New versions are released as experimental first and later promoted to stable. If you wish to switch to the experimental version on Steam, choose the experimental Beta Participation option under game settings; on the stand-alone version, check Experimental updates under Other settings.
Now imagine yourself in a fictional 2.1.7 where all inserters are properly able to grab items from belts without problems. Out comes 2.1.8 with the following patch entry:
Fixed inserters being able to grab items on the inner loops of tight corners. Inserters will now behave as pre 2.1 where they can fail to grab items if they are too slow to do so.
Everyone would loose their mind because this is straight up from bizarro world.
The thing is, whether or not things behave like this even depend on the material I place on the belt. I can reproduce it sometimes with wood, but I can't reproduce it at all with stone (though the long inserter can't grab it still).
When moving around in a space platform view, the star parallax scrolls faster than the planet. This makes them seem closer than the planet which contradicts the fact they are rendered behind the planet. I am not complaining about realism, I am reporting a geometrical impossiblity implied by the scene that feels off even when you can't explain it.
Given the necessary bootstrapping, you can make Nutrient, Spoilage, Coal, Heavy/Light oil, Petroleum Gas, Solid Fuel, Rocket Fuel, Sulfur and Explosives entirely out of fish and water.
Currently not doing Coal liquefaction, but you can.
Back in August of 2024 prior to Space Age launching, I had a super fun playthrough on a map where cliff generation was cranked up to 11, and cliff explosives were completely disabled. It was a super cool challenge as I couldn't build the same ol' reliable 2 lane train network I usually do, and led to some creative layout and defensive strategies.
However, ever since the changes to cliff generation that were noted in Factorio Friday Facts 401, cliff generation has become nearly inextricably linked to water generation. If you generate a map with huge water scaling and little coverage, the cliffs generate now as a huge mountains with very little continuity, despite the continuity being 600% higher than normal.
Overall, I do think the newer cliffs are way better on default settings, but I was mildly disappointed when I wanted to start a 2.1 run and wasn't able to get nearly as engaging cliff generation that has long continuous cliffs that take time to move around. It also doesn't seem to work properly with the old legacy "Lakes Elevation" setting. Cliffs still generate using the updated method mentioned in FFF 401.
Either way, I'm definitely in the smallest minority of Factorio players out there asking for more cliffs, but I'd love to see the legacy cliff generation make a comeback in the Island Elevation if at all possible. Or for the continuity/frequency setting to have more impact at larger water scales.
So yesterday i saw in the 2.1.12 changelog the addition of the "raise on crafted" event, which is exactly what i needed to make a mod i wanted to do since 2.0 SA released.
I always found quality and fluid to be annoying, legendary ice doesn't give more water, and you cannot use "more input fluids" to craft quality items.
This mods allow me to at least fix the first part, as the second is sadly engine locked and nothing can be done without being ugly.
So i present to you my very stupid mod.
Recipes that create/uses fluids and have at least one item as input (required for quality to be select-able) will not create/consume more fluid depending on the quality set.
The bonus is 50% per level, so +50% for uncommon, +100 for rare, +150 epic and +250 legendary (legendary is technically 2 levels above epic)
The bonus also scales with quality.
My favorite example is the foundry, with +300% productivity with research, 1 legendary calcite turns into 3500 units of molten iron instead of 1000.
It will also consume 3.5 times the lava, or 1750, but lava is free.
And because you obtained 3.5x the molten iron, you can also get 3.5x the iron plates, and with recycling you improve your odds of getting a legendary plate a lot lot lot more.
This "should" work for all machines and recipes that deals with fluid, even crafted ones.
I tested as much as i could but a lot might have slipped though or i just missed, if you find anything PLEASE let me know and i'll look into it.
My first base on Fulgora. It can (technically) make 60SPM.
It's fun and all, but i scream inside when i have to watch everything except Holmium is being voided, so only funny purple bottles are escaping this loop until i find out what to do with the rest of the stuff. I know scrap is practically infinite, but still, what a waste :')
It could've been smaller though, if i didn't chose to buffer each component before voiding it.
I updated to 2.1 today and noticed my build on fulgora clogging up, but I dont understand why. Shouldnt the left lane still continue although priority one is full?
I know HDR has come up before (I've read the old forum thread front to back), but it's worth revisiting now: Wube themselves call the 2.1 work "the update of our graphics and audio systems" (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-444), and the art team is clearly investing. A new unloading bay, redesigned pumps with new fluid-wagon loading models, a redesigned oil refinery, a redesigned assembling machine (the most-placed building in the game), diagonal flamethrower turrets, and a visual pass on the planets. FFF #444 even asks for suggestions to be posted during the experimental, so that's what I'm doing. If there's ever a cheap moment to add an HDR output path, it's while the pipeline is open.
To be clear, this isn't about making sprites "brighter", they're pre-rendered at a fixed light level. It's about what the engine composites live: night bases, lamps, lasers and flamethrowers, lava on Vulcanus, machine glow, the sun on a space platform. Deep blacks staying dark while lights genuinely pop, instead of everything clipping to the same SDR white.
(And yes, Windows Auto HDR / RTX HDR exist, but they work from the final SDR frame, after the compositor has already clipped the range. They can guess at highlights; native output just has them.)
Performance-wise this should be one of the cheapest features imaginable at runtime: the game is CPU-bound and the GPU is mostly idling.
Bonus: the game currently has no deliberate HDR handling, so on HDR displays you get whatever the OS/compositor decides. Historically that meant broken rendering on early Plasma 6 HDR and the classic Windows alt-tab black screen. And the old "PC HDR is a mess" objection has aged out: Windows, the Wayland color-management protocol, and KDE Plasma 6.2+ all have real HDR pipelines now. The ecosystem is finally ready for a native path.
And it's not niche anymore. Most new TVs, roughly 40% of PC monitors, lots of laptops. I'm ~1500 hours in, play on an OLED, and honestly the art is a big part of why I keep coming back: I just sit and stare at my base sometimes. All shots are SDR captures… imagine the highlights with real headroom behind them.
Not expecting this to be trivial. Even an experimental, opt-in graphics setting would be great. But with 2.1 slated as possibly the last major update, it felt like now or never.
For 2.1 I wanted to try platform-to-platform sciences from asteroids production.
Here are some blueprints I am running for 1,5 mil. SPM factory.
I have created multiple static platforms over Nauvis to craft sciences that are supplied by multiple Harvester ships that are synchronized over signal, so they don't arrive to Nauvis at the same time.
Platform factory to create platform foundations, legendary cargo bays/thrusters/collectors/crushers, but also beacons and inserters (I have left some space free for future expansion).
Legendary materials factory to provide leg. mats to Platform factory.
So the idea is to start with one Harvester ship and one Platform factory and gradually let Platform factory create mats for this eco-system of supporting platforms and scale up as you feel like to.
I am still crafting military and purple science on Vulcan (because of the stone).
All this is supplying labs on Nauvis through new unloading building and legendary trains.
I really like this concept of static platforms that don't need defence and don't need to move. It is also a huge storage/buffer of sciences over Nauvis on instant demand. It is super easy to multiply and it is truly “infinitive“.
Designs are not for sure perfect, they could use some optimization and space savings (at the same time I like that space in not a factor in a space), but they work and definitively prove the concept. They work OKish for normal quality buildings/modules, etc. as well (though I didn't test it much).
For the future I will optimize platforms further and I am also playing with an idea to have platforms powered by solars only (created on Platform Factory) as space is not an issue and it would truly self-sustainable and infinitive.
Any ideas and suggestions welcomed!
Take care,
Shaki
---- (Some parts of designs need to be credited to/inspired by Nilaus and Dorrian).
It seems that you can't place space platform tiles past a certain point but you can place their ghosts? But also it doesn't work if you use blueprints? and it shows that you can place it with blueprints until you go into map view? The wiki says that it should be infinite in all directions except up in which you can only go 200 tiles. This was done on the latest experimental version.
I've been starting to scale up and try to use correct (or mostly correct) ratios to expand my base now that I have legendary quality and have been making my own designs. A problem I have is that this isn't compressing the belt entirely (as evidenced by the small gap at the top, resulting in closer to 58 science per second.
The topmost assembler isn't always crafting. What I've observed is this:
The top two output inserters will eventually stop placing science briefly (because each assembler currently crafts 21.1 science per second, slightly over the 60 per second limit of green belts).
When this happens, the assembler keeps crafting, filling it's output and using up all input ingredients
The input inserters will stop adding ingredients because the assembler is full
The belt will then clear, the inserters will drop their items and then empty the assembler
Because the assembler now has an empty output it will try to craft again, but it has no input ingredients and so there is a small gap in time where the input inserters have to provide items, the assembler have to start crafting again, and only then can the output inserters drop the science to the belt again.
Now, I think I could fix this with some basic circuitry to prevent the topmost assembler from using up all of its input ingredients, but this feels inelegant and to me masks some underlying problem I must have with my belt balancing on the output.
Can anyone look at this design and identify what I can improve?
(Secondarily, if someone knows what the correct ratio of assemblers to beacons that would result in a nice even number from each assembler let me know - it irks me slightly that I couldn't get each assembler to make a nice even 15, 20, or even 30 per second to have perfect ratios)
If you are like me and use the Burner Leech Fork mod, to supply your furnaces with fuel in early game without having to have a dedicated coal line, this mod is great. However, on the 2.0 version it kept constantly breaking for me everytime I moved a burner inserter, so, I created a fork of the forked mod (lol) and released it on Factorio mods! This version allows you to customize what inserters can be used to leech fuel, how many times it checks via ticks, and fixed a lot of code issues that the fork had. I also implemented all of the to-do's that the fork author wanted to create by LokiLaufeyjarson and I feel it's perfect now.
Let me know what you think if you're stilling using Burner Leech Fork 2.0!
I have a stack setup here that i will let stuff cycle through but i am not certain how i will pull out usable uranium 235 once all of these get full... I am very stumped on what my next step should be....
This loads the chests in an even rate so as soon as there's cargo ready it loads into the train as fast as possible. Each block of 6 chests is it's own 'system' by connecting all 6 chests to the arithmetic combinator which divides by 6. The output is then passed to each of the 6 belt inserters which are also connected to their individual chest with a green wire. The inserter is only enabled if it has less than or equal to the average. This ensures that each chest has the same amount of material in them.
Each 'block' of chests uses a different output from the arithmetic combinator, 1, 2, 3 4. This value is then passed via the power cables to a final decider combinator which requires 'each' signal to be above 350 (8400 total) for a full train load, 700 for 100 stack items, 1400 for 200 stack items, etc. which then signals that this station can be picked up from. (I use LTN here, but can easily be done other ways). One o the constant combinators has the actual value I'm looking for (8,000 iron ore in this case). The other constant combinator has LTN specific values and arent relevant to this setup). This setup can easily be expanded to different size trains.
Honestly, it's really difficult to get used to building and doing everything, but I've honestly had a great time playing. It's been fun figuring out what to build and how to organize everything. Yeah, if someone who has played a lot saw my base, it would probably make them angry or make them want to blow the whole thing up. But hey, we all start somewhere, and this is the first time I've played a game like Factorio, so it's been an interesting ride.
Control shift click is so god damn nice. Idk if it’s new, idk if it’s well known, but I didn’t know about until I did it unintentionally, and now idk how I ever lived without it.
If you control shift click when placing a ghost down (blueprint, copy paste, etc.) it places whatever you’re building down, even if there’s something in the way. So you don’t need to deconstruct then construct, it all happens in one move. It even automatically places down undergrounds if you put something in place of belts, so your production lines don’t get interrupted!
What other QOL features am I missing out on?
(Side note, I use LTN and if there’s a way to avoid having to assign each train to a depot then make it automatic, I’d love to know about it. And am I the only one experiencing a weird glitch where LTN will randomly turn off the dispatcher? I don’t think there’s a shortcut for it and trains will be making deliveries then suddenly stop, and I have to turn it back on)
when you hover over a logistic chest you see your inventory; when it gets too long to show it throws up a scroll bar but I have no idea how to scroll down (playing on desktop with mouse)
Hello. 2.0 brought rail changes, both good and bad, and soon things like the old small roundabouts will no longer work at least according to FFF-377:
In some future Factorio update when we decide to drop 1.1 savegame compatibility (Let's say 2.1), we will eventually get rid of the old rail shapes completely.
So trying to make my own "LHD Chunk Aligned Modular Blueprint" of sorts. The main difficulty with these things are... intersections. Or more accurately, "space-saving intersections that can easily be pasted over straight sections". Before someone mentions it, I've heard that roundabouts and intersections are "bad for UPS" -- I'm not a power-user that need absolutely unstoppable throughput at minimal UPS, and I know to avoid deadlocks with proper spacing for train intersections and having stations unload both ways. Even tempted to use roundabouts, they just feel so massive after 2.0 and I cannot find a good BP that I fully understand.
1a. Gorgeous work. Simple, nice curves, symmetry, fits nicely over other tracks, all fits in the chunk. Great.
Then here's the LHD variant in the thread:
1b. ACK! MY EYES! WHY THE CURVED LINESSS. Credit to TiMatic.
Now no shade to TiMatic -- this may be **the only actual true Chunk LHD Intersection with this degree of separation** -- but the curved rails kill me. *Factorio* does not have "exclusion zone" or such on its BP's, meaning that whenever you paste this you need to destroy the rails before placing, possibly breaking things and just being a PITA. But I'm hoping and praying for something more.
The problem arises in the LHD variant that the signals in the "big" triangle near the middle "flip" to the other side in the "small" triangles. That's why they curve the rails, to fit the two signals needed there.
2a. Note the 2 rail signals next to the cursor, which allows proper splitting.
However, it's still only part of the puzzle, there's still a missing chain signal on each for the right-side (compare to the previous, where it forms nice "X's"). Finally with some more playing around I was able to get this:
2b. YES! WE DID IT, IT'S FINA- wait what
On the verge of greatness, our John Wube himself decides to rob me of victory and says the middle intersection cannot separate the signals.
- V453000, probably
I'm guessing the train gods do not like the Yellow/Cyan "X" meeting at a point like that, it makes it to where it cannot separate the signals.
So my question to you fellow rail engineers: is my dream lost. I understand you cannot always have everything you're asking for, that there's sacrifices to be made.
Can be pasted over Straight Rails without issues
4-Tile Spacing
Left-Hand Drive
[Optional] Allows a bit of spill-over from 1-4 trains at the end of the Neighbor chunk without blocking off other directions as much with its tail-end, which I found become an issue if there isn't the 2-signal separation at least on exits.
[Optional] Chunk-fitting (spilling over a bit is fine, Straight BP's can be modified to have their signals "further"... but typically avoid going too big as it creates issues and more limitations on what you can do beside intersections).
The other kicker: I don't actually really understand rails. I've spent dozens maybe close to 100 hrs with them but they're sorta a topic I feel barely confident in.
Like is 2a. really that much more interrupting than the ones from ruspartisan and TiMatic that I'm trying to emulate? I try playing with the trains on it like choo-choo toys and all the basic cases are handled, it works fine, I think the only main difference issue is that the "minor" intersection (the Cyan "X" or "^" in 1b, 2a, 2b) interferes with the "main line" intersection, but I have very little understanding how impactful that really is. I try to measure a train into the Obligatory Straight Rail Buffer™ after an intersection and this does not seem to cause any difference, but I know enough buffer room fixes just about anything so maybe I'm disguising "sloppy" signalling with it.
I'll probably use the 2a for now, Krastorio + 2.1 biter changes is ruining my base. I'll post the BP's in the comments. (Also all the love to you V45, I still love your rail changes)
Tl;dr LHD Intersection -- is the 3rd picture decent enough, is the 4th picture "fixable" at all.
