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I'm stumped on Vulcanus. I have a "base." It's safe, but I want to scale up, and I've never made a megabase or figured out rails and circuits. I'm slowly figuring out circuits. I can at least limit chests with them now, across multiple chests so I can limit how much of X is being made. Train interrupts I don't understand, so I have to move my spaceships manually.
Train signals aren't that hard to understand. Watch some Tutorials and start to set up a basic train network with 2 lanes. That's the best way to learn how to use them.
I also havent really figured out how to use circuits apart from using a power switch to limit the heavy oil cracking for my science block so I can make lube but havsnt done anything more complex than that.
If there's anything you're curious to know or if you'd like some advice on anything specific, I'd be more than happy to answer the best I can.
I just spent this weekend staying up to 9 AM the next day trying to comb our bootstrapping spaghetti on Vulcanus into a factory that can actually do something at some kind of scale, so I'm very fresh to the problem, lmao.
Wow! Thanks!
That's an exceptional write up that I'm gonna have to read a few times to fully understand it.
Feel free to ask for anything else if you get stumped again, or if anything I said was unclear.
If/when you start getting into trains, signals might require some explaining. I remember having a difficult time gripping the concept of block signaling when I had to learn it for the Minecraft mod Railcraft, which has a very similar structure to Factorio's rail system.
trains aren't that complicated, and pretty fun once you're into them.
The main thing I have problems with right now is how to tell a ship to stay put long enough for the cargo to load. I want my first ship, that I call Charon to go to and from Nauvis and Vulcanus. At Nauvis I want it to load 1200 blue chips, and load 4000 Metallurgic Science packs and 1000 Tungsten Plates at Vulcanus. They offload just fine because I have my requests set up at the Cargo Landing Pad, but if there isn't enough stuff already made, they don't wait for the rest of the cargo.
I don't know if I need to use a fullfill all requests or any request or what. I never learned how to use trains either.
Trains and space platforms work the same way as far as scheduling goes. They traverse the station list one at a time, in order, and loop back to the top when they get to the bottom.
When it gets to whatever stop it's targeting, it will start asking, "Can I leave yet? Can I leave yet? Can I leave yet?" incessantly in the background, and it will leave as soon as it hears "yes". By default, if you don't set any conditions, the answer is "yes", and the train or space platform will blow straight through without even stopping. If you set conditions, it will stop, and it won't leave until the combined answer to all of the condition you set is "yes".
The station conditions for trains are different from the station conditions for space platforms. For space platforms, some of the more relevant ones related to cargo are:
- Request satisfied: This condition makes you pick one of the requests you set, and checks only that one to see if it's satisfied. You want to use this condition only if some of your platform's requests are must-haves, and the rest are "nice to have, but don't wait for them".
- All requests satisfied: The platform will only leave if and only if every request you've set is satisfied. It will wait until they're all finished. This the one you want.
- Item count: For this, you pick an item, a number, and some kind of inequality symbol. If the number of items on your platform matches whatever your condition you set, the condition will trigger. You can use this as an alternative to "requests satisfied" and achieve the same thing that way. It's less convenient though, because if your requests change, this condition won't change with them.
The other request-related conditions tend to have uses for interrupts moreso than scheduled stops.
You can think of a train or space platform as always being stopped at a "phantom station" at all times, even when it's in motion, and it's always checking "Can I leave yet? Can I leave yet?" at that phantom station against all of its interrupt conditions at the same time. If any one of the interrupt conditions becomes true, the train or platform will immediately pause whatever it is doing and go to the station you set in the interrupt instead. A sort of "oh shit, emergency stop, gotta do this right now!" situation. Very useful for commanding, say, a platform that is low on fuel to stop what it's doing and head to your designated refueling station.
These negative cargo-based conditions are:
- Request not satisfied: The opposite of "request satisfied". You might use this in an interrupt to tell your platform, "Oh no, you aren't topped off on <X> item, stop what you are doing and go fix that immediately."
- Any request not satisfied: Same as above, but instead of picking a request to check, it will trigger for any request that is not satisfied.
- Any request zero: A slightly more lenient form of the above condition. The above condition will trigger if any request is not satisfied. This condition will trigger if any request that wants more than zero of a thing is unsatisfied, and there is currently zero of that thing on your platform. Useful for when you want an interrupt for being completely out of something, but being fully topped off isn't important. Nuclear fuel might be one of these situations.
Keep in mind that for space platforms specifically, requests have to be set per-planet. I've already screwed up several times trying to request, oh, green arms from Vulcanus or something to deliver to Nauvis, and I get my platform all the way to Nauvis only to learn the platform never picked anything up because my green arm request was set to pick up from Nauvis and not Vulcanus. Still getting used to that detail.