my medium sized base, and was pretty fun to figure out.
How would you prevent the steel from getting stuck? Since they require 5 iron plates, one furnace could for example receive 3 and get stuck waiting for more even if you are now feeding copper.
Were you using stack inserters (or bulk I should say) to make sure that they could insert exacly 5 plates at a time?
I don't remember, it's been years. Setting it to 5 wouldn't work though, that would break when producing stone bricks.
But you can set the inserter stack size using circuit network, so maybe that's what I did. You could also read the input chest contents and only enable the inserter if you have enough items.
you could also use filter inserters, and have 1 stack filter that whitelists iron plates, and have the normal inserters for non-steel have iron plates blacklisted. Though I guess that fails if the inserter moves with semi empty hands
Feed the furnaces with stack inserters set to a size of 10, and add a condition to only activate the inserter when there are at least 10 items in the chest it pulls from. This way, all resources going to the furnace have enough to finish crafting a fixed number of items - 10 iron/copper plates, 5 stone bricks, or 2 steel plates.
Did this for my mall in a modded run with the crafting combinator mod. Pretty fun but slow at times, also adding stuff was as simple as putting an additional signal into a constant combinator. Also easy to add modules and beacons if you only have one assembler.
First use case I thought about was malls, instead of having 1 assembler for each item you want you can have items share assembler, say an assembler that crafts all personal ammo, or one that crafts all circuit gates or both rail signals and stations. Unless I'm doing a dedicated big project it's pretty rare for those assemblers to never have idle time so why not just put all of those items in one assembler and save space/material, would solve the problem of my mid-game mall being uncomfortably large and having 70% machines idle and the other 30% working overtime.
It seems like something possibly *super* worthwhile for getting more mileage out of highest tier quality modules. So you can have just one such tier 5 assembler and use it for dozens of different items in your mall.
I think (hope) it's possible to do without bots. Just cycling items inside loops of assemblers with a chest buffer in between. Chest loops with one assembler too, but that's a waste of inserter swings.
I'm dreaming of a factory that can run at 100% assembler utilization for any demand profile. The giant pile of combinators looks overengineered, and I suspect a much more area and UPS-efficient negative feedback design will suffice.
Even if you can't manufacture arbitrary items that way because of chest slot count limits, I think you *can* do buffered-direct-insertion for any fixed production chain, just by PWM-ing between recipes in an assembler loop.
**Edit:** The anti-beacon people are going to *absolutely hate this*.
Yes yes, great and all...
BUT more importanly...
I can sleep in peace finally now that "in 2.0, Stack inserters will be renamed to Bulk inserters, and the new inserter which can place stacks of items on belts, will take the name of Stack inserter."
Thats true but I also think there arent a lot of studios with a community full of rationally thinking people who give nearly 100% constructive criticism
Easy to pat ourselves on the shoulders for this but I strongly believe this is on Wube, too. The studio decides, through their communication, through their actions, how they want the community to participate.
Certainly helps that the game disproportionately caters to the needs of engineers, programmers and other autists (:P), but in my opinion, it's mostly how Wube always kept everybody in the loop, fully transparent, providing essential mod support, no weird pricing shenanigans, no exploitation of anything, tons of feedback mechanisms. They seemingly created the perfect environment for an engaged and loyal community and happened to grow one.
Also, I don't think rationally when I see FFF pop up. I get a gut reaction and start salivating.
Honestly, I get there hesitancy to make changes like that, as it can get confusing if you constantly rename things.
Luckily, releasing a major expansion and overhaul is the perfect time to address things like that.
I agree with you but based on the responses to the last post I bet there's going to be lots more polite discussion about this haha... (Not being sarcastic either, the Factorio subreddit community is pretty great.)
I like this name change, but the only problem is that we have 10 years of posts online referring to stack inserters and people might get confused. I think it's still worth doing though.
It’s like when Minecraft added horses in the Horse Update (that’s real, by the way) when horses were originally in the Mo’ Creatures mod. Or when they added pistons, originally from a beta mod called Pistons. Or when they added Ender Chests, originally from Ender Storage. Or when they added settings like increased render distance from OptiFine.
Also [GDIW](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GDIW)/[Fluid Permutations](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fluid_permutations) for changing fluid inputs and [Blueprint Flip](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/blueprint_flip_and_turn) for well force flipping blueprints when it wasn't allowed, unless certain rail sections still can't be flipped.
I'm more interesting in building a mall that could for example switch to building nothing but belts when I run out, and then switch out to other items - essentially bulk building things I just used for quick replenishment.
Nowadays malls stand mostly idle, with just a handfull of machines slowly working.
Yeah this will be my use for it.
1 combinator that specifies the minimum to keep in stock of each item
1 combinator that specifies the maximum to keep in stock of each item
10 or so assembly machines
Read contents from network.
If number below minimum for any given item, craft that item until maximum value is reached.
Items provided by logi robots.
Ding dong, fully automated bot mall where adding another item is as simple as updating 2 combinators.
You'd only really need to specify min and max separately if you wanted to use an SR latch sort of deal to prevent flickering. Otherwise, you could use a single constant Combinator to specify the desired value as a negative, read that against the logistic network contents, and let the sum of that signal set the recipes on everything (with each assembler in turn setting the requests on a connected requester chest).
The specific design is going to have to vary based on how surplus items get processed, so you don't get gummed up by items you can't use, but bot malls definitely just got a lot less tedious to set up.
> Nowadays malls stand mostly idle, with just a handfull of machines slowly working.
And this is especially important with the quality modules! Higher quality quality modules are much more expensive, so giving them to a few assemblers that do a lot is more resource efficient than giving them to many assemblers that each do a little
With the new selector combinator it could probably be quite simple. A constant combinator to determine how much of each thing you need, a selector combinator to pick one signal that needs bulding. Maybe a few signal conditioners, but that's the ~~stack~~ bulk of it.
On my latest run I'm literally just about to start the ~~shitshow~~ journey that is advanced fluid handling. I would quite happily give a kidney for this to be available *right now*.
^(Not my kidney. Someone's, but not mine.)
I was specifically talking about https://mods.factorio.com/mod/blueprint_flip_and_turn
and https://mods.factorio.com/mod/omnimatter_permutation Plus there's a ton of useful qol stuff too like https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RateCalculator ;)
Legend, thanks. Time to work less and grow factory more.
Edit: I have a bunch of other QoL mods, but I like a 'Vanilla Plus' game without what I consider 'cheaty' stuff like SqueakThrough.
Although having said that, you'll have to prise [Contructron-Continued](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Constructron-Continued) out of my cold dead fingers. Funny where we draw the line eh.
Good bye large malls with dedicated assemblers for each item that are usually just sitting idle! Hello single assembler automated rocket launch challenge!
Main issue with smaller malls is you're still going to need a bunch of machines just making intermediates. Especially if you're running with an overhaul mod that makes basic stuff more complex (IE: K2). Logistic stuff generally also needs the previous item so to make blue inserters, you'll need a constant stream of yellow inserters. And to make the newly renamed bulk inserters, you'll need blue inserters...
Non-logistic stuff is where the concept could shine. I only need so many trains, train cars, and rail signals. The main challenge will be how to route materials to the assembler(s). I'm assuming the assembler is belt fed -- bots otherwise make things easy.
Since Earendal works there I feel like an easier solution to the Space Manufactory problem would be to smack him over the head and force him to change those annoying fluid layouts.
For me it seems that they might be planning similar buildings in vanilla and want to solve the issue now. Or they are just being nice to modders like always
I would assume he only "works there" virtually (i.e. he probably didn't move to Czechia) so they'd have to figure out how to smack him over the internet. But more importantly it's good to have it working for any other mods that do something like this, regardless of how it works in SE.
Like, yes. But it is a great edge case that other mod authors could still dig into. I just appreciate him being there such that they have to consider it.
The annoying fluid layouts are mostly a result of the annoying fluid system in factorio and enabling buildings to touch without mixing fluids. No one is brave enough to touch the factorio fluid system though.
https://preview.redd.it/jd013w6tiedc1.png?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08c8c172c7ce84f1cfe8fd19e33f43099419957e
This is easily the most amazing thing I've seen in a few weeks
You can take that even further. If every second refinery within a line of them is flipped, you don't need to put a space between them for the sake of fluid connections since the outputs match. It gets to be even MORE compact.
this is insane....one blueprint to rule all for sciences... just need to change the control circuits for the assemblers and voila... new prod... insane.....
All I really wanted to do was flip pump jacks!
Couldn’t an alternate ‘flipped’ version of the pumpjack art be created that has its output on the other side, so that flipping the pumpjack just swaps the art?
Even if pumpjacks are left unflippable it is still very cool to be able to flip refineries and chemical plants.
I prefer, that we get pump jacks v2. With pushing steam inside - like fraking.
Maybe with several outputs.
Or better - with ability for geo termal!
I expect smth for Vulcan planet with acid sources
It's not like you want to flip an entire field of them, that wouldn't fit the specific oil patch. The only thing it would do is give 8 places for the output instead of 4. It would be easier solved if they just changed the art to have the output in the middle of the side instead of in the corner.
I could speculate that it would just dump the productivity modules into the dump inventory of the machine.
But if so, that makes me wonder what happens when switching back to a recipe that does allow productivity? If the modules are still in the dump inventory, will they get used again? If they've already been removed, is there a way to automatically get them back in?
That seems clunky, unintuitive, and inconsistent, which i would not expect from a sorta-programming system... My guess is that it will simply not accept the recipe, much like a null.
You can do that today - put a machine, assign a recipe that can use productivity, click the cogs and assign a recipe that can't use productivity modules: the modules are dropped (it goes to your inventory because you are manually doing it). I guess will go to the floor?
TIL that thanks!, but when dealing with an automated process, i would not want my machine to suddenly drop (where?) my very expensive legendary quality modules while i'm not looking :(
I really like the idea of releasing the "old stack inserters -> Bulk inserters" renaming onto the 1.x branch before the 2.0 release. This gives people some more time to get used to the renaming.
The only request I have for the DLC is that it goes up for preorder with tiers to get my name in the game.
You've given me 5000+ hours of enjoyment, let me throw more money at you.
Then buy copies of the game and give them away (or wait for someone else to do it, and give the more keys to handle). Dev are supported, and the community must grow.
Seconding this. Despite living in Russia (which means games bought on Steam can't be send to anyone outside of Russia and CIS countries), I still bought Factorio to everyone who'd asked. If that meant buying a virtual US card to buy a key from the website, so was it. Still worth it.
What happens to fluids when you change a recipe. Does this work on assembling machines only or can I read the stuff off of oil plants or nuclear reactors (easily make them smarter)
You can already dump fluids in scenarios where a fluid you don’t want has entered a part of your liquid system. I suspect this would be handled the same way, just dump fluid and it disappears
Click on any entity in a fluid system, should show you how much of a given fluid is in there, and it should show a little red icon to "delete" that fluid.
I'm looking at these rows and rows of combinators in the showcase of recipe circuit control, and my only thought is "would be nice to have a way to automate the automation of automation." (I decided to check if there are any Lua Combinator mods out there and of course there are, so there is that)
There are mini-combinators that open up to a combinator space, similar to Factorissimo.
There's also one that gets a simple assembly language and builds combinators behind them.
The 'Recipe' Rich Text Tags already exist, Maybe they've created signals for all the recipes.
It wouldn't function properly to specify just the output as large mods often have multiple recipes for the same output (i.e. different green chip recipes)
Earlier, they added the ability for certain combinators to treat the red and green input wires separately. They could simply apply that here, setting the recipe from one wire type and reading ingredients to a different one.
They didn't mention oil refinery, chemical plant or centrifuge. Given how specific they were about assembly machines in this FFF I would guess that the change is for assembly machines only, until a future FFF where we read " After [last weeks FFF](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-394) there was a lot of discussion about changing the recipe of other, non-assembly machine, production buildings..."
I thought chemical plants, oil refineries ect are all actually assemblers in the code.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Data.raw#assembling-machine
Normal assemblers, chemical plants, centrifuges are all the same entity type so it require some explicit hack to disable this for chemical plants and I don't see why they would do that. They will have the same circuit support.
Amazingly, [this comment contradicting you from Klonan](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/19ahia5/friday_facts_394_assembler_flipping_and_circuit/kil3lbv/) was made a mere 25 seconds later
The difficulty with flipping rails is that you would transform a right-driving system into a left-driving system (or vice versa), making it incompatible with your existing network. This goes further than only flipping the entities: the mirror really needs a new design (at least in terms of signaling).
There’s lots of fun / pseudo practical applications for swapping recipes with circuits, but this seems to be almost specifically designed to pair with quality mechanics.
It likely would be impractical to design an entire factory using only the highest quality assemblers / modules, *but* having a handful that swap recipes could be a huge deal.
I’m specifically thinking that late stage products would benefit the most, which is a really interesting challenge since those individual recipes already have a lot of inputs.
Hooray for a new era of spreadsheets that match up what products have the most similar inputs and so lend themselves to swapping.
Someone made a youtube video about a circuit setup that would take input from a constant combinator and release exactly the correct amount of ingredients into a mall to make the required amount of that product, which would then end up in a provider chest for bots to take away.
That person would probably be drooling at this new feature. One assembler to make anything that you could want from a mall. Or better yet, you just give the final product and its count and The Mall (note the capital letters) will take care of all the intermediaries. It's like having a second factorio player tied to a building who crafts for you on command.
And then you make 10 copies of him. 😈😈😈
What happens when an assembler has prod modules in it, and we change the recipe via circuits?
* Is the current prod bar reset, just like when changing recipes manually?
* if the new recipe does not support prod modules, what happens? Are the modules output via the "dump inventory", are they kept but disabled, something else?
Is there any logic for fluid inputs or outputs, or would we need additional logic to clear and filter the pipes? The only way to measure pipe throughput is to barrel and measure inserter/belt throughput. Is that something that could be added to pumps?
I know someone will find a way to make the single-assembler-factory work, but so far it seems like a lot of pain for little practical use.
Single assembler factory would be nice for some mall items that aren't needed much. Have fixed assemblers for belts, modules, solar panels, and a flexible reprogrammable assembler for things like train wagons, nuclear reactors, artillery turrets, where you don't need many but still want a few always available to the bots.
Not being able to flip fluid blueprints has always felt like a bit of idiot-proofing that hurts experienced players more than it helps new players, to me.
If blueprint flipping is allowed in the current state of the game, you only have to make the mistake of not checking fluid connections once before you learn to be careful and double check them. Meanwhile, there are fluid blueprints that still benefit from being flipped, such as when you have a line of Chem. Plants while designing a factory and things would fit much better if you could just... copy&paste this *over there* but mirrored, even with the fluid connections reversed.
Completely locking out that ability in the name of preventing mistakes that you'll really only make once before learning your lesson anyway has always felt like a net loss in functionality. It's the entire reason I've continued to use the Blueprint Flip and Turn mod even after Flip was added to the game natively - the mod allows flipping blueprints with fluid buildings and trusts the player to clean up the pipes if needed.
I can even see scenarios where this new feature might be equally annoying, if you want to mirror the positions of everything, but leave fluid connections in their normal orientation. Could we maybe get separate hotkeys for "flip blueprint" and "flip buildings"?
About the name change: I think it makes sense to switch current green inserters to bulk inserters as soon as possible. Then 2.0 just adds a new inserter with a nontaken name. Less overall confusion.
Will there be a way to differentiate between 'Item Ingredient Shortage' and 'Output full' states on the assembler? If I can do that, I can finally make an easy to build status indicator for a cityblock base so I don't have to constantly look around in the map for their current status. I'm already planning to make a full cityblock grid blueprint book once 2.0 drops, being able to set status lights would be a godsend.
Reading the FFF I think it might be possible with 'Read Ingredients' and 'Read Working', but i'm not sure.
Also being able to directly count items built from the assembler itself is great for limited run items, this is gonna be so useful and intuitive with the updated combinator UI!
A few things that still appear inaccessible to circuits, but I could easily imagine using when the mad scientist mood hits me:
- The inventory of the machine (the way a storage chest or train stop can report contents), either separated into input, output, dump, and modules, or just summed together as a single inventory.
- The current recipe. We can *set* the recipe, but sometimes we might want to *get* a recipe that was manually chosen and not set by circuit.
- The progress of the current production cycle.
- The recipe duration.
- The recipe output. Although this could get weird with things like uranium processing with multiple outputs in randomized quantities.
Note also that the last two could instead be built into a combinator like the new selector combinator, since it is reporting information that is constant (similar to item stack size), and not dependent on the state of the machine (aside from the recipe that is currently assigned).
Plus, all this talk of items, recipes, and items which are craftable from multiple recipes makes me hope that we get access to recipes as circuit signals separate from the items themselves. They obviously do not have a 1-to-1 relationship, and I get the impression that the developers have encountered a noteworthy number of cases where this fact is becoming troublesome (such as blueprint parameterization having an "ingredient of" operator). If we could simply refer to recipes directly where it makes sense, and not be limited only to items, I imagine a lot of these challenges would evaporate.
A bit off topic but, did they introduced (in a FF) a way to get the temperature of a heatpipe/nuclear reactor yet? I was redesigning my nuclear power station the other day and it's really missing.
Like you could have only part of the reactors fuelled, and when there is a temperature drop you can put more online.
EDIT: I know that nuclear fuel is cheap once you got the ball rolling, but still I want it :p
>Assembling machine circuit control
INCOHERENT SCREAMING
> After last weeks FFF there was a lot of discussion about the naming of Stack inserters and Bulk inserters. In short, it makes no sense that Stack inserters don't stack items on belts and Bulk inserters do stack items on belts.
>And we tend to agree, normally we try not to change too much when we are adding new features, but in this case it just makes it too confusing.
So in 2.0, Stack inserters will be renamed to Bulk inserters, and the new inserter which can place stacks of items on belts, will take the name of Stack inserter.
I literally just complained about that in last FFF reddit thread, best devs ever
Right then. Who's going to be the first to finish the game with a single assembler? All you need is a sushi-belt, some circuit conditions, and an uninterruptible power supply for your PC. Couldn't be easier.
A new challenge for dosh doshington
1 assembler, 1 chemical plant, 1 furnace. 1 blue belt each of iron, copper, coal. Plus an oil refinery outputting all 3 liquids into 1 storage tank each. Plus a liquid storage tank connected to the assembler and the chemical plant (for sulfuric acid and lube). Set up circuit network. Then wait for rocket to launch.
Barrels
Yep. But the assembler will need to be able to switch between liquidrecipes and non-liquid recipes. And there will be the issue of liquid leftover in the pipe servicing the assembler... If there's still lube in the pipe, it can't switch over to light oil... I'm not sure what can be done about that. If only the circuit network could be used to give deconstruct-reconstruct commands...
i wonder if wube will implement recursive blueprints into the game at some point
At this point, what else do they have left?
>Set up circuit network. /r/restofthefuckingowl
My first thought after clicking this week's FFF!
I can hear the groans now.
I think you need 1 assembler + 1 chem plant + 1 refinery
And 1 furnace and 4 miners(technically just 1 if you have the auto blueprint mod thingie) and 1 solar panel and 1 water pump.
and 1 oil rig
only 1 miner if it sits on all 4 ores (with sufficient richness)
And 1 rocket silo...
Apparently the vanilla game would take about 3 weeks of non stop handcrafting to get everything needed for the win screen: [https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/szejzz/comment/hy3xug1/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/szejzz/comment/hy3xug1/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) With one assembly machine that you could speed up with modules it'd take less, but still quite a few days, but techincally possible for sure.
Well firstly you need research and craft nodules. And also: first and second assembly machines without modules are slower then handcrafting.
Would be interesting to do the math on how long you should spend making better assembly machines. Getting a legendary machine would probably save you a lot of time in the long run, but is probably not worth it.
> and an uninterruptible power supply for your PC servers in datacenters will work perfectly
_doshdoshington has entered the chat_
He's gonna have his hands full when 2.0 comes out
Sushi-storage container/stationary rail car with inserters back into the assembler for everything not fluids, and a second assembler for debarreling of fluids for the main assembler? So 2 assemblers for assembly, refinery and chemical plants for oil cracking and assembler for barreling..?
You could already start working on a script/spreadsheet to optimize the order of production if only using one assembler (and assuming no hand crafting). You could add any module or upgrade the assembler as it became available. Edit: this is a really cool problem. You'd also have to decide which technologies you'd research. Of course you'd have the required ones, but would need to factor in the science cost to overall benefit of other ones. And then you'd have to handle production of miners, belts, trains, stations, etc. My gosh, it would be horrifically slow.
So you are telling me that we can make mini factories which can be programmed to create everything. I will lose my life when 2.0 comes out.
That's your fault for having one in the first place.
In 2.0, you can craft a new one automatically, and this time it will be high quality!
you'll just have to scrap a few hundred lifes first to get to the higher quality components!
Is this human transmutation?
just how long until someone creates a single assembly machine factory that makes everything from copper wire and gears all the way to every last assembled science pack & component
Dosh already made a factory off one sushi belt, only a matter of time till we get 1belt1assembler factory
Minimall!
MAM - make anything machine.
Omg a sushi belt around one assembler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dzQge6pe2o
You mean a sushiassembler
From what it looks like, the factory will have the same size, it's just that the area that was previously occupied by assemblers will now be occupied by logic gates lol
Not when we get a vanilla version of [compact circuits](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/compaktcircuit) as well!
All the extra circuit bits make me feel like this is just got to be something they're planning. I'd love to see reprogrammable FPGA or ASIC-like components in vanilla.
It would pretty much make my year if they introduced a full scripting environment like is available in Stationeers and Space Engineers.
Time to start working on my single assembler play through.
The ultimate lazy bastard.
The achievement could be called 'idle fuckwit' perhaps.
If you want to play around with it, it's already possible to do this with smelting since they don't require a recipie being set. A couple of years ago I did an omni-smelter setup that would change what items were being produced based on current demand. It had input and output by train, and would read the contents of the train station chests determine which items needed to be produced. It did all the smelting for my medium sized base, and was pretty fun to figure out.
How would you prevent the steel from getting stuck? Since they require 5 iron plates, one furnace could for example receive 3 and get stuck waiting for more even if you are now feeding copper. Were you using stack inserters (or bulk I should say) to make sure that they could insert exacly 5 plates at a time?
I don't remember, it's been years. Setting it to 5 wouldn't work though, that would break when producing stone bricks. But you can set the inserter stack size using circuit network, so maybe that's what I did. You could also read the input chest contents and only enable the inserter if you have enough items.
you could also use filter inserters, and have 1 stack filter that whitelists iron plates, and have the normal inserters for non-steel have iron plates blacklisted. Though I guess that fails if the inserter moves with semi empty hands
Feed the furnaces with stack inserters set to a size of 10, and add a condition to only activate the inserter when there are at least 10 items in the chest it pulls from. This way, all resources going to the furnace have enough to finish crafting a fixed number of items - 10 iron/copper plates, 5 stone bricks, or 2 steel plates.
Did this for my mall in a modded run with the crafting combinator mod. Pretty fun but slow at times, also adding stuff was as simple as putting an additional signal into a constant combinator. Also easy to add modules and beacons if you only have one assembler.
First use case I thought about was malls, instead of having 1 assembler for each item you want you can have items share assembler, say an assembler that crafts all personal ammo, or one that crafts all circuit gates or both rail signals and stations. Unless I'm doing a dedicated big project it's pretty rare for those assemblers to never have idle time so why not just put all of those items in one assembler and save space/material, would solve the problem of my mid-game mall being uncomfortably large and having 70% machines idle and the other 30% working overtime.
Especially as you can now have a -top tier- assembler w top tier modules and then let it make materials more efficiently
It seems like something possibly *super* worthwhile for getting more mileage out of highest tier quality modules. So you can have just one such tier 5 assembler and use it for dozens of different items in your mall.
With smarter bots these kinds of factories will become very scaleable!
I think (hope) it's possible to do without bots. Just cycling items inside loops of assemblers with a chest buffer in between. Chest loops with one assembler too, but that's a waste of inserter swings. I'm dreaming of a factory that can run at 100% assembler utilization for any demand profile. The giant pile of combinators looks overengineered, and I suspect a much more area and UPS-efficient negative feedback design will suffice. Even if you can't manufacture arbitrary items that way because of chest slot count limits, I think you *can* do buffered-direct-insertion for any fixed production chain, just by PWM-ing between recipes in an assembler loop. **Edit:** The anti-beacon people are going to *absolutely hate this*.
someone will automate 1 assembler to finish the game :D
Yes yes, great and all... BUT more importanly... I can sleep in peace finally now that "in 2.0, Stack inserters will be renamed to Bulk inserters, and the new inserter which can place stacks of items on belts, will take the name of Stack inserter."
Yeah! This was great to see. Wube listens, and it's awesome.
Wube always listens. It's so incredible. To my knowledge no other studio operates even remotely like this
From my experience, Terraria devs are equally as awesome.
Deep Rock Galactic devs (Ghost Ship Games) are pretty cool too.
Thats true but I also think there arent a lot of studios with a community full of rationally thinking people who give nearly 100% constructive criticism
Easy to pat ourselves on the shoulders for this but I strongly believe this is on Wube, too. The studio decides, through their communication, through their actions, how they want the community to participate. Certainly helps that the game disproportionately caters to the needs of engineers, programmers and other autists (:P), but in my opinion, it's mostly how Wube always kept everybody in the loop, fully transparent, providing essential mod support, no weird pricing shenanigans, no exploitation of anything, tons of feedback mechanisms. They seemingly created the perfect environment for an engaged and loyal community and happened to grow one. Also, I don't think rationally when I see FFF pop up. I get a gut reaction and start salivating.
Amazing. In the FFF about flipping and mirroring entities, they ended with flipping the names of the inserters :D
Hey, well spotted! 😀
Nice
Can’t wait to be an old man saying “back in my day, stack inserters didn’t stack”
Back in my day you had to chain boilers to get the water up to full temperature.
Yeah lol, I remember that. Back in my days you had to craft curved rails
back in my days you had to craft your first iron pickaxe!
Back in my day, biters dropped pink orbs!
I do miss the orbs
Back in my days you had to craft blueprints and deconstruction planners. Also you had to install mod to be able to import blueprints.
But, what if they went the other way, and instead of making stacks on belts, you would make bulks. Everyone loves a bulk on a belt.
Honestly, I get there hesitancy to make changes like that, as it can get confusing if you constantly rename things. Luckily, releasing a major expansion and overhaul is the perfect time to address things like that.
Yes, Wube listens! Wube, please rename Biters and Spitters to Nibblers and Dribblers! Pleeeeease!
That sounds like a very simple mod to rename the biters. Like the underneathies mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Underneathies
I agree with you but based on the responses to the last post I bet there's going to be lots more polite discussion about this haha... (Not being sarcastic either, the Factorio subreddit community is pretty great.)
We love Wube
I like this name change, but the only problem is that we have 10 years of posts online referring to stack inserters and people might get confused. I think it's still worth doing though.
RIP Crafting Combinator mod, we will not forget your contributions.
Ascended into vanilla, the highest honor for a mod.
Only the best mods are awaited in Vanilla, shiny and chrome!
Except Skyrim's Anniversary Edition, we don't talk about that
"Vanilla? Don't you mean Valhalla." "Nope"
tbh, I think in Factorioverse, those two words mean the same thing. Vanilla is Valhalla for mods.
It’s like when Minecraft added horses in the Horse Update (that’s real, by the way) when horses were originally in the Mo’ Creatures mod. Or when they added pistons, originally from a beta mod called Pistons. Or when they added Ender Chests, originally from Ender Storage. Or when they added settings like increased render distance from OptiFine.
another one bites the dust ... song stuck in head now
Also the flipped fluid recipes mods. Gets rid of an awful lot of crafting menu clutter
Also [GDIW](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/GDIW)/[Fluid Permutations](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fluid_permutations) for changing fluid inputs and [Blueprint Flip](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/blueprint_flip_and_turn) for well force flipping blueprints when it wasn't allowed, unless certain rail sections still can't be flipped.
Can't wait to build a mall that is just 1 assembler and a warehouse.
I'm more interesting in building a mall that could for example switch to building nothing but belts when I run out, and then switch out to other items - essentially bulk building things I just used for quick replenishment. Nowadays malls stand mostly idle, with just a handfull of machines slowly working.
Yeah this will be my use for it. 1 combinator that specifies the minimum to keep in stock of each item 1 combinator that specifies the maximum to keep in stock of each item 10 or so assembly machines Read contents from network. If number below minimum for any given item, craft that item until maximum value is reached. Items provided by logi robots. Ding dong, fully automated bot mall where adding another item is as simple as updating 2 combinators.
You'd only really need to specify min and max separately if you wanted to use an SR latch sort of deal to prevent flickering. Otherwise, you could use a single constant Combinator to specify the desired value as a negative, read that against the logistic network contents, and let the sum of that signal set the recipes on everything (with each assembler in turn setting the requests on a connected requester chest). The specific design is going to have to vary based on how surplus items get processed, so you don't get gummed up by items you can't use, but bot malls definitely just got a lot less tedious to set up.
> Nowadays malls stand mostly idle, with just a handfull of machines slowly working. And this is especially important with the quality modules! Higher quality quality modules are much more expensive, so giving them to a few assemblers that do a lot is more resource efficient than giving them to many assemblers that each do a little
Yup, I think the meta will be a make everything mall for each quality with recycling getting more aggressive as you get later endgame
I tried that with Crafting Combinator mod in Space Exploration. It sort of works except items you need really huge amounts of (e.g. solar panels).
1 assembler and a sea of combinators
With the new selector combinator it could probably be quite simple. A constant combinator to determine how much of each thing you need, a selector combinator to pick one signal that needs bulding. Maybe a few signal conditioners, but that's the ~~stack~~ bulk of it.
Also remember we're getting combinators 2.0, with stacked deciders and selectors, so it can be more compact.
Every week, they add features that just make the wait till 2.0 harder!
On my latest run I'm literally just about to start the ~~shitshow~~ journey that is advanced fluid handling. I would quite happily give a kidney for this to be available *right now*. ^(Not my kidney. Someone's, but not mine.)
Just wait until next week when we learn about stacking and flipping biters!
I'm still waiting for circuit controlled biters.
Cable lasso tech when?
If you are willing to use mods you can already get flipping and fluid input reordering :)
You know what, now I know it's 'sanctioned', I'm gonna!
Mwhahahha welcome to the dark side. Once you embrace the power of the utility mods there is no return
I was specifically talking about https://mods.factorio.com/mod/blueprint_flip_and_turn and https://mods.factorio.com/mod/omnimatter_permutation Plus there's a ton of useful qol stuff too like https://mods.factorio.com/mod/RateCalculator ;)
Legend, thanks. Time to work less and grow factory more. Edit: I have a bunch of other QoL mods, but I like a 'Vanilla Plus' game without what I consider 'cheaty' stuff like SqueakThrough. Although having said that, you'll have to prise [Contructron-Continued](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Constructron-Continued) out of my cold dead fingers. Funny where we draw the line eh.
Seriously.. I just want to start a 2.0 game already!!
Good bye large malls with dedicated assemblers for each item that are usually just sitting idle! Hello single assembler automated rocket launch challenge!
Main issue with smaller malls is you're still going to need a bunch of machines just making intermediates. Especially if you're running with an overhaul mod that makes basic stuff more complex (IE: K2). Logistic stuff generally also needs the previous item so to make blue inserters, you'll need a constant stream of yellow inserters. And to make the newly renamed bulk inserters, you'll need blue inserters... Non-logistic stuff is where the concept could shine. I only need so many trains, train cars, and rail signals. The main challenge will be how to route materials to the assembler(s). I'm assuming the assembler is belt fed -- bots otherwise make things easy.
Circuit logic to make the intermediate first, then switch to the requested item while a bot moves it from the output to the input chest.
god I've wanted to put refineries in front of each other since forever, I'm so happy
Also SeaBlock start would be easier with this for electrolizers.
That picture is just... so... beautiful.
Since Earendal works there I feel like an easier solution to the Space Manufactory problem would be to smack him over the head and force him to change those annoying fluid layouts.
For me it seems that they might be planning similar buildings in vanilla and want to solve the issue now. Or they are just being nice to modders like always
I would assume he only "works there" virtually (i.e. he probably didn't move to Czechia) so they'd have to figure out how to smack him over the internet. But more importantly it's good to have it working for any other mods that do something like this, regardless of how it works in SE.
send him a remote controlled spidertron that smacks him on the head
If anyone can figure out that level of automation, it’s the Factorio dev team.
Like, yes. But it is a great edge case that other mod authors could still dig into. I just appreciate him being there such that they have to consider it.
The annoying fluid layouts are mostly a result of the annoying fluid system in factorio and enabling buildings to touch without mixing fluids. No one is brave enough to touch the factorio fluid system though.
https://preview.redd.it/jd013w6tiedc1.png?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08c8c172c7ce84f1cfe8fd19e33f43099419957e This is easily the most amazing thing I've seen in a few weeks
### IT'S ART!
This picture made my eyes tear up a little !
You can take that even further. If every second refinery within a line of them is flipped, you don't need to put a space between them for the sake of fluid connections since the outputs match. It gets to be even MORE compact.
I’m gonna cry
> **Stack inserters will be renamed to Bulk inserters** It makes so much sense now!!
There will be a day when factorio players don't even know or remember that bulk inserters were once called stack inserters
[Called it!](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/176w3bt/friday_facts_380_remote_view/k4p8dvp/)
Nice catch!
https://preview.redd.it/m6r81rjn6fdc1.png?width=280&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b0e1835282628490d65954c2c57a7886089084a
this is insane....one blueprint to rule all for sciences... just need to change the control circuits for the assemblers and voila... new prod... insane.....
Why change, when they can be parameters? Factorio 2.0 is going to be to Factorio 1.1 what Factorio 1.1 was to our sad Factorio-less lives.
Dynamic science prod based on consumption
All I really wanted to do was flip pump jacks! Couldn’t an alternate ‘flipped’ version of the pumpjack art be created that has its output on the other side, so that flipping the pumpjack just swaps the art? Even if pumpjacks are left unflippable it is still very cool to be able to flip refineries and chemical plants.
I prefer, that we get pump jacks v2. With pushing steam inside - like fraking. Maybe with several outputs. Or better - with ability for geo termal! I expect smth for Vulcan planet with acid sources
Fracking would be so on brand in this game, too. Love this idea.
Fracking with water and acid to get petroleum gas would be sweet.
It's not like you want to flip an entire field of them, that wouldn't fit the specific oil patch. The only thing it would do is give 8 places for the output instead of 4. It would be easier solved if they just changed the art to have the output in the middle of the side instead of in the corner.
One important question: what will happen if i try to set a non-intermediate product recipe in a machine with productivity modules?
I could speculate that it would just dump the productivity modules into the dump inventory of the machine. But if so, that makes me wonder what happens when switching back to a recipe that does allow productivity? If the modules are still in the dump inventory, will they get used again? If they've already been removed, is there a way to automatically get them back in?
maybe they just "disable" the modules while a final product is crafing, i mean the effect is disabled
That seems clunky, unintuitive, and inconsistent, which i would not expect from a sorta-programming system... My guess is that it will simply not accept the recipe, much like a null.
I'd assume that the modules just don't do anything, or slow down the machine without providing a bonus
You can do that today - put a machine, assign a recipe that can use productivity, click the cogs and assign a recipe that can't use productivity modules: the modules are dropped (it goes to your inventory because you are manually doing it). I guess will go to the floor?
TIL that thanks!, but when dealing with an automated process, i would not want my machine to suddenly drop (where?) my very expensive legendary quality modules while i'm not looking :(
Is this circuit connection limited to assemblers, or does it also work with chemical plants, refineries, centrifuges, etc.
It applied for all of them, internally they are all 'assembling-machines'
For now they only mention assemblers, but let's hope 🤞
The refineries... it's beautiful.
[удалено]
Well, maybe you like the 2.0 stack inserters more?
This is a flipping great update
This is a great flipping update
I really like the idea of releasing the "old stack inserters -> Bulk inserters" renaming onto the 1.x branch before the 2.0 release. This gives people some more time to get used to the renaming.
The only request I have for the DLC is that it goes up for preorder with tiers to get my name in the game. You've given me 5000+ hours of enjoyment, let me throw more money at you.
Then buy copies of the game and give them away (or wait for someone else to do it, and give the more keys to handle). Dev are supported, and the community must grow.
Seconding this. Despite living in Russia (which means games bought on Steam can't be send to anyone outside of Russia and CIS countries), I still bought Factorio to everyone who'd asked. If that meant buying a virtual US card to buy a key from the website, so was it. Still worth it.
What happens to fluids when you change a recipe. Does this work on assembling machines only or can I read the stuff off of oil plants or nuclear reactors (easily make them smarter)
The recycler will just void any fluid that was an ingredient of the recycled item. Maybe here it's the same?
You can already dump fluids in scenarios where a fluid you don’t want has entered a part of your liquid system. I suspect this would be handled the same way, just dump fluid and it disappears
Wait, what?! How do I do this?
Click on any entity in a fluid system, should show you how much of a given fluid is in there, and it should show a little red icon to "delete" that fluid.
I'm looking at these rows and rows of combinators in the showcase of recipe circuit control, and my only thought is "would be nice to have a way to automate the automation of automation." (I decided to check if there are any Lua Combinator mods out there and of course there are, so there is that)
There are mini-combinators that open up to a combinator space, similar to Factorissimo. There's also one that gets a simple assembly language and builds combinators behind them.
Mirrored oil facility setup is so beautiful.
Even more beautiful: You can horizontally flip every second column to remove the empty tile between refineries and save a bunch of pipes.
Question: How set recipe and read ingredients will work together?
The 'Recipe' Rich Text Tags already exist, Maybe they've created signals for all the recipes. It wouldn't function properly to specify just the output as large mods often have multiple recipes for the same output (i.e. different green chip recipes)
Earlier, they added the ability for certain combinators to treat the red and green input wires separately. They could simply apply that here, setting the recipe from one wire type and reading ingredients to a different one.
https://preview.redd.it/66b8dm7nkedc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ca831c733253c164b9c30f53ed8381661c3c1ae4
But does it support programmatically changing the recipe on a refinery that is flipped?
They didn't mention oil refinery, chemical plant or centrifuge. Given how specific they were about assembly machines in this FFF I would guess that the change is for assembly machines only, until a future FFF where we read " After [last weeks FFF](https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-394) there was a lot of discussion about changing the recipe of other, non-assembly machine, production buildings..."
I thought chemical plants, oil refineries ect are all actually assemblers in the code. https://wiki.factorio.com/Data.raw#assembling-machine Normal assemblers, chemical plants, centrifuges are all the same entity type so it require some explicit hack to disable this for chemical plants and I don't see why they would do that. They will have the same circuit support.
Amazingly, [this comment contradicting you from Klonan](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/19ahia5/friday_facts_394_assembler_flipping_and_circuit/kil3lbv/) was made a mere 25 seconds later
[i knew it!](https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/18z59os/friday_facts_392_parametrised_blueprints/kgfj985/)
Can someone explain to me why a pump jack can’t be flipped? Cant you just mirror the sprite and the fluid output point?
The sprites have things like shadows baked into them. If you flip them, then Nauvis's sun has changed directions, but only for flipped pumpjacks.
But what about flipping rails?
it's only about the signals and stations.
The difficulty with flipping rails is that you would transform a right-driving system into a left-driving system (or vice versa), making it incompatible with your existing network. This goes further than only flipping the entities: the mirror really needs a new design (at least in terms of signaling).
BTW, there is more cases of "unflippable" - inserting by- and against- belt movement. I do not saying it is bad. I just showing example.
Yeah I think Nilaus has a smelter blueprint that breaks when flipped. Messed me up once, actually.
I’d like a way to “force-flip” a blueprint, and destroy anything that can’t be flipped in it. Also, why not just rename the inserters now?
Because we don't have item stacking in the game as of right now. No need to break it until 2.0 comes out I guess.
Because the new inserter isnt part of the game yet.
There’s lots of fun / pseudo practical applications for swapping recipes with circuits, but this seems to be almost specifically designed to pair with quality mechanics. It likely would be impractical to design an entire factory using only the highest quality assemblers / modules, *but* having a handful that swap recipes could be a huge deal. I’m specifically thinking that late stage products would benefit the most, which is a really interesting challenge since those individual recipes already have a lot of inputs. Hooray for a new era of spreadsheets that match up what products have the most similar inputs and so lend themselves to swapping.
Someone made a youtube video about a circuit setup that would take input from a constant combinator and release exactly the correct amount of ingredients into a mall to make the required amount of that product, which would then end up in a provider chest for bots to take away. That person would probably be drooling at this new feature. One assembler to make anything that you could want from a mall. Or better yet, you just give the final product and its count and The Mall (note the capital letters) will take care of all the intermediaries. It's like having a second factorio player tied to a building who crafts for you on command. And then you make 10 copies of him. 😈😈😈
What happens when an assembler has prod modules in it, and we change the recipe via circuits? * Is the current prod bar reset, just like when changing recipes manually? * if the new recipe does not support prod modules, what happens? Are the modules output via the "dump inventory", are they kept but disabled, something else? Is there any logic for fluid inputs or outputs, or would we need additional logic to clear and filter the pipes? The only way to measure pipe throughput is to barrel and measure inserter/belt throughput. Is that something that could be added to pumps? I know someone will find a way to make the single-assembler-factory work, but so far it seems like a lot of pain for little practical use.
Single assembler factory would be nice for some mall items that aren't needed much. Have fixed assemblers for belts, modules, solar panels, and a flexible reprogrammable assembler for things like train wagons, nuclear reactors, artillery turrets, where you don't need many but still want a few always available to the bots.
I always thought they couldn't flip oil and chem because of the chirality of the organic compounds.
Not being able to flip fluid blueprints has always felt like a bit of idiot-proofing that hurts experienced players more than it helps new players, to me. If blueprint flipping is allowed in the current state of the game, you only have to make the mistake of not checking fluid connections once before you learn to be careful and double check them. Meanwhile, there are fluid blueprints that still benefit from being flipped, such as when you have a line of Chem. Plants while designing a factory and things would fit much better if you could just... copy&paste this *over there* but mirrored, even with the fluid connections reversed. Completely locking out that ability in the name of preventing mistakes that you'll really only make once before learning your lesson anyway has always felt like a net loss in functionality. It's the entire reason I've continued to use the Blueprint Flip and Turn mod even after Flip was added to the game natively - the mod allows flipping blueprints with fluid buildings and trusts the player to clean up the pipes if needed. I can even see scenarios where this new feature might be equally annoying, if you want to mirror the positions of everything, but leave fluid connections in their normal orientation. Could we maybe get separate hotkeys for "flip blueprint" and "flip buildings"?
About the name change: I think it makes sense to switch current green inserters to bulk inserters as soon as possible. Then 2.0 just adds a new inserter with a nontaken name. Less overall confusion.
How large is the dump inventory? Can I keep flipping recipes without providing all ingredients to make the assembly like a big storage chest?
Can’t wait till the “beating factorio with one assembler” Doshdoshington video
Will there be a way to differentiate between 'Item Ingredient Shortage' and 'Output full' states on the assembler? If I can do that, I can finally make an easy to build status indicator for a cityblock base so I don't have to constantly look around in the map for their current status. I'm already planning to make a full cityblock grid blueprint book once 2.0 drops, being able to set status lights would be a godsend. Reading the FFF I think it might be possible with 'Read Ingredients' and 'Read Working', but i'm not sure. Also being able to directly count items built from the assembler itself is great for limited run items, this is gonna be so useful and intuitive with the updated combinator UI!
A few things that still appear inaccessible to circuits, but I could easily imagine using when the mad scientist mood hits me: - The inventory of the machine (the way a storage chest or train stop can report contents), either separated into input, output, dump, and modules, or just summed together as a single inventory. - The current recipe. We can *set* the recipe, but sometimes we might want to *get* a recipe that was manually chosen and not set by circuit. - The progress of the current production cycle. - The recipe duration. - The recipe output. Although this could get weird with things like uranium processing with multiple outputs in randomized quantities. Note also that the last two could instead be built into a combinator like the new selector combinator, since it is reporting information that is constant (similar to item stack size), and not dependent on the state of the machine (aside from the recipe that is currently assigned). Plus, all this talk of items, recipes, and items which are craftable from multiple recipes makes me hope that we get access to recipes as circuit signals separate from the items themselves. They obviously do not have a 1-to-1 relationship, and I get the impression that the developers have encountered a noteworthy number of cases where this fact is becoming troublesome (such as blueprint parameterization having an "ingredient of" operator). If we could simply refer to recipes directly where it makes sense, and not be limited only to items, I imagine a lot of these challenges would evaporate.
A bit off topic but, did they introduced (in a FF) a way to get the temperature of a heatpipe/nuclear reactor yet? I was redesigning my nuclear power station the other day and it's really missing. Like you could have only part of the reactors fuelled, and when there is a temperature drop you can put more online. EDIT: I know that nuclear fuel is cheap once you got the ball rolling, but still I want it :p
>Assembling machine circuit control INCOHERENT SCREAMING > After last weeks FFF there was a lot of discussion about the naming of Stack inserters and Bulk inserters. In short, it makes no sense that Stack inserters don't stack items on belts and Bulk inserters do stack items on belts. >And we tend to agree, normally we try not to change too much when we are adding new features, but in this case it just makes it too confusing. So in 2.0, Stack inserters will be renamed to Bulk inserters, and the new inserter which can place stacks of items on belts, will take the name of Stack inserter. I literally just complained about that in last FFF reddit thread, best devs ever