Unipolar magnets in particle container recipe?

[Electric Donkey]

I'm looking at Factoriolab's DSP calculator for a "green from raw" list of facilities and resources, and if I choose the recipe for particle containers that uses unipolar magnets it seems to say I'll need to dedicate more than 28 veins to this one green science blueprint, which will only produce 375 jello servings per minute. I only have like 80 veins in the whole cluster (one black hole, one neutron star). So if you're making lots of green jello, do you need to use the ugly recipe for particle containers, even if you have ultra high VU or infinite resources? (Or am I reading the calculator wrong?)

[Electric Donkey]

Or maybe Factoriolabs doesn't take into account advanced miners and cranking them up to 300%? So I could make my UM veins go three times as far as this calculator is saying?

Edit: Or maybe as long as you keep researching VU you'll be able to boost the mining speed enough to continue to use the UM recipe?

[Rekal]

Yeah the calculator doesn't take Vein Utilization into account. Look at the throughput (items/s or items/min) required instead of the vein nodes required and make a judgement based on that. Two nodes covered by one miner at the base miner speed will give 1 item per second. Multiply that by your mining speed, and factor in the new larger miners to get what each node will currently output for you.

Just be sure if you're going to ship the unipole magnets everywhere that your logistics station links are up to the challenge. With every green cube needing 4.1 unipole magnets (fully proliferated) this could end up being a bottleneck for you. Only 10 logistic vessels can be inbound to a single ILS. Plus black holes and neutron stars are usually near the outskirts of a sector so longer transit times.

The other recipe may seem messy, but don't count it out. It's cheap. The total inputs for it when proliferated are only 3.9 iron ore, 0.7 copper ore, and 0.7 fire-ice. All very common material you can find in almost every system, just a few extra process steps to reach the same point. About 3 extra mk3 assemblers and an extra chem plant per 1/s green cube isn't too ugly.

Edit: I just popped into the game to confirm what the new miners rate was, and each node under a big miner pulls 1/s or 60/min. Which is double the original miners per node. Multiple that by your upgraded mining speed, and then again by whatever % you crank the new miner up to to get how much you can pull from a single node.

[aphfid]

In the settings for Factoriolab, near the bottom, there is a "bonuses" section. The only item in that category is mining speed. When the mining speed is increased and decreased, the number of veins needed in the recipe changes as well. I'm guessing Factoriolab uses mining speed to tie into VU - as VU both increases mining speed and decreases ore utilisation. I've never paid any attention to it before as I tend to play more by ear as to whether I use the unipolar magnets for particle containers or not. Maybe it's useful for you.

I tend to not use unipolar magnets for particle containers until my ore consumption is tiny - like 0.01 percent. My blueprints make stuff from raw, so once the blueprint is set up, it doesn't make that much difference to me whether I use unipolar magnets or not.

I think it's more important to pay attention to the actual amount rather than the number of veins with unipolar magnets. Lets say I start with 50 veins for a total of 10 million magnets (pulling figures out of the air here so don't think of the numbers as real). If I have already consumed 50% of them, I might still have 50 veins, but only 5 million magnets left. I tend to hang off using unipolar magnets till I look at my ore consumption and the amount left and conclude, yeah - I'm pretty unlikely to use all that. If I have 5 million, but my ore consumption is only 1%, then that's the same as having 500 million. If my ore consumption is 0.01%, then it's the same as 100 times 500 million, which I'm probably not going to use. (Ore consumption is 4th from the bottom on the upgrade panel when in the upgrade window of tech)

Something else I sometimes do is harvest and set aside 150,000 magnets for making plane smelters. That's enough to make 10,000 arc smelters, which I'm unlikely to need, so if I run out of magnets, worst case scenario is going back to the non-rare recipe. All depends on how many unipolar magnets are in the cluster. Some might only have 80,000 unipolar magnets total, while others have 14 million. I've had clusters that have had less than 20,000 magnets, but since they added plane smelters, it seems to me like there's always millions.

I would classify unipolar magnets as an end-game thing. That said, I've never run out of them since the plane smelters were added.

[Coops]

Also take into account 25% more for the mk3 proliferated recipe.

[LorDC]

Originally posted by Electric Donkey:

Or maybe Factoriolabs doesn't take into account advanced miners and cranking them up to 300%? So I could make my UM veins go three times as far as this calculator is saying?

Edit: Or maybe as long as you keep researching VU you'll be able to boost the mining speed enough to continue to use the UM recipe?

You have to crank it up to 600% fot advanced miners because they have 60/min base mining rate compared to 30/min of basic miners. Then multiply it by your VU upgrade bonus.

[josmith7]

Originally posted by Coops:

Also take into account 25% more for the mk3 proliferated recipe.

Though FactorioLabs calculator does at least take that automatically into account if you tell it you're using proliferation for +production. (By clicking on the little proliferation icon to the right of the factory for that product)

The mining speed adjustment, over in settings -> bonuses is more manual.
You'd need to go over to your technology tree screen to read your current mining speed, And then if using Advanced miners multiply that by between 2 - 6 (depending on how much you're overdriving them) just to work out what value to change the default 100% to.



Myself, I don't bother. I just assume that by the time I've got my VU high enough I'm not worried about depleting my unipolar magnets that I'll have more than enough mining speed to feed the factory.