How hard is this?

[waynel140]

How long did it take you to understand something like this?

This is an advanced tutorial. Beginners should refer to the Tutorial:Circuit network cookbook for examples and the Circuit network page for an overview over the circuit network. This tutorial assumes a basic understanding of circuits and covers more advanced topics like SR latches, memory cells and clocks.

Just how hard is Factorio? I'm fascinated by the game. I can lose myself for hours. It redefines the phrase "puttering around." After a hundred hours, I'm still not very far into building. I'm not sure what I'm asking here, but is it really that much harder to get a bigger, more advanced factory going? I'm just about to get into liquids, and some say that is where it gets a lot more difficult. Any advice at advancing beyond the starter base would help. Thanks.

[AlexMBrennan]

A couple of hours I guess? Combinators and circuit wires are not particularly intuitive or convenient, and they are not explained at all in the game but on the other hand you don't need any combinators to beat this game.

Combinators are basically optional toys for people who enjoy building overly complicated solutions for minimal gain.

Just how hard is Factorio?

Vanilla Factorio is not particularly difficult because there is only a single recipe that produces byproducts you need to manage (oil, i.e. the liquid recipe you were warned about) but the rest is extremely straight forward - you just connect the output belt of one machine to the input belt of another.

If you have completed the tutorial then you know how to automatically supply smelters with iron and copper and that's all you will ever need to beat this game - the only question is how many belts you will use to do it.

Managing oil byproducts isn't particularly difficult either - you just turn on the cracking of heavy/light oil whenever the heavy/light oil tank gets too full.

[schnappkatze]

I still don't, after hundreds of hours. The circuit network stuff feels to me like something that is not really needed for anything unless you are an efficiency maniac. More advanced people might correct me, but I have yet to find an important use for the circuit network, that cannot be solved more easily otherwise.

That being said, I never build a megabase or launched more than a rocket / hour. I'd say at least until you build a rocket, you can safely stay away from the circuit network and not miss anything crucial.

My advice: Take your time, never stress, and as long as you have fun, don't look up stuff in the internet. The ingame tutorials also help a lot.

[Fel]

Factorio can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be.

If you take things one step at a time, everything is simple and the tools you have are all very distinct and simple themselves.

But the deeper you dive, the more complexity you find, especially when you want everything to have exactly what it needs at the right time but never too much.


Circuit network allows you to over-complexify your solution to a problem that most likely had a much, much simpler answer.
And that's part of the charm of it for people that already have hundreds or even thousands of hours in the game.
That's not to say that you can't do some simple and useful things with it of course, but it often snowballs out of control when you go for something a bit more complex.

[Nico]

I guess Factorio is a very god example of easy to learn and hard to master. The basics are usually pretty simple, but using them to turn everything into a big and effective factory takes quite a while to learn.

For circuits I guess .. it goes one step towards programming, which I guess is considered quite complicated for quite many players. So I guess it's a bit less easy to learn and still hard to master ... but very basic things aren't that complicated, like an inserter that inserts once some storage is nearly empty.

And fluids are probably one of the more complicated things, especially when you reach the advanced oil refining, since it creates 3 outputs which you might not all want at the start, though I think that's really the only recipe that really produces several outputs for you to somehow handle and balance. Whereas in many full overhaul mods they have dozen recipes with multiple outputs, some of them even being pure trash that you have to get rid of somehow, so compared to them vanilla is still really simple. Since as long as you just have one output per recipe it's in general not that difficult to handle.

[Fel]

A tip for people that want to start with circuit network:

Play with it.

With a few more words, try to connect these red/green wires to whatever you want and see what can be connected and what can't.
Open the GUI of things that are connected to see what new options they offer.
And from there, do a few meaningless things with it on stuff that can't make a mess of your factory (so not your main belt of iron or the inserters putting coal in your boilers).

Oh, and use lights when you are playing with it, you can have them light even during the day and even have them emit different colours, it's the perfect thing to play with.

[pat]

Originally posted by waynel140:

I'm fascinated by the game. I can lose myself for hours.

Then you're doing it correctly.

[knighttemplar1960]

Combinators are simple, taken by themselves, just like everything in the rest of the game. What gets complicated is when you put them all together. If you have ever done any computer programming, combinators are boolean logic gates and can be used in the same way. The wires essentially let you create if/then statements.

Fel's recommendation to play with it is a good one but I would go one step further. Don't use the base you are currently working on. Once you have a factory that has launched a rocket, make a copy of that save game (by making another save and renaming it if you are a person that overwrites the same save file each time you play) and then play with that copy to learn circuits and once you get some circuit object that works make a blue print of it, put it in a blue print book so it goes with you, and then exit with out saving that game again so that you can start fresh with your next experiment instead of having to disassemble what you built the previous time.

Wires are "all most" a requirement for advanced oil processing but the thing you need them for is pretty simple. Its just to set things up to tell a 2nd pump attached to a storage tank to pump that type of advanced oil into a 2nd set of machines if the tank is over half full (or however over full you think is a good number).

There are other not overly complicated things that you can use wires and combinators for that are pretty straight forward and useful instead of overly complicated. You can use them to read the contents of chests at a railroad station and summon a train when a certain item goes below a certain amount. That can save you several stations and cut your rail traffic down. You can read train signals and set gates at rail crossings to come up and not go down until the train is past. Instead of getting run over by the train (and having your car destroyed if you are driving) and getting killed, the gates stay up and prevents you from getting on to the tracks.

Once you figure them out there are somethings that you will always use them for.

[shadain597]

I feel like I might have mentioned this to you before, but don't stress about getting your basic oil processing setup too big or too neat, because you'll want to upgrade it to advanced processing after researching just a few techs, which has a dizzying 1 additional input and 2 additional outputs, requiring a complete redesign of the setup.

If even one of those outputs backs up the whole thing shuts down, which is where the circuit logic Knight Templar mentioned comes into play; you fill a storage tank and siphon off any excess to be cracked down into the next type of product. Heavy oil to light oil, light oil to petroleum. But there are some things you do need heavy and light oil for, so that's why you set up a storage tank and only crack the excess down.

[waynel140]

Originally posted by Nico:

I guess Factorio is a very god example of easy to learn and hard to master. The basics are usually pretty simple, but using them to turn everything into a big and effective factory takes quite a while to learn.

Amen! Exactly. This is more of a "my problem" than a Factorio problem. My ADHD keeps demanding I succeed faster than the rest of my brain can handle. I'm not that frustrated. More amazed at how simple and how hard this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game is. Never seen anything like it. And I can't stop playing.

[waynel140]

Originally posted by pat:

Originally posted by waynel140:

I'm fascinated by the game. I can lose myself for hours.

Then you're doing it correctly.

Incredibly, one can't do it wrong. Never seen a game where you don't have to start over and over when learning the game. No doubt at all I'm having fun. Also why there are 11,000 people playing the game at this hour, when most sane Americans are still asleep. (Reminder to check how many are playing at 8 o'clock at night, in the US.) Former reporter, I can't help being curious about stuff like that.

[Nico]

Originally posted by waynel140:

Originally posted by Nico:

I guess Factorio is a very god example of easy to learn and hard to master. The basics are usually pretty simple, but using them to turn everything into a big and effective factory takes quite a while to learn.

Amen! Exactly. This is more of a "my problem" than a Factorio problem. My ADHD keeps demanding I succeed faster than the rest of my brain can handle. I'm not that frustrated. More amazed at how simple and how hard this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game is. Never seen anything like it. And I can't stop playing.

Well, there is a reason why it's also called Cracktorio.

[waynel140]

Originally posted by shadain597:

I feel like I might have mentioned this to you before, but don't stress about getting your basic oil processing setup too big or too neat, because you'll want to upgrade it to advanced processing after researching just a few techs, which has a dizzying 1 additional input and 2 additional outputs, requiring a complete redesign of the setup.

If even one of those outputs backs up the whole thing shuts down, which is where the circuit logic Knight Templar mentioned comes into play; you fill a storage tank and siphon off any excess to be cracked down into the next type of product. Heavy oil to light oil, light oil to petroleum. But there are some things you do need heavy and light oil for, so that's why you set up a storage tank and only crack the excess down.

I'm not intimidated. I'm not intimidated. I'm not intimidated.

Oil and trains. Two things I'm looking forward to getting into, and two things that I refuse to let create fear in me. (Okay, fear might be a bit strong.) I just keep reminding myself that the game is actually simple, and sooner or later I'll figure it out.

[waynel140]

Originally posted by Fel:

A tip for people that want to start with circuit network:

Play with it.

With a few more words, try to connect these red/green wires to whatever you want and see what can be connected and what can't.
Open the GUI of things that are connected to see what new options they offer.
And from there, do a few meaningless things with it on stuff that can't make a mess of your factory (so not your main belt of iron or the inserters putting coal in your boilers).

Oh, and use lights when you are playing with it, you can have them light even during the day and even have them emit different colours, it's the perfect thing to play with.

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Combinators are simple, taken by themselves, just like everything in the rest of the game. What gets complicated is when you put them all together. If you have ever done any computer programming, combinators are boolean logic gates and can be used in the same way. The wires essentially let you create if/then statements.

Fel's recommendation to play with it is a good one but I would go one step further. Don't use the base you are currently working on. Once you have a factory that has launched a rocket, make a copy of that save game (by making another save and renaming it if you are a person that overwrites the same save file each time you play) and then play with that copy to learn circuits and once you get some circuit object that works make a blue print of it, put it in a blue print book so it goes with you, and then exit with out saving that game again so that you can start fresh with your next experiment instead of having to disassemble what you built the previous time.

Wires are "all most" a requirement for advanced oil processing but the thing you need them for is pretty simple. Its just to set things up to tell a 2nd pump attached to a storage tank to pump that type of advanced oil into a 2nd set of machines if the tank is over half full (or however over full you think is a good number).

There are other not overly complicated things that you can use wires and combinators for that are pretty straight forward and useful instead of overly complicated. You can use them to read the contents of chests at a railroad station and summon a train when a certain item goes below a certain amount. That can save you several stations and cut your rail traffic down. You can read train signals and set gates at rail crossings to come up and not go down until the train is past. Instead of getting run over by the train (and having your car destroyed if you are driving) and getting killed, the gates stay up and prevents you from getting on to the tracks.

Once you figure them out there are somethings that you will always use them for.

I save these tips in a file to refer back to, kind of my own beginner's guide. When I originally posted this thread, I was more like smiling at the quote. "It reads like stereo instructions," which probably doesn't mean anything to you, but once upon a time, hooking up a stereo system was more complicated than most of us could accomplish. This also shows how far we have come with technology. And the fact you have no stereo to hook up anymore.

I love this game, more and more every day. Like most people, probably, I can't even tell friends and family why. It's something that appeals to some of us.

Thanks to everybody who have helped. Often we see BS on Steam where people disagree in disagreeable ways, but mostly it's good people who love games and want to help new people. The Factorio bunch is among the best. The very best. I am in awe of them, as much as I am Factorio. FACTORIO!!! What a game! LOL

[waynel140]

Originally posted by Nico:

Well, there is a reason why it's also called Cracktorio.

It's like sex. The better you get at it, the more you want it.

[waynel140]

Something else I find interesting.

Two weeks ago when I would read a thread on Reddit r/factorio, I would understand none of it. Now, maybe a quarter of it, which makes sense since I'm only a quarter through the game. Most of this stuff is like listening to a foreign language I can't speak. I don't know what it's like to have a thousand hours in the game, but learning it is so much fun. I want to speak Factorio!