How To Deal With Bottlenecks Quickly?

[Hexafish]

I'm aware this is what makes Factorio so addicting and can leave you awake at three, but it's starting to get annoying to find ways to quickly resolve them.

I'm going to list everything in my factory for the past 10 hours

Iron deposit depleted
Train network + smelting + iron outpost completed
Power drainage

Lack of greens
Lack of copper to make greens
Lack of furnaces
Lack of reds to make furnaces
Lack of greens to make reds
Lack of greens

This particular bottleneck is very hard to resolve because the key issue is that its in a loop and is hard to resolve. Don't believe me?

These loops of bottlenecks are precisely what amplified the Great Depression in the 1930s. (Yes, I'm aware that it was actually because the economy crashed, but the loop afterward made it harder to resolve).

So back to my factory. Any ideas to combat this?

[KatherineOfSky]

Try to build big as you plan for the future. If you "run out of space", find more space -- put assemblies/furnaces, etc. in their own outposts and ship it in by train.

Personally, I like very big/rich ore patches, so that they last for a long time and provide a sufficient amount of materials. The cycle you describe is indeed part of what is so addictive about Factorio, but your planning should mitigate the "hard crash" of any one of those things happening.

Lack of greens seems to be the main difficulty -- mine LOTS of copper -- have several outposts, not just one. Plan a green circuit production area based on how many blue belts of green circuits you want to provide to your factory. ... the make sure you have enough copper and iron to supply it. Remember that steel furnaces are the same speed as electric ones, and don't need red circuits. There is ZERO reason to switch to electric unless you have 1. Sufficient Power AND 2. Modules to Put in them.

Consider making your greens in their own outpost, so you can design everything from the ground up, (instead of squishing it into your current factory).

[Hexafish]

Originally posted by KatherineOfSky:

Try to build big as you plan for the future. If you "run out of space", find more space -- put assemblies/furnaces, etc. in their own outposts and ship it in by train.

Personally, I like very big/rich ore patches, so that they last for a long time and provide a sufficient amount of materials. The cycle you describe is indeed part of what is so addictive about Factorio, but your planning should mitigate the "hard crash" of any one of those things happening.

Lack of greens seems to be the main difficulty -- mine LOTS of copper -- have several outposts, not just one. Plan a green circuit production area based on how many blue belts of green circuits you want to provide to your factory. ... the make sure you have enough copper and iron to supply it. Remember that steel furnaces are the same speed as electric ones, and don't need red circuits. There is ZERO reason to switch to electric unless you have 1. Sufficient Power AND 2. Modules to Put in them.

Consider making your greens in their own outpost, so you can design everything from the ground up, (instead of squishing it into your current factory).

I'm at a strange stage in the game where I'm shifting my factory towards rails because I haven't built the rail system yet.

I guess this would kind of be like when you were adding a steel outpost in your playthrough but to make the rails you needed steel.

[Roxor128]

Originally posted by KatherineOfSky:

There is ZERO reason to switch to electric unless you have 1. Sufficient Power AND 2. Modules to Put in them.

There is one: You're building a smelting outpost and don't want to ship in coal to run it.

[Lothos]

FWIW, my current map has taught me some things I need to simply accept from the get go on any future maps. And mind you i've played many many other maps before this one with hundreds of hours of playtime.

1. First consider from the get go where you want/plan to be at the end of the day. My goal originally was a satelite launched every second before .15 came out. Now I logic circuit my rockets to launch when i need packs, but I still want to be about that speed.

2. However much space you think you need around anything, quadruple it and then give it more space. I am currently moving my satelite outposts a third time and will need to move some of them again to give them enough room to be big enough for my end desires.

3. If you want rails, decide what kind of system you plan to run from the get go and how big your trains are from the start. Its a royal PITA to switch later. Also, plan a minimum of 4 tracks wide in your busiest areas of your base and keep intersections/T's/exits away from each other at least a train length.

[GMC]

Originally posted by Darkslayer85:

This particular bottleneck is very hard to resolve because the key issue is that its in a loop and is hard to resolve.

The resolution is simple: allocate 100% of copper to greens, 100% of greens to reds, 100% of reds to furnaces, 100% of furnaces to expanding your smelting capacity. Once your smelting capacity reaches the point where copper plates are bottlenecked upon copper ore rather than furnaces, you can go back to using furnaces to make science packs

In short, it's the fundamental dilemma behind every resource-management game: spend or invest. I.e. whether to use your resources to create end products (e.g. combat units in a RTS) now, or to use them to increase your resource flow so that you can create end products at a faster rate in the future.

There are a couple of things that can semi-automate this:

• Have an inserter move furnaces from the belt into a one-slot chest. Once it's full, they'll proceed on to use in science packs. If you take the contents to expand smelting, they'll be replaced before (or alongside) science packs.
  
• Prioritised splitting, so that the above allocations become automatic in the event of resource starvation.

[Greep]

Originally posted by Darkslayer85:

Originally posted by KatherineOfSky:

Try to build big as you plan for the future. If you "run out of space", find more space -- put assemblies/furnaces, etc. in their own outposts and ship it in by train.

Personally, I like very big/rich ore patches, so that they last for a long time and provide a sufficient amount of materials. The cycle you describe is indeed part of what is so addictive about Factorio, but your planning should mitigate the "hard crash" of any one of those things happening.

Lack of greens seems to be the main difficulty -- mine LOTS of copper -- have several outposts, not just one. Plan a green circuit production area based on how many blue belts of green circuits you want to provide to your factory. ... the make sure you have enough copper and iron to supply it. Remember that steel furnaces are the same speed as electric ones, and don't need red circuits. There is ZERO reason to switch to electric unless you have 1. Sufficient Power AND 2. Modules to Put in them.

Consider making your greens in their own outpost, so you can design everything from the ground up, (instead of squishing it into your current factory).

I'm at a strange stage in the game where I'm shifting my factory towards rails because I haven't built the rail system yet.

I guess this would kind of be like when you were adding a steel outpost in your playthrough but to make the rails you needed steel.

One of the bigger newbie mistakes is focusing too much materials on science, since it's the biggest resource drain. If you're finding you're running out of basic metals too much, you should consider shutting down your science labs and rerouting the metals to build defense or resource acquisition. Getting new resources is cheap. Plop a few turrets around a far out ore patch and spend a few hundred iron on belts, and you've now got a half a million ore potential coming in.

Also, you really don't need to worry about rails in a small factory. Arguably, you may not even need them to launch a rocket. Just keep building yellow conveyor belts outwards going into your factory. If you've built two yellow belt lines and still need more ore, that's a good time to switch to rails, but that's not going to be for a while.

[Hexafish]

Originally posted by Greep:

Originally posted by Darkslayer85:

I'm at a strange stage in the game where I'm shifting my factory towards rails because I haven't built the rail system yet.

I guess this would kind of be like when you were adding a steel outpost in your playthrough but to make the rails you needed steel.

One of the bigger newbie mistakes is focusing too much materials on science, since it's the biggest resource drain. If you're finding you're running out of basic metals too much, you should consider shutting down your science labs and rerouting the metals to build defense or resource acquisition. Getting new resources is cheap. Plop a few turrets around a far out ore patch and spend a few hundred iron on belts, and you've now got a half a million ore potential coming in.

Also, you really don't need to worry about rails in a small factory. Arguably, you may not even need them to launch a rocket. Just keep building yellow conveyor belts outwards going into your factory. If you've built two yellow belt lines and still need more ore, that's a good time to switch to rails, but that's not going to be for a while.

There's literally a power switch with combinators which automatically remove all power and resources from science. I've already turned it off.

Even four yellow belt lines wasn't enough. That's why I needed my train network.

[Greep]

Well, sounds like you have things settled lol. There's literally always something that's a bottleneck, always. If there isn't, there's more science (infinite research).

[Steelwind]

I get to trains as fast as I can then it is all about backing down the chain until you find the bottleneck and bulk it up until it isn't. Once I am using trains I always build big with space to expand. My smelter, for example, can load 3 car trains full of plates in seconds but I still have room to make it bigger since this is Factorio, lol. Of course this means I need 2-3 large mining outposts for each ore with multiple trains running between each. When I started I had to train in ores to my old smelter/factory until I could get enough rails to really get going.

As to your issue you have to pick a spot and just start there. Even if you are bottlenecked shutting all nonessential stuff down and just cranking out train stuff until you can get rolling should be doable. If not then make simple single two headed train runs to get the critical stuff moving until you can.

[Hexafish]

Originally posted by slindenau:

Originally posted by Roxor128:

There is one: You're building a smelting outpost and don't want to ship in coal to run it.

Yeah, she needs to learn a lot lol.
It's way more efficient to go electric, asap.

Have you seen her megabase? Just wondering

[KatherineOfSky]

Originally posted by slindenau:

Originally posted by Roxor128:

There is one: You're building a smelting outpost and don't want to ship in coal to run it.

Yeah, she needs to learn a lot lol.
It's way more efficient to go electric, asap.

@slidenau: I'm really tired of you nitpicking and attempting to make fun of me. STOP, NOW.

When I made that statement, I thought it was obvious to anyone that if you had no desire to ship coal, you shoudln't do it. Regarding your statement: It is NOT always more efficient to use electric, depending on the state of your factory. Obviously, the OP's factory doesn't yet have the capabilities to go full electric furnace. Therefore it would be much more time-efficient to use steel furnaces until s/he has enough steel and red circuits and power to support them.

Trying to build enough electric furnaces too early can be a disaster!

[Hexafish]

Originally posted by KatherineOfSky:

Originally posted by slindenau:

Yeah, she needs to learn a lot lol.
It's way more efficient to go electric, asap.

@slidenau: I'm really tired of you nitpicking and attempting to make fun of me. STOP, NOW.

When I made that statement, I thought it was obvious to anyone that if you had no desire to ship coal, you shoudln't do it. Regarding your statement: It is NOT always more efficient to use electric, depending on the state of your factory. Obviously, the OP's factory doesn't yet have the capabilities to go full electric furnace. Therefore it would be much more time-efficient to use steel furnaces until s/he has enough steel and red circuits and power to support them.

Trying to build enough electric furnaces too early can be a disaster!

I have power shortages every night.

I hope that last 24 U-235 gets done soon.

Edit: @slidenau Please come back when you have Katherine's 1100 hours played.

[Emmote]

Originally posted by slindenau:

There is no point in investing time to build 100's of burner smelters, just to have to delete EVERYTHING again because it's not space compatible with electric smelting.

Well, if you build your burner smelting area right the first time with enough space, you can simply just upgrade.
With now being able to filter the Deconstruction blueprint, it's easier than ever.

Plan for the future.

[Hexafish]

Originally posted by slindenau:

Jeez, you don't have to get mad.

You claim to only start with electric smelting when you want to use modules.

I'm just saying it should be your first priority (after stabilizing power ofc) to simplify your factory and be READY for the future.
There is no point in investing time to build 100's of burner smelters, just to have to delete EVERYTHING again because it's not space compatible with electric smelting.
But thats just my view.

@Darkslayer85: how would you know i don't already?

Prove it then and stop hiding behind your privacy curtain

[Harry]

Originally posted by Emmote:

Originally posted by slindenau:

There is no point in investing time to build 100's of burner smelters, just to have to delete EVERYTHING again because it's not space compatible with electric smelting.

Well, if you build your burner smelting area right the first time with enough space, you can simply just upgrade.
With now being able to filter the Deconstruction blueprint, it's easier than ever.

Plan for the future.

And let's not forget that at the time one can properly build a decent amount of red circuits, one has normally already access to robots, which make redesigning the base extremly easy. And the best part: you only need to create the blueprint once.

Additionally, the production chain for a steel furnace is shorter than the one for the electric furnace and if one considers the wasted ressources for a few hundred steel furnaces....... neglectable.

I don't think I even used electric furnaces for the 8 hours speedrun.