What are some tips and tricks you wish you knew sooner

[Red]

Almost a 200 hour player here. Not even done gold research yet.
Curious as to what if any tips and tricks i could be missing out on.

[Fel]

One that's always good is to leave a lot of space for expansion.

And for rails, two-ways rails are great when you have a single train going back and forth but they are the worst way to learn how to use signals.

[Pr0wn]

Orienting my production lines so I can easily expand by copy/pasting without them clashing with other production lines. For instance slapping more refineries in a row indefinitely when i need to increase throughput, without them clashing with the main bus or other production lines.

Nuclear fuel can be a bit tricky to set up but it scales so easily and is so compact that you won't need to worry about power at all once in place.

Clearing up nests beyond pollution cloud instead of fighting endless biter waves.

Also how easier things are when you invest in a mall early on.

[mrxak]

Always give yourself plenty of room. Compactness is a virtue on space platforms but it's a vice everywhere else. Assume that you'll need more belts, more assemblers, more of everything everywhere around everything you do. And then on top of that you'll eventually want to add beacons around at least some of your stuff. So give yourself plenty of buffer room. Everything will eventually need to scale up. It's much easier if it scales up in place, so you aren't spending a lot of time rerouting your belts. And then there's things like your furnaces. They will start out at 2x2 buildings, then go up to 3x3, then eventually 5x5 when you have foundries. The Space Age buildings are almost always larger than what you start out with. Assemblers start out all 3x3, but some of them will need to go up to 4x4 or 5x5. Only your liquids will basically keep the same footprint.

Think in terms of modularity. Any design pattern that can be repeated should be repeated, and should be a blueprint, as generic a blueprint as possible. The new parameterized blueprints are glorious. As soon as I learned how they work, I began using them extensively and they have saved me so much time. It's not super intuitive, but make sure you understand that the list is a hierarchy, with stuff higher up on the list being accessible to things lower on the list, such as variables, and "ingredient of". Drag stuff up and down the list so it's organized first, then start parameterization.

Modules are wonderful, but they can also be an early trap. They help you scale up production, but they require a serious investment in resources to actually produce a lot of them. Only module a little bit to start, where it's absolutely critical, until you have EM Plants from Fulgora, and can produce a lot of circuits very quickly (best done on Vulcanus, Vulcanus rules for circuit production), and a lot of modules with productivity out of your EM plants.

Instead of going heavy on modules early on, try to get a reasonable amount of repeatable productivity research on your key production chains. Just a few levels of each make a big difference, and it applies everywhere. There's two ways to look at productivity. The first is that it helps you make more of the thing. The better way to look at it is that it gets you the same amount of the thing for less input.

Produce the level 3 modules on the planets where you have the special ingredient local, rather than shipping it to all planets. Export the level 3 modules from one planet only, to all the other planets. This becomes especially important when you start making quality level 3 modules. You can make level 3 efficiency modules on both Nauvis and Gleba, however, as the special ingredient can be made locally on both surfaces.

The best way to recycle your way up to quality, that I've found, is to use circuits to control what goes into a quality-moduled recycler. I use a requester chest that is defined by circuit conditions, that uses combinators to read the contents of my logistics network from a roboport, then only sends a request signal over a given quantity limit on an item of a particular quality. For example, let's say I'm making quality inserters. I actually want lots of common inserters, I don't want to recycle them all. So I only recycle them if there's more than 500 in my logistics network. For my uncommon inserters, maybe I just need 50. Then 50 of rare, 50 of epic. Exceed those limits and they get recycled, and hopefully produce quality ingredients. These then get sent to quality-moduled assemblers that will reroll with the new ingredients and hopefully push up the quality even higher. I want to have a minimum number of every quality, just in case I need to build anything at that lower quality. That minimum number should be at least enough to export on a rocket. And this, by the way, is a prime candidate for a parameterized blueprint. Said blueprint can also include all the assemblers at all the quality levels, so that as quality ingredients come out of the recycler, they can go directly into making new items at a minimum quality with a chance at higher.

But quality is also an early trap. It only really becomes practical to max out your quality on everything after you can use legendary level 3 quality modules everywhere. The only quality you should invest in early is probably quality solar panels to power your platforms out to Fulgora, and quality accumulators to store electricity on Fulgora.

Drop calcite down from a stationary orbital platform collecting it in space for free, rather than shipping it to all your planets from Vulcanus. Don't be afraid to simply add more duplicate platforms if you aren't making enough calcite. But once you get advanced asteroid processing, you'll be able to make a lot more in orbit even at Nauvis.

[POWER WITHIN USER]

Using train filter slots along with filters on inserters. I no longer had a need for supply trains when the first wagon of every train carries some ammo, heavy oil barrels or repair packs.

[jagholin]

Handcrafting is a trap. No matter how easy it is just to order a stack of belts or inserters from the menu, you should automate everything that you need often (this includes belts, splitters, undergrounds, inserters, power poles and assemblers). Not only will this save you a lot of time in the long run, but when you get to the logistic/construction bots it will make a transition to automated construction a lot easier

Dont store your blueprints in the inventory, its just a waste of an inventory slot. You can open the blueprint library(B) and put all your blueprints there. You can still have shortcuts on the shortcut bar to the blueprints in the library. You can also create a blueprint book and group all your blueprints that fit in the same category in a book. You can also put your books into other books.

[Superguru]

I wish that I knew earlier that recyclers can make quality items from scrap. Would have saved me all the quality experiments on Nauvis.
Just filter out everything green and above to have a nice material supply to craft higher quality machines and modules.

[Fletch]

Spend some time to learn the keyboard shortcuts (especially "q" and "z" are especially handy), and know about "Alt" mode (and keep that mode enabled). Another tip/trick is that you can use bots to "deconstruct" fish if you need a bunch of fish for some reason, heh.

[Strategic Sage]

Way too broad of a question to be answered intelligently.

[Air Bear]

I'm running around with bots on Vulcanis breaking rocks down for starting materials and my bots are taking a while to pick everything off the ground. Turns out if you just walk over the pile on the ground, it goes straight into your inventory. Little, dumb, convenient.

As someone said above - the best way to manage biters is to take them out before your pollution cloud gets to them. My runs got a lot smoother once I started doing that.

I had at least 4 runs where I got to spidetron before this space age expansion, and I'm a little embarrassed to only just realize that tanks have their own equipment grids. I could have been running around in tanks of doom in all of those previous runs and I had no idea.
One of my favorite things to do in the old game was to have a 2nd spidertron follow me around so I had twice the amount of lazers scorching everything to the ground. I'm gonna try that with tanks soon, hope it works and they dont damage each other or anything like that.

[Oop 'scuse me]

Don't put speed modules in beacons touching your quality recyclers.

[Zhardoz]

Originally posted by Air Bear:

I'm running around with bots on Vulcanis breaking rocks down for starting materials and my bots are taking a while to pick everything off the ground. Turns out if you just walk over the pile on the ground, it goes straight into your inventory. Little, dumb, convenient.

As someone said above - the best way to manage biters is to take them out before your pollution cloud gets to them. My runs got a lot smoother once I started doing that.

I had at least 4 runs where I got to spidetron before this space age expansion, and I'm a little embarrassed to only just realize that tanks have their own equipment grids. I could have been running around in tanks of doom in all of those previous runs and I had no idea.
One of my favorite things to do in the old game was to have a 2nd spidertron follow me around so I had twice the amount of lazers scorching everything to the ground. I'm gonna try that with tanks soon, hope it works and they dont damage each other or anything like that.

You can actually "RTS like" spidertrons now. I have 11 now and they annihilate everything.

[KingOfFriedChicken]

The ability to blueprint and hold those BPs passive on other hotbars so I can click 1 and just grab the BP instead of swapping hot bars 🤣

I now have BP for tanks and their entire grid network if they break, not to mention their groups and inventory saved so it's hassle free.

It's known but the BP ability to place turrets and chest with ammo.

Cuz what I needed was more BPs with my dozens and dozens of books 🤣

[Khagan]

Originally posted by Air Bear:

I'm a little embarrassed to only just realize that tanks have their own equipment grids. I could have been running around in tanks of doom in all of those previous runs and I had no idea.

No you couldn't: the tank equipment grid is new in 2.0.

[TBdog]

Restart often. Don't try and save a base.

[KingOfFriedChicken]

Originally posted by TBdog:

Restart often. Don't try and save a base.

I have never had this issue ngl lol I shoot for bots and ill rip a base apart and rebuild it haha