Production Speed/Time to Produce

[Fridge Lord]

Can someone explain this to me please? Assigning more workers to a production building speeds up the production speed.. say 260% vs. 135%. However, I notice no significant change in how long it actually takes.

For example, a 6 second timer does not change to 3 seconds or so, either on the menu, or as I time it.

What's going on? Thanks.

Edit: Or to be a little more specific, the timers will frequently change speeds from slightly higher, to normal speed. If it's a long timer like a 6-second, I don't even notice a change. If it's a 1.5 second, it may complete 5 or 6 times rapidly, then switch to its normal speed for a little while. What is this?

[Draggy]

I bet you have been investigating these different speeds on farms AND have watering or fertilizing enabled.

So it is exactly the oposite of your interpretation. the "5 or 6 times rapidly" are the normal speed (including all boni) and what you called "its normal speed" is the speed penalty a building gets if it has to multitask (example: harvesting crops on a farm WHILE watering (or fertilizing or both) slows down the harvest by ~ half.

Thats why active watering and fertilizing is pointless atm (speed debuff way to high) so people usually burn their fertilizer in kitchens or steam machines and build passive watering trenches around their farms. (or even use the so called "swamp farm" exploit)

This problem also leads to that all "high end" productions which need tons of farms (sandwich/berry cake) are usually built on flattened land on zero level to be able to use the passive watering via trenches. which makes maps utterly ugly.

Funfact: you can speed up a milk farm so much that it outruns passive watering (if built on or adjected to a water tile). At prod speed >1250% you need additional wells.... which also cant keep up so theoretically you have to force-feed water into your milk farm via an unpacker with boxed water or just.... build a second milk farm.

another example would be, having a kitchen doing 2 (or more things) at the same time, like making ointment AND its own fishoil (you can enable multiple recipes in one production) or a mine set on stone AND coal (if covering multiple resource patches)

Thats why i use seperate buildings for every task in my production line (to keep ratios up) and do not bother at all about fertilizing/ active watering on all farms.

I hope this enourmous speed debuff will be subject to a change when steam powered water pumps and pipes are implemented (Erik said something like that in other posts about this subject)

EDIT: Your problem can also have a much more simple reason: If you "pimp up" lets say your Cloth shirts production with additional workers but your cotton farms /fabric workshops cant deliver enough material in time (not enough farms and/or transport belt/shute/cart to slow) You then see a blinking red E representing (not enough material input) or even the same when your output is ful. These input/output "E"`s are very helpful if you go along your production chain to identify a bottleneck.

[Fridge Lord]

Thank you very much, it was really helpful going into detail on all the mechanics!! Dedicated lines seems to be a good idea, and was more in line with how I used to build things when I played Factorio.

One thing I am not understanding is the farm water source/active watering relationship. I have already been using the cheesy technique of just poking my thumb into one tile of ground near the farm to make a cheap little pond, and putting the farm on it so that it has water access. However, if I am not mistaken, this simply automatically fills up the farm's inventory with water- it does not water the plants. Am I correct in that?

If you wanted to water the plants without having to assign watering to the farm's workers, what would you do? Because even if you use a worker to bring water from a well to the farm, doesn't he just fill up the farm's water inventory, not water the plants?

In other words, how -do- you water without giving the farm double duty? Thank you.

[Draggy]

@Fridge Lord

as we say in german "A picture says more than a thousand words"....

[img]https://i.imgur.com/svhKy1d.jpg[/img]

you see i dug trenches around some farms. and you can clearly see which tiles are watered (there is water also underneath the rail tracks) from the darker color.

no active watering at all, one person working a farm is way enough. its better and cheaper to... just build additional farms (which give ful speed bonuis EACH instead pimping a single farm with expensive earth mana/omni stones/workforce).

Fertilizer i burn in a steam engine to gain the little bonus provided for my production buildings (you cant steam farms... sadly). Its a byproduct from the milk farm anyway.

Now this watering is not needed at all in early-mid game. Hence the production speed of all of your buildings scales with your peoples happiness, in endgame its easily possible to have production speeds of >1500% without bothering with earth mana to buff your farms or hire additional workers. not much difference if a farm runs on 1500 or on 1550%.

Sole purpose of the watered tiles is to provide enough crop regrowth (watering affects not productivity nor speed but makes crops regrow faster) so i have more buffer befor the production speed of a farm outruns the regrow rate even while using a ful size farm.

well... if in doubt... a farm more will do, too to solve this problem.

Glad i could help!

EDIT: You may also wonder why those many train carts.... well. you dont have any other chance to get enough resource throughput with shutes or belts later on.

EDIT II: You are right with your assuption about refilling water but NOT watering the tiles. So becasue you dont really gain a substantial bonus from watering/fertilizing besides faster rerowth rate (which you can counter easily with max sized farms/build an additional farm), active watering is not only pointless in the current system, its very contraproductive due to the 50% speed debuff while multitasking!

EDIT III: to make it even more clear: Only the farm fields directly adjected to water are auto-watered. the bright ones are not. I just dont want to desrtoy all immersion with a setup where you have like a chessboad pattern of tiny lakes all over oyur farm field.

[Fridge Lord]

As we say in non-fluent, English as a first language German, danke. Thank you for your thorough explanation, I can see you have a lot of hours and thank you for sharing all these fine details with me, it has clarified a lot and given me an idea for some creative solutions.

This pretty much answers all the questions I had about farms.. I have done everything possible I could think of to try and get the farms to go faster, yet they still leave a single grain mill hungry for grains. This will help a lot.

I have hundreds of hours in factorio with a word document I made with a bunch of math ratios, etc. etc... That is my problem with games like this. I don't even have my mana stuff going yet because my brain gets tied up trying to master everything I don't understand with things like farms. A slow way to play but pays off hugely in the long run :)

[Draggy]

Well, being experienced in FACTORIO will help a lot to master your upcomming endgame logistics nightmare.
With >2000 hours in factorio myself i managed more than once to - literally- bring factorio to its knees with building 10K SPM bases using >27 Gigawatts of power (220 nuclear reactors) while maintaining a train logistic network with >150 3/10/3 trains. 3800 smelter (8/8 beaconed to the brim). Till Factorio said "here you have your 9 FPS, deal with it!"

So i am positively surprised how stable this tiny little game made by Erik already is in this early stage. Some little hickups in Framerate if you choose the "wrong" camera angle... but hey, it still does the job.

For sure it does not have this complicated fluid management like F: but has physics on shutes, a "real" 3D engine and other neat things.

[Lil Puppy]

Trench type watering, like above, is an extremely common technique on Earth, they're called irrigation channels and have been use for thousands of years, we also use terraces, which will be available when the dev ads dynamic water so it flows from rivers and stuff :)
And this is the swamp 'exploit' which humans also use on Earth for thousands of years and currently employ - we use it for crops that require massive amounts of water like rice:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1703694892