Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
8 
Report this post
It's not a universal QoL improvement like the others are. A singular dedicated refueling stop is only relevant if you build your train network in one particular way - i.e. without intermediate parking in depots where they could be refueled.
Moreover; the concept of retaining a single refuel stop - which is why they added this mod to the Momenti pack - quite factually won't even work well, because it can't scale. I have ~220 trains services a train grid city-block Nullius base right now. Good luck servicing the refueling for those from one stop. Causality has a weird sense of humor in that you will eventually hit a state where a good chunk of your trains 'synchronize' and all head for the refuel stop. The result? Overflowing queues; trains backlogging onto the network main lines; traffic jams; deadlocks; etc.
To avoid that you pretty much have to have fuel trains running between a fuel factory and a network of refuel stops. ATFS will just be a crutch that will prevent you from realizing the problem until it's ballooned to nearly-out-of-control levels. Which could put you in a real danger of trashing your entire train network into a deadlock state that takes literally hours to resolve.
On top of that; ATFS has a history related to producing weird crashes, iirc.
So; really: no. Avoid.
Besides; anachrony is avoiding the elephant in the room in this pack's description.
The actual complexity of refueling isn't in the fact that you have to manage multiple stops. That's the easy part which is no different from a basic M:N train schedule using train limits at the stations.
The hard part is "what goes in; must come out."
All of Nullius' fuels have burnt fuel residue you have to handle. A bit like the used up uranium fuel cells in vanilla Factorio.
At the onset of the game you'll probably have most of your trains running on methanol canisters. Those form a closed loop; the result of using one of those up, is an empty canister that you can refill again.
Simultaneously; canisters are suuu--per expensive; stack to 50; and a train could literally run for 1.5hrs non-stop on one full stack. I.e. that doesn't make sense and you want to limit your trains to something like, a stack of 10, and avoid the overhead of a lot of 'deadweight.' So you have to set up your refueling with circuit combinators that ensure you only push in as many filled canisters; as you took out empty canisters.
Other than that; it's again an M:N train schedule to ship empty canisters back for reprocessing into full canisters. And since it's a closed system and you don't need a lot of it; you could just use reserved slots in a single-wagon train and take whatever empty canisters are left for pickup, when you deliver fresh filled canisters to a fuel stop.
But again; that's not the actual complicated part.
Guess I'm a bit out of the ordinary for sticking with hydrogen, then. My reasoning was that I was making lots of hydrogen and oxygen, but not any methanol, so might as well use what's available. Then I expand things. A couple of dozen trains and half a dozen 8-train refuelling stops, with a couple more under construction. Now I've got methanol production going for making lubricant but I'm at the point where trying to switch to something else for the trains would be a huge pain in the arse to do as I've just got so many canisters in the system (at least a few thousand), so it's probably not worth the trouble.
Or half an hour on a stack of hydrogen ones, which is probably just as well, given I don't have quite enough canisters in my system for it to be self-sustaining yet.
My main annoyance about canisters is actually not the cost, but figuring out which of the chain of box-fed assemblers making all the useful-on-their-own intermediates has run out of inputs when production of the stupid things stops. Medium Tank 1 -> Medium Tank 2 -> Small Tank -> Barrels -> Canisters. [sigh]
That's the problem with starting on hydrogen, yes. It's the "let's update all our logistics bots"-problem, except ten time as bad.
Fair warning: Locomotive 2 and 3 up the fuel usage quite a bit. Hydrogen-canisters, you will find, are no longer sustainable when upgrading your trains. Methanol canisters actually are sustainable. A half-stack of 25 in a Locomotive 3 will still suffice for practically any schedule, provided you refuel in between each trip.
Infact; methanol canisters allow you to pretty much skip over the whole mess that are nuclear fuel cells and just upgrade once to bio-diesel at the end. (That's what I'm aiming for.)
I would honestly upgrade to methanol while you can still manage it.
(I dread the moment I am going to upgrade my trains to bio-diesel...)
At the start and well into the mid-game I produced empty canisters in my bot-based hub/mall on a drip load. The fact that methanol canisters feature lossless recycling means you only need as many new ones as you are dispatching out new trains. And that's perfectly manageable to handle without formal automation.
I only switched into a factory on the train network once I got to the point where I had to automate fusion cells. (Screw getting heavy water off of recycled waste water, btw. I just set up an actual dedicated waste water factory instead. Yes. Really.)
A canister factory is ... interesting. Let's just say: Bob's adjustable inserters are pretty much a 200% prerequisite if you want to do it belted and with any measure of sanity still attached.
True; but it means your trains would have to wait for their batteries to recharge.
Unless you keep a count-exact collection of hot spares around in each refuel depot.
That would make it a rather solid option really, provided you're OK with giving up the speed and acceleration bonuses. Preferable by far over Solar Locomotives, which are both innately slower than Locomotive 3 and can't get any fuel bonuses - because obviously: they don't use fuel.
... hmm..
Anachrony really should compensate the stats on Solar Locomotives for the inherent lack of being able to boost them with fuels. Compared to Locomotive 3 running on Battery 2 or Battery 3, they're a strictly worse option. Literally not a single advantage to them, other than obviating the need for a single electrolyzer to recharge batteries in your fuel depots.
I haven't gotten to solar locos, but I happened to look at them in the tech tree early on and my reaction was basically "wait, these have terrible stats; why would anyone bother to use them when you already had to build the refueling infrastructure for regular locos? Am I missing something?"
The only thing I can think of is if there's a separate, low volume train line that can't cause traffic jams on the main line, which seems rather situational. Even doubling up on locos wouldn't help with the top speed (AFAIK, and I don't remember how dramatic the difference is) and doing that would require an overhaul of all of your train stations, which is a massive headache for no real gain. IMO, it'd have made more sense if solar locos were a parallel tech line where the first tier unlocks about the same time as the first tier of regular locos, and then goes from there. That way, choosing solar early on would allow you to build the network to accommodate the weaker solar locos.
Overall, the solar locos feel like a weird implementation in a mod that otherwise tries pretty hard to give a variety of decently balanced energy options that all have pros and cons. . . Even if some are objectively better than others.
Distributing fuel to depots.
I'm using the trains that will never run out of fuel, to ensure I can always get fuel to my trains that could run out of fuel.
Which means I only need to use them with a single-wagon set-up, as fuel isn't exactly used in super-duper high volumes. And with only a single wagon attached to them, they run fairly comparably to a 2-wagon loco 3 on methanol.
So that kind of worked out OK-ish.
If your fuel delivery train can't get enough fuel for itself, then you're well on your way to having a major train problem anyways, one that ought to be noticeable before it actually happens. Same for the boiler situation: getting into brownout conditions bad enough that your boilers run out of fuel and the whole thing shuts down is almost always preventable with even a little foresight and planning ahead, such that using burner inserters/miners is just pointless and inefficient. Well, except on a backup plant that might spend the entire game switched off--and even then there's other ways of setting that up.
Correct. It's kind of an esoteric thing that I did just for the heck of it.
And like I said: since 1-wagon solar locos seem to perform comparable to 2-wagon loco-3s it kind of evens out and doesn't lead to loco-3s slamming the breaks on each signal gap.
Right. You've convinced me to start on a methanol canister facility. Main problem I'm stuck on figuring out now is how to ensure all the hydrogen canisters already in the system get used up so they can be reused for methanol.
That's only true once you've got enough in the system to keep the belts and boxes at your refuel stations full and you're not adding any new ones. Add a new one and you suddenly need a few hundred to a few thousand canisters to fill up the facility, not just the couple of dozen for a train. Until then, you have to deal with the annoyance of supplying the canister production chain. Bots would make it less annoying, but I haven't quite gotten there yet.
Dedicated waste water? Is that just filtering seawater and dumping the saline water?
Thanks for the warning. Though, given a peek ahead at the tech tree shows some of the later science packs need barrels of fluids, siphoning off a trickle of empty barrels for making canisters could significantly simplify the manufacturing back at base.
Create an isolated merry-go-round. Build something like a quad-headed-no-wagons train on it. Chuck any hydrogen canisters into it. Watch train go choo-choo until train no longer go choo-choo.
It depends on the scale of the refuel stations or depots you use, sure.
I use 8-bay depots. For the longest schedule run length from top left of my rail grid to bottom right, a loco-3 consumes 6 out of its stack of 25 canisters of methanol. That's the absolute maximum.
This means at most 48 empty canisters would need to be ejected and replaced with filled canisters at any one time. Each depot is set up to request a fuel train to stock back up 100 filled canisters as soon as the central count dips below 50. I.e. the count discarding the 10-per-box that are located right next to each individual station.
So I don't need thousands. 3 stacks - i.e. 150, which is also how much each refuel train is set to load up on, using filtered inventory slots - covers it for me. ;-)
Yes. There's a later higher-tech form of desalination that goes straight from seawater to brine and regular aka 'water-as-'water and it produces a substantial amount of waste water. It requires steam as input, meaning I just boil the regular water back to steam and void the surplus. The brine gets voided as well. The heavy water extraction process itself produces sludge, which you also have to rework into saline water - which you dump/void - and ... more waste water! So it's a self-loop and to prevent the process from blocking on those output products, they need to be preferentially re-used. I.e. you need to account space for valves as well.
I'm currently clocking at 17.8 heavy water from 6000 waste water p/sec right now.
Yes; those numbers are correct. The conversion scale really is that lopsided.
Which is also why you don't want to depend on waste water as a by-product to have your entire nuclear industry and potentially the backbone of your base power generation, hang off of.
Hence: you really want to avoid the additional 'penalty' of having to have enough capacity to produce nuclear fuel to run your trains on. At face value it sounds attractive; but it really isn't such a good idea.
Also, needless to say: managing those levels of fluid throughput is ... a 'delight,' as pipes have throughput limits that don't really allow it. E.g. you need to run multiple lines from about 36 seawater intakes to make it work. The entire build is a pretty tight squeeze for an 8-beacon setup as well. And that's with the Advanced Fluid Processing mod's additional types of underground pipes. That mod is pretty much required to pull it off.
Doing it back in your hub/mall is certainly viable. Depends also on where your science is located. If you're making it all at the site of your hub/mall, you can of course integrate it there directly and just siphon off the bare minimum you need.
But bear in mind: rocket fuel also will need canisters; as will nuclear fuels. And both are non-optional. Rocket fuel is needed to launch rockets that return astro science. Nuclear fusion fuel is needed for missile 2; which is needed for excavation drones; which are needed for asteroid miners; which you'll need to pull down copper ore and uranium ore asteroids to seed Nauvis with those ores; which are some of the game end-goals.)
I eventually set up a joint barrel/canister factory which does 7.5 p/sec of each.
Takes 7.5 or 15 p/sec input of ... 10 different ingredients total, iirc?
That's kind of the scale you'd be thinking of. It's manageable; just a mess with inserters at odd angles to lay it out in a reasonable beaconed way.
That is... horrifying.
Also not terribly useful until you only have a few stacks left and have collected them all. I want to force usage so I don't have to collect them. I'd hack something together with combinators if Factorio provided a means to read a train's fuel.
That actually sounds pretty reasonable. I did some testing for a mod for fusion power that involved using heaps of chemical plants for extracting heavy water from regular water and getting 7 units out from 1000 in.
Ah, beacons. One of my perennially forgotten technologies (the other being the combat robotics branch in vanilla). Always researched, never made. Modules are slightly better-off, if only because they're used as crafting ingredients.
Ah, looks like I have a few MORE facilities to build! As if I didn't have enough that were mostly ghosts already. Though maybe... No, down boy. Focus on the rubber and aluminium first.
I've got a long way to go before I get anywhere near making 10 of anything per second. I'm sure I'll do it eventually, given how Nullius tends to encourage redesigning your facilities for better recipes.
A 4 large beacon setup is far more forgiving than an 8 small beacon setup in terms of room to build. Maximum possible beacon performance in Nullius requires careful overlaying of large and small beacon effects. For example, with crafting machines in the overlap region of 4 large beacons and small beacons positioned in the gaps between large beacons in which only 2 large beacon effects reach. The suppression from 2 large beacons on small beacons is only 20%, but it gets a lot worse with 3 or 4. Machines placed near the small beacons and within the field of 4 large beacons get the best of both worlds, which is better than you can achieve with just small beacons or just large beacons.