Factorio Stuff

I've been refraining from writing another guide post about science packs, while the discussions about changing some of the recipies in recent Friday Facts were still ongoing. But as of now, the only change is to chemical science, which I already did anyway. So here's an explanation of the changes as well as a quick update to the blue science guide from last time.  Afterwards I'll get to work on the remaining two science packs, when I can.

The changes described here are already live in the most recent update to the experimental and include changes to oil refining and chemical science. As discussed in the recent Friday Facts, these changes are meant to make it easier for new players to get into chemical processing. For this, the basic oil processing was greatly simplyfied. Instead of crafting each type of oil and having to balance those, the basic processing now produces exclusively pertoleum gas.

Unlike previously, the basic processing no longer takes crude oil in both inputs. The inputs are now dedicated to only one type of input, so you no longer have to remember which one is for water if you want to make switching over to advanced oil processing easier. This will also avoid the problem of changing the recipe the refineries are set to, which previously caused the new "can't mix two fluids" warning if there were still refineries with the basic recipe in the pipe network.

The other two liquids often seemed much less useful to new players. You're just going to put all heavy oil into making lube and then crack everything down into petroleum, once you get advanced processing. The new update changed some things to improve this. I already talked about the previous change to requiring solid fuel in blue science and even praised it for making your first chemical build more straightforward, since you could now make plastic from petroleum and put everything else into crafting solid fuel. At least until you get advanced oil processing.

Now it is even more simple. Since you only get petroleum out of the basic processing, you can then craft plastic and sulphur from it without having to worry about any of the other liquids. The first still goes into making red chips, while the latter replaced solid fuel as an ingredient in chemical science packs.

Only after you unlock new research using your first couple of blue science packs will you get the other types of chemicals. Heavy oil still goes mainly into making lube, while light oil is now an ingredient in rocket fuel. So aside from that, you can still use it mostly for cracking into petroleum or use it for making solid fuel.

The only downside to this is, that it doesn't incentivise crafting solid fuel early on, like the previous recipe change did. You still need it for rocket fuel of course. But having blue science require solid fuel was a nice mid-game incentive to make lots of it and use it for your steam engines, trains or even your furnace lines. Now it's been relegated to "that intermediate product you need for rocket fuel" again.

Since rocket fuel now also requires light oil, this means a new liquid that needs to be piped down the main bus for those of us who build using that principle. I usually don't put all the liquids on the bus, only lubricant and sulphuric acid, since those are needed in more advanced recipes. I keep the other chemicals in their dedicated oil processing area and do most of the crafts there.

With these changes an early blue science build could look something like this.

I chose to make sulphur locally since it crafts pretty quickly and you don't need a lot of it. So no need to go overboard with chem plants for now. And making them in a dedicated area and putting sulphur on the bus doesn't seem worth it due to the low demand and not being needed in any other recipe (besides for making acid). That's up to you though

Now that the blue science changes are hopefully final and won't be changed again in the foreseeable future, purple science is up next!

Below the cut is the revised chemical science pack build.

Assuming you have build military science, the chemical science pack is the fourth one you will have to build. So you're probably thinking you've got this! But if you look at the ingredients for blue science, you'll notice some new icons you haven't seen before. As the name implies, this science pack requires you to get into processing chemicals!

Anything involving liquids is admittedly a little different from the game mechanics you'll have encountered so far. And based on all the cries for help- I mean forum posts, lots of people struggle with it at first. I know I did! So I will probably make a more detailed post about the way oil processing works in the game, but for now I just want to give you all you need to get started on blue science.

When you look at the recipe for blue science, the easiest ingredient is engines. These are pretty trivial to make. Just a normal assembly machine, getting all the ingredients in and that's it. They have a pretty long crafting time, so you should build a lot of assemblies to get a regular supply of them. Then you need to belt in gears and pipe (either made locally or on the bus, depending on your preferences) as well as steel. At this point in the game, that last one might be a bit of a bottleneck, so this is the perfect opportunity to scale up your steel production.

Once you've done this, you'll need advanced circuits, which require plastic, as well as solid fuel. This is where you'll have to start getting into fluids. A little trial and error will usually lead you to successfully using pumpjacks to produce the raw, crude oil. Unlike ore patches oil is infinite (there is a little more to it, but we can ignore all that for now), so just build enough pumpjacks for all the spots in a nearby oilfield and forget about them. Afterwards you can pipe the crude oil into a refinery and this is where it can start to get tricky.

There is a new feature in 0.17 that prohibits fluid mixing, so you can't actually make any really big mistakes anymore. Just know that each type of fluid should go in its own line of pipes and that if ONE of the fluids is backed up, the whole refinery will not work anymore. Because each crafting cycle produces all three types of liquid. Meaning that if you're not consuming one type of liquid at all, all three of them will eventually get stuck. Below is a very common layout for piping the three dirrefent fluid in a compact way that doesn’t mix any of them.

The problem of refineries getting stuck because one liquid is backed up has actually been alleviated by the recipe changes in the 0.17 update, due to the introduction of solid fuel as an ingredient for blue science. It used to be you just needed lot's of petroleum for making plastic and the other types of fluid where kind of just sitting there until you unlock more tech that makes them more useful later on. So you would build fluid tank after fluid tank whenever they backed up and your refining stopped.

With the new recipes you still need petroleum for plastic, but since any of the three basic types of fluid can be made into solid fuel, you can just turn all of the the other two into that and they won't back up! Now the only thing missing is some coal for the plastic production and you have all you need for blue science.

A very basic oil processing build for getting the plastic you need for red chips and the solid fuel for science could look something like this:

Side note: solid fuel also works as a great source of, well fuel. It works for both smelting and steam power generation. So you can use a splitter with output priority towards you science and any overproduction of solid fuel can go into power or smelting to save you some coal! Just make sure the coal line you're merging the solid fuel into doesn't also go into e.g. plastic, grenades or other things requiring coal specifically.

With the oil processing set up and operational, you can just belt the solid fuel and the red chips (once you've got the plastic I'm assuming you can take it from here) into your blue science assembly and you're good to go!

I already explained how to get the ratios for a science build in the last post, so I'm not going into the details of that for this build. If you want to, you can use my blueprint for a simple oil processing build that'll at least get you as far as blue science or the science build itself, there is a blueprint string after the cut.

Besides making an entire cargo wagon with one type of item, you can also mix them. This is another application where filters come in real handy. Let's say you want to make green circuits and need to bring in iron and copper plates. If you want, you can make a train that has a filtered inventory so it fills up half the cargo with iron plates and then drives on to the next smelting area to fill the rest up with copper plates.

Outputting them at the intended green circuit factory can then be achieved in an orderly fashion by using filter inserters. That way, you can choose exactly where each type of item is going without having to use splitters.

Another possible use for filter inserters is for mixed ore patches. Sure you can filter all the belts with splitters, but setting that up can be quite laborious. It also isn't good for your belt throughput! If you have a full belt of mixed ore and split a fraction of it off, then you'll never get a full belt's worth of throughput. Depending on the size of the ore patch this might not be a problem if you can extract enough lines of belt anyway and merge them together. But still, you just hate to see this don't you?

The easy solution is just filling your train with all the various ores you're getting from the mixed patch (with no filters on the cargo wagon itself, just fill it up with everything you've got!) and then send the train off to go through all the trainstations that take iron/copper/coal/stone one after the other! For each station, schedule the train to leave as soon the number of the respective item hits zero and then go to the next.

If you use filter (stack) inserters at all your trainstations, then only the correct items will be taken from the cargo. Mixed ore patches are no problem at all with this approach, no filtered splitters needed!

Another classic use of filtered inventory slots is a "building train", i.e. a train with all the items necessary for building trainstations, outposts, defences or what have you!

You have to filter the inventory slots, because your inserters don't know what or how much they're supposed to put in the train. And of course you want to be able to send it back to base to restock automatically without having to do it yourself.

So you can set up filters on your wagons to make sure you get a certain number of stacks of the items you want. Without these filters, your inserters would just fill up the inventory with the more readily available items and leave no room for others. Here’s an example of what my building train looks like:

Fourty nuclear bombs may seem like overkill, but you never know how many biters you might run into when scouting for new ore patches! ;)

One thing of note here are the rail tracks in the very first cargo wagon. This is really helpful, because you can reach the first wagon while riding in the front of the train. So if you run out of track in your personal inventory, while manually driving your train and putting down rails in front of you loony-tunes-style, you can just grab more rails from the cargo. The other wagons normally can't be accessed from the front of the train.

Setting up the building train in a new save used to be a lot of work. But you don't have to worry about that anymore, since trains and wagons can be blueprinted now! Meaning you only have to do it once and can then use it over and over again!

When building a large train network, I like to make sure my factories  don't get "contaminated" with wrong items if there's a mistake somewhere.

For trainstations that output items, I use filter (stack) inserters. Using some circuit conditions and a constant combinator set to the desired item, you can make sure the inserters won't grab anything else. This also helps when manually driving a train with building materials and stopping near an output station. No more power poles and transport belts clogging up your smelting lines!

That's it for output stations, inputs are a little more bothersome to set up. I like to set filters on my cargo wagons to make sure only the correct items are loaded into it. You can [mouse-wheel click] (default controls) on an empty inventory space in your cargo wagons to choose what can go in it, similar to the hotbar.

If you want to filter all your trains manually this way, that would be a lot of work. Just imagine, having to [mouse-wheel click] on each square, selecting the correct item from the pop-up menu, oh no...

Luckily, Factorio has several copy and paste-features! Similar to being able to copy ( [shift]+[right click] )  the recipe of an assembler and paste ( [shift]+[left click] ) it onto another one, you can also copy filters. This applies both to a single filtered inventory slot inside a cargo wagon, as well as one wagon's filters to another!

So instead of mouse-wheel clicking over and over, you can set one filter and then use [shift] to copy it to all the other inventory slots.

And once you have one entire wagon set up, you can just copy the entire wagon's filters onto another one! Which means you only have to set the filters on a wagon for each type of item once and then you can just copy them as needed.

So, just hover over the filtered wagon, [shift]+[right click] to copy the wagons settings. If you hold [shift], the entity currently “in the clipboard” will be marked green. Now hover your mouse over the wagon you want to copy (it will get marked in yellow) and [left click] while still holding [shift].

But since we can now blueprint trains and wagons, I decided to be even more lazy and made a blueprint with all the more common items you might use trains for. Just plop it down, delete all the ghosts of items you don't need, build the ones you want and then copy those to the train you're setting up! They also come with color-coded train engines, which can be copied as well.

Side note: pasting one train engine onto another will also copy their schedule. If you're only trying to copy colors without overwriting the current schedule, take a little detour through the trainstation! You can paste a train's color onto a station and vice versa. Similarly, pasting a trainstation onto another will also copy the station's name. If you don’t want that then again, take an extra step in between and go through a train engine.

Pretty sure making this blueprint cost me more time than not having to set it up once at the start of each new game will save, but well! If you're not willing to spend an unreasonable amount of time on coming up with an only slightly faster solution then what's even the point!

If you'd like to use my lazy solution you can find the blueprint string after the cut.

Just remember to deconstruct the thing once you're done or you'll have a bunch of trains sitting in your train menu doing nothing!

Next we look at the ingredients for the military science. You need two walls, a grenade and one round of piercing ammo. That's three different items you need to put into the machine, which is easy enough with two input belt lines and some long-handed inserters.It's finally time to show some more science pack builds. In the past I already showed a simple build for the first two science packs. Since their recipes haven't changed in the new update, I will start by talking about science pack three, aka military science.

Instead of just showing you the finished assembly line, I want to explain how I go about building these things a little bit. So first, I'll explain some theory and then take you through the different step of building the assemblies. And yes, don't worry, at the end there will be a blueprint string with the finished assembly. I would advise you to try building it yourself first, though. It's a lot more educational than just using somebody else's blueprints.

As explained in my post about red and green science, I usually approach building these things by looking at the crafttime of the science pack I'm trying to make. If you build one assembly per second of crafting time you will get sixty science packs per minute, assuming a crafting time of 100%. There’s no proper reason to go for one science pack per second. Designing the production for these numbers is simply convenient. And for an early to mid-game base, one science pack per second should be more than enough to get you started!

The different levels of assembly machines actually have different crafting time multipliers, so the ratios don't quite work out. As I've mentioned before, in the new update you can use assembly machines level one for any number of ingredients, which we will do for the relaticely eary sciences like military.

With a crafting speed of 0.5 this means you need twice as long for one science pack. Sooner or later you should upgrade the assembly machines. For now, let's just use the level ones to save on resources though.

But enough theory, let's go through building the military science step by step.

You start by looking at the crafting time of the science pack you're making. Military science takes ten seconds to make, so that's ten assemblies for one pack per second. Ah, but you get two packs per craft! So let's start with just five machines.

Next we look at the ingredients for the military science. You need two walls, a grenade and one round of piercing ammo. That's three different items you need to put into the machine, which is easy enough with two input belt lines and some long-handed inserters.

When choosing what item to put on which belt you should pay attention to the number of required items. Items you need a lot of should go on the belt closer to the machine, because you might need fast inserters or even stack inserters to get the necessary throughput later on. Since military only needs very few of each item, this is not an issue in this particular build.

Alright, now how many items do you need? Since five machines are enough to build make one science pack per second (at 1.0 crafting speed), it's very simple. You need one grenade and ap-ammo per second. And we already know how to make one item per second, don't we? And making two per second for the walls won't be a problem either!

So you look at each item and build one assembler per second of crafting time for each item (except for the walls). That means eight machines for grenades ...

and three for ap-ammo!

Walls only take half a second. If you wnat to craft one per second, you would only need half an assembler. Luckily walls are the only item we need two of, which adds up to one whole assembler.

Now it's just a question of getting the required materials into the assembly lines. The necessary smelting etc. is not part of this build and I'm assuming you will have all of the basic materials being made somewhere in your factory (maybe transported with a main bus system?).

The only ingredient you probably don't have is basic ammo rounds, which is required for the armor piercing ones. But since we know we're making one ap-ammo per second and each round take a single basic ammo, it is super easy to know how many to build! Just like before, you look at the crafting time and see that the basic rounds take one second each. So one single assembler for basic ammo can supply all three of the assemblies for the ap-rounds.

Once you supply the assemblies with the needed materials  you will get something like this:

After hooking all the assembly lines up to the correct materials, you just have to get the products to the military science assemblers and they will start producing a nice steady supply of grey science packs.

As I've mentioned above, this is all calculated for a 1.0 crafting speed. Since none of the different levels of assembly machine have a crafting speed like that, this will never quite work out perfectly. But it's a good way of thinking about these kind of things and get you started.

Since assembly machines level 1 have 0.5 crafting speed, your five military science assemblers are really slow and can't actually handle one science pack per second. So you can either double the number of science pack assemblers or cut the number of assembler for the incoming materials in half. Since I would argue you can never have enough science, let's double the science pack assembly line!

Later you can upgrade all the level ones with better assemblers. This will screw up the ratios because of the different crafting speeds for level two and level three assemblers. You can either add a couple more machines to each assembly line or just leave it as is. Unless your labs are constantly running, there's usually a bit of a backlog of materials anyway. The important part is to keep all your production lines on the same level of assembler, to keep the ratios close enough together.

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That's it for military science! I hope this hasn't just taught you how to make grey science packs, but also how to even approach building a production of any science packs you want.

I will also show the other types of science packs in the future, but probably with a less in-depth explanation of how to build them. Instead I will show the finished design and talk about what's special or important about each type of science pack.

You can find the blueprint string for the basic military science build after the cut! I have indicated what materials need to go on the incoming belts with constant combinators. You don't need to actually build them, though! As long as you have alt-mode activated they should display what item is supposed to go on the respective belt.

A lot of players never make it all the way to actually launching the rocket (only about 14% of all Steam players have the achievement for launching your first rocket). I honestly don't blame them, since actually "finishing" the game is much less interesting than to just keep playing and get a little bit more iron that's all I need, okay good, oh now I'm low on oil, alright just ten more minutes, then I'll go to bed aaaand it's four in the morning!

Anyway, the new update has brought some interesting changes for the rocket launch, if you ever do get around to it. First of all, you no longer need a satellite to "finish" the game. There are few things as upsetting as finally finishing the rocket, watching the awesome little animation as it prepares for launch and then pressing the "launch" button without putting in the satellite first and it was all for naught! Which is why the rocket silo and space science are now two separate techs.

So if you just want to finish the game, all you have to do is get a rocket ready in the silo. You can leave the “rocket inventory”, where you usually put the satellite, empty and just click on “Launch”.

The rocket launch animation will play, you can make a fun but ultimately futile attempt to race the rocket to the top of the screen and then you will get the “Game Finished” screen, taunting you with the number of “kills” such as wooden chests you shot to get rid of and all the power poles you ran over with a car.

I'm assuming this change is especially welcomed by speedrunners, because you can completely skip the satellite, which is pretty resource intensive and this will probably shave a bit of time off of the current record.

Do note that if you want to keep playing on that save, I would advise you to go the extra mile and craft the satellite, because you still only get the space science packs if you launch a rocket with the correct cargo! And even if you're not currently working on researching the infinite technologies, it’s still better to have a thousand space science packs sitting in a chest somewhere than to waste one rocket's worth of resources!

Another change that might be important here is the progression through the tech tree. Researching the silo used to require several rocket upgrades, as in damage or speed boosts to your rocket launcher. This is no longer necessary. In fact, as you can see in the tech tree, progressing towards the silo no longer requires any military science packs at all! Especially for maps in peaceful mode or with biters completely turned off, this means you could skip military science completely if you want.

Besides players who don't like biters, this is probably another great change for speedrunners, but also achievement hunters. I still haven't managed to get the No Spoon achievement, but if I can just completely skip military science, it just might be possible!

Since the last few posts were train related, I thought I would keep the theme going and talk about a few more new train features.

First of all, there's the new GUI which makes setting up schedules for the trains a little more intuitive. You click on "add station" to add a new destination. A neat new QoL improvement here is that all the stations your train could actually reach are on top of the list, all the other ones are marked red. This is really usefull for when you have separate train networks where not everything is connected to each other.

You can still select them if you want, however (for example if you're still working on your rails and want the train to start going as soon as you're done connecting everything). If you have several stations with the same name, this menu will also count how many there are.

Afterwards, you can change the wait condition. There are two new ones here "passenger present" and "passenger not present" which check to see if someone's in the train. It can only check if someone's in the train though and not how many. So in multiplayer you still have to make sure you're not leaving your friends behind in the middle of nowhere!

If you use multiple wait conditions it can get a little confusing. If you’re using several AND/OR conditions, there’s now a little visual cue to help show you what's going on and which ones belog together.

As you may also have noticed above, there's a green bar on the wait conditions. These are progress bars and fill up over time (for "time passed" and "inactivity” conditions) or depending on the cargo inventory (for "cargo empty/full" or "item count"). Once the neseccary ones (depending on your AND/OR settings) are fullfilled, he train will go on its merry way to the next destination!

You can also cancel all wait conditions and still send the train on its way. That way, the station will act as a "waypoint" to pass through on its route. Unlike in previous versions the train will not have stop for this, it will keep going full speed without having to slow down! Of course you can use this to set up loops by using two destinations with no wait conditions, like it was shown in the FFF #280!

When setting up a schedule you can click on a stations name to center the mapview in the train menu onto that trainstation. Clicking on the middle icon in the top corner will bring you back to the train. Alternatively, you can click on the icon next to it to switch over to the regular map for a quick look.

Once a train starts moving, the map in the train schedule menu will show the route that the train is taking.

If a trainstation on the schedule cannot be reached, the icon next to it will turn red and a tooltip will help clue you in on what's wrong (for example, when all stations of that name are disabled in a system similar to the one described in my last post).

And last but not least, you can set up "temporary" destinations for your train. By holding [ctrl] over the map (not the regular map, the map inside the train menu!) you can choose the location you want the train to go to and leftclick to let it go there right away (temporary trainstations are always added to the top of the schedule)!

There was a question on yesterday’s post. I was just going to answer it right there in the notes, but my reply kept getting longer and longer, so I decided to just make a separate post instead.

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@arraydotprototypedotreduce said: You can name stations the same and have them only call trains if they have a train load of resources available? This is a new one to me… Is it a mod?

Nope, no mods necessary for this at all! And it's not a new feature either, so you can even use it if you don't subscribe to the experimental branch of the game.

The basic idea of naming for example all copper mining the same and having a central smelting array is pretty straightforward. But since trains will normally go to the nearest destination with the scheduled name, you will probably just end up with all your trains queuing at the mining outpost closest to your smelting. Because even an express belt's worth of iron and generously upgraded stack inserters can only move so much product per minute!

So how do you make sure, trains will go to all the different stations and automatically pick one with enough product to actually fill up the cargo wagon as fast as possible? You just have to use the awesome power of circuit conditions!

You have to approach this issue from the other direction, so to speak. Instead of telling the trains where to go, you have to tell the trainstations, whether a train may go there. So first, you connect all the storage chests at a mining outpost with a single colour of circuit wire. For this you can just grab the wire item and with the wire in hand, click on the first chest to start the wire connection and then on another chest to choose a target for the wire connection.

Remember, bot placed blueprints with circuit conditions in them, will just magically add the wire. You can use this to get the wire for free, but more importantly (a couple of red wires shouldn't be too big a strain on your production) this will be a lot faster and more convenient, than doing it manually.

Chests connected by a wire will automatically send a signal with their content to the wire network. If you connect several, they will add their content together. So once you connect all the chests to each other, you have a signal with all your storage chests inventory going through the circuit wire.

If you want to see whats going through the circuit wire, you can connect it to a power pole and hover over it to look “inside“.

Now the next step is simple, connect the trainstop to the same circuit network and toggle on the "enable/disable" option in the trainstop's menu, which should pop up once it has a wire connection. Now you can set up a condition for when you want the trainstop to be enabled, like how much ore is in your storage!

For this you can calculate how much ore you need to fill your train. Ore is stored in stacks of 50, so one cargo wagon can hold up to 2k ore. (Since inventory isn't actually limited by a specific number of items, but by number of stacks, maximum stack size is important here!) In a one engine with four cargo wagons scenario, that means a total of 8k ore is needed to fill the train's cargo.

I usually reduce the number a little since there's still some travel time involved, so let’s go with 7.5k ore. Go to the “Enabled condition” part of the menu and change it to the number of iron ore (click on the first icon and select the iron ore from the menu that pops up) to be greater than (click on the sign to select the correct one from the dropdown menu) the number you decided on (ignore the icons for this and just use the slider or for more precision, manually type in the number in the little box at the bottom and click “Set”).

Now should end up with something like below. These settings mean, the trainstop will only be enabled, if there is enough ore in the storage chests to completely fill the train!

One caveat: since this system only checks the total number of ore, it won’t work properly if theres an uneven distribution of ore in the storage chests. Which can happen, depending on how you route the ore from the miners to your storage. So for example, the chests in front of your first cargo wagon might be filled up already, while the rest are still mostly empty. If the total number of ore is still greater than 7.5k, the trainstop will be enabled, but the cargo wagons won’t actually be filled quickly. However, this is an easy fix: a little bit of belt balancing will work wonders here!

Another new feature that really made my life a lot easier, is being able to blueprint trains.

You just select an area with a train currently in it, toggle the little "trains" box in the blueprint menu on and voila! Admittedly, the trains and cargo wagon sprite look a little wonky, but I'm assuming that will be changed in the future.

After creating a blueprint like this, you can just plop it down anywhere to build a copy of the trainstation with your train in it. The train will even have the same schedule as the original, so depending on how your train network is set up, you can just keep it as is and it will work right away.

This also works for blueprints in your library, so you can just keep a blueprint of all the type of stations you normally use in a blueprint book and you could just build it somewhere, hook up the remaining connections and juts let it go like that!

If you use filters on your cargo wagons' inventory, these will also be saved. So you don't have to manually make sure, for example that your building train has all the right items in it. I’ve filtered so many building trains in my days, I am super grateful for this feature!

Another interesting thing is fuel. A blueprinted train will have a logistic request for the type of fuel in the original. You can deactivate these, for example if you train station includes a proper refuelling system, otherwise your bots will put the requested fuel in the train.

This is really neat for building your train network. Both for unique stations, like a station for supplying a field of solar panels with more building materials as well as common ones, like mining outposts.

A feature that isn't new but has been improved is the fast replacement of splitters and underground belts.

In the previous version, placing a belt on top of an underground or a splitter would automatically replace them. But if you're just dragging around a bunch of belt, more often than not you might accidentally replace a splitter you wanted to keep. I was very ambivalent about this feature, since I thought it was very useful in some circumstances, but I kept having these accidents where it didn't work as intended.

In the 0.17 version, this feature has been changed a little and I think it works really well now. It's similar to how your mouse-click "remembers" whether you're putting items in or out of an entity, for example when putting a bunch of coal in a furnace by just click and dragging a stack of it across several furnaces. Here, it makes sure you don't start grabbing items from them instead, once you run out of coal in your inventory.

The fast-replacement now works like this, too. If you just place a piece of transport belt on the ground and then drag it across the screen, you're in "belt placement mode". If you happen to pass an underground or splitter, it will not be affected! Here’s what happens if you drag a red belt across the two belt lanes:

You can still fast replace splitters and so on, if you explicitly click on them. Your mouse will also be in "fast replace mode" now, so if you drag your mouse across more belt and undergrounds etc. you will fast replace everything else.

The update also gave new abilities to our bots.

For one thing, they can now "deconstruct" cliffs for you. That is, if you mark cliffs for deconstruction, your bots will use cliff explosives to get rid of them. This means you actually need to have them in your inventory or in your network's storage.

Are you seeing that? The bots are walking away from the explosions without even looking at them, like the heros of an action movie!

Placing a ghost image on top of a cliff by shift-clicking will also automatically mark them for deconstruction. Just like you would do it, to place blueprint down despite rocks and trees being in the way.

The next new ability is bot based landfilling!

Not only can your bots place landfill for you if you use shift to order them to do so, you can even include landfill in your blueprints.

(Ignore the GUI looking a little wonky in this and the next one, these are experimental releases after all)

For the purpose of the blueprint, landfill counts as tiles, similar to stone bricks or concrete. By default, tiles are toggled to not be included in a blueprint as soon as there are actual entities and not just tiles in it. But you can manually toggle them on to be included. So if you'd like to build a big solar power rig in the middle of the ocean (far away from those pesky biters!), than you can let your robots build it for you without any need to manually landfill the whole area first.

I totally forgot to mention another big change in the new version. Or at least, it sounds like a big change at first, but actually doesn't affect gameplay that much.

In fact, you might have already noticed this in some of my screenshot recently. There's a very curious, empty spot next to the weapon slots on your HUD. I'm talking about the removal of the two types of pickaxe!

The devs explained their decision to remove them in the FFF #266. There are basically only two stages to the progression of pickaxes and neither feels very significant. Most players reach tier one literally one or two seconds into the game: you use the couple of iron plates you start the game with to craft the first pickaxe. Since in the beginning of the game you have to mine the first couple of ores and some fuel (wether coal or trees). Depending on how much you mine, maybe you'll have to craft a second or even third one.

But once they reach steel smelting, most players will use the first few steel plates to craft a couple of steel pickaxes for the mining speed boost.

And that's it.

Maybe ten to fifteen minutes into the game, you have successfully completed all of the pickaxe "tiers". In fact, this might very well be the last time you craft a pickaxe in the game, ever. Because at some point, all the actual mining is done by electric mining drills, while deconstruction as well as rock and tree removal is done by your bots (and the occasional hand grenade).

Manually "mining" a building will also use up your steel pickaxe. But if you just craft maybe three or four pickaxes as soon as you get steel smelting, this will last you for a long, long time. I vividly remember a pretty long playthrough of mine, where I thought there was some kind of bug because the speed at which I was manually picking up buildings was suddenly super slow. Only after a while did I remember that pickaxes are a thing. So I hand crafted a stack of them (why set up an assembly for something as rarely used as this?) and a low three digit number of hours later into that save, I was still going strong with the exact same stack of pickaxes.

So long story short: no more pickaxes! This is a game about automation, not Minecraft! You now start the game with a mining speed equivalent to the iron pickaxe. There's no tier below that anymore (you could previously hit an ore patch with a stick, if you had no pickaxe equipped at all, for example for the Lazy Bastard run). Instead of unlocking the steelaxe together with steel smelting, you can now research a follow-up technology. It's still called "steel axe", but it will just give you a general boost in mining speed, equivalent to what used to be the speed of a steelaxe.

One new feature that doesn't really affect gameplay very much but gives you the option of making things look nicer, is the introduction of rich and interactive text formatting.

There are some basic commands like /color and /font you can use. For example, if you type " Text in different [color=red]colors[/color] and [font=default-large-bold]fonts[/font]!" into the chat (default setting to open chat/the console is the [tilde] key), you will get this:

The really cool thing is using it for more Factorio related things and not just text formatting. If you type in "[item=solar-panel][item=iron-plate][item=copper-plate]" you will actually get the items.

You can also grab the item you want to add to the chat and just click on the chat box to add it. Hovering over the icon will display the usual hover-text info box. But if you just type it in, this even works for items you haven't researched yet!

If you're thinking "well colorful text is nice I guess but meh", well you can use all this formatting not just in chat, but also for in-game texts like naming trainstations and blueprints! You can name a trainstation "[item=coal] [color=black] Coal Supply [/color]" and the name will be displayed both with the icon as well as the color you chose (though the black text is more of a grey, really).

This also works for blueprint names, like "[item=electronic-circuit] [color=green]Green Chips[/color]":

Now this is where it gets really cool, if you play the game in multiplayer: you can also share blueprints over chat now. If you grab a blueprint and click on the open message box, you can post it to the chat. Anyone who received it, can now hover over the message to see what's inside the blueprint and clicking on it will give you a copy of it!

So no need to export and share blueprint strings in multiplayer anymore, just post your blueprints in chat for everyone to see! I did try just typing in the name of the blueprint and doing it like that, but it didn't work. As you can see below, it just posted my attempted commands as plaintext. Maybe it has something to do with the names blueprints are stored under. But just dropping them in chat is more convenient anyway. I was just curious to see if it worked.

Lastly, there's a new ping feature. If you click  somewhere on the ground (whether in regular gameplay or from map view) with [alt]+[ctrl]+[LMB], you will automatically post the coordinates of that spot to the chat. This will also create a blinking ping symbol (similar to the targeting icon from the artillery) on that spot. And if you click on the location in the chat window, it will bring up the map at the respective coordinates so you can quickly go to where the other player is trying to bring your attention.

According to the FFF #237, which talked about plans to introcude these features, you should also be able to post your power armor set-up to the chat, but I wasn't able to pull this off. Clicking on the chat with my power armor in hand just posts the same info as "[item=power-armor-mk2]" would. So either they didn't end up making this feature or I'm too stupid to do it.

One thing they removed in the new release are the ingredient limits on the different levels of assembly machines. It used to be, level 1s could only craft item that require up to two ingredients, level 2s could do three and the highest level could use as many as you want.

In the new version, all assembly machines can use as many types of ingredients as you want! Meaning even a level 1 assembler can potentially craft your rocket silo for you. The only downside of the lower level ones is the slower crafting speed.

In my current playthrough, this had a big effect on my base building, because I just used assembly 1s for basically all my production way into the mid-game. And even then, I only transitioned to using level 2s very slowly, focussing on the production lines I could use the extra crafting speed the most.

I actually still have a couple of level 1s in my first 0.17 base. They are especially useful for items in (what the fandom often calls) "shopping malls", i.e. assembly lines that produce all the items you need to build and expand your base. From the assembly machines themselves to power poles and mining drills. These items are not in super high demand, so you don't need a constant output of them. Just grabbing what is there and then while you're off building things, they can just slowly build up a chest full of, say long-handed inserters. Even if they're not running all the time and it takes several minutes to fill up a stack or two in the chests, that is just fine with me.

So unless crafting speed is important, you don't even need to update your assemblies! The only downside to lower level ones (besides the speed) is if you are crafting something that requires fluids! Because the level one assemblies don't have a fluid input. So if you're trying to craft for example electric engine units, you will have to use level 2s or higher. Trying to copy the electric engine recipe onto the level 1 assembler, will give you another floaty-text error message.

One thing of note: this will make the (in my opinion super fun!) Lazy Bastard achievement a lot easier. That's the one where you have to finish the game without handcrafting more than 111 items total. So you basically had to make a beeline for an assembly level 2 and then never handcraft another item again for the entire game! Except for the first refineries, since they are one of the few items that require more than four ingredients. Which means you actually have to handcraft them until you unlock level 3s!

But since level 1s can now craft with as many ingredients as you want, this will be a lot easier. You can just make the level 2 assembler in a level one and even build as many refineries as you want, instead of relying on that tiny trickle of oil from a singel one for ages!

Previously, you actually needed almost all the 111 crafts just to get to the level 2 assembly, while making sure you've got enough crafts left for the refinery (the absolute minimum number of crafts to finish the game is 106 as far as I know). Now you can probably stay below the limit with no problems. The devs have said, they realize this makes the achievement a lot easier, but they do not plan on lowering the crafting limit in the future.

Which I honestly think is fine, since these changes should theoretically only lower number of necessary crafts by three: for the level 2 assembler, the first refinery and you also "gain" one craft by power poles now requiring raw wood instead of wooden planks. I haven't actually done the achievement in the new version yet, so I might be missing something!

On a somewhat Factorio-related note: there's an early-access weekend for the game Satisfactory starting right now! Since the Venn-diagram of people who love Factorio and people who are excited about Satisfactory is probably more or less just a circle, I thought I would mention it here. Everyone who signed up for an alpha key should be getting one, so check your mail, if you did!

If you haven't heard about the game yet, it seems to be basically first-person, 3D Factorio. I'm sure the Satisfactory devs would object to that and could go on and on about how original and totally different in very significant ways their game is. But if you want a concise, easy to understand explanation of the game, well yeah, it's 3D Factorio.

They also lifted the NDA that was part of the non-public alpha, so now you can finally find gameplay on streams and Youtube, etc. A lot of Factorio Youtubers are very excited about this game going into the alpha weekend, so you may already know someone you like to watch, who will be playing this as well!

If you haven't signed up for the alpha yet, you won't be able to play this weekend, sadly. But the public, early access is scheduled to launch on March the 19th.

The new copy and paste feature is just really awesome! I use it all the time now, I can hardly even remember when we didn't use to have it. Even in the early game, it's useful for planning, as placeholders and for laying out your base. You could do all that with blueprints of course, but it's just even more accessible and convenient now.

Being able to scroll through the last couple of things in your "clipboard" is also really great. Maybe it's just me, but I often think "oh, you need that thing again, the one you just used" and previously I would have already cleared my temporary blueprint and lost it. Thanks to the new feature, this is no longer a problem!

I also checked and in case you were wondering, the clipboard can hold up to the last twenty things you copied or cut. Also, the clipboard is saved per player (not globally, i.e. shared between saves) and is not temporary in the "is deleted on a restart" sense of the word. Here is the screenshot I took when checking the number of “slots” in the clipboard, in case you'd like to see the last twenty random things I used it for!

Normal blueprints can be edited when you create them, holding [shift] when you release the mouse will skip the blueprint-editing menu and make it right away. Since the copy function also gives you the "blueprint" right away, this feature is reversed: holding shift will let you edit the content of the entities you're trying to copy.

One thing you have to watch out for is the darn hotkey though! It's really easy to not hit the [shift] key properly and you end up with just [C]. Which, in case you forgot, is the hotkey for shooting at stuff, so you end up with a lot of situations like these ...

... or sometimes even these!

Luckily, you can customize basically all the controls in Factorio (which I really appreciate in a game!) and I decided to just turn that hotkey off. Shooting at nearby enemies is still [space], the [C] key is just for shooting at some specific target, whether it's an enemy or not. So it's rarely ever used anyway, unless you're shooting at a chest filled with junk to destroy it, because that's the only way to delete unwanted items.

Previously, when you trying to perform an action that wasn't permissible, you would just get a pretty loud and distinct "DE-DEED!" sound. Without necessarily knowing what exactly the problem is, this was not always very helpful. Sometimes it's pretty obvious, like trying to place down an entity in an already occupied area. Other times you might be trying to put productivity modules in an assembler with no idea why all you get is that infuriating sound effect.

The 0.17 release includes a lot of new flying text messages that pop up to explain what went wrong. This should help players figure out the problem and how to do it correctly instead. There's messages for other entities being in the way (very specific ones!), trying to place miners or pumpjacks without the required resources nearby, attempts to put the wrong type of module in an assembler or beacon and one for a brand new feature: preventing fluid mixing!

Whenever you're building oil products, the absolute worst thing that can happen is "contaminated" pipes. You work on a line of chemical plants and just when you think you're finished, you connect a line of pipes up to the wrong type of liquid and bam: now a part of your pipe network has the wrong type of fluid in them. So you either have to pump them out or tear up the whole thing and rebuild.

This is now no longer possible! As soon as you connect a pipe up to some source of fluids - even just a potential source, that isn't producing anything yet!- all pipes connected to it will be assigned that type of fluid. And connecting two lines of pipe with different types of fluids in them will cause the dreaded DE-DEED! sound effect and display a little "can't connect systems with different fluids" message.

This is really helpful as far as preventing silly accidents goes. I have read some complaints though, saying that certain builds are now no longer possible because of this. Since even the inputs of a chemical plant or refinery will determine the fluid type of a connected pipe system. And some recipes don't require two inputs so you used to be able to supply just one input and use the tile before the second one for other pipes. But I think this will only affect some very specific builds, like when trying to come up with super compact ones. In normal gameplay, space is an infinite resource, so you usually don't have to worry about this.

Something I found a little bothersome, was trying to switch refineries from normal oil processing to advanced. Since one input changes from oil to water, all the pipes connected to that input will be assigned water as well. But if there’s other machines on that pipe still set to crude oil - even when there’s not actually any oil in the pipes!- trying to change one machine will give you the "can't mix fluids" error message.

Instead you have to clear the reselected recipes on all your refineries in that pipe network and then set them to advanced. This isn't a huge problem though, since you usually only switch them once, after getting the necessary research done and then never again. And thanks to the awesome feature of copying crafting recipes from one machine to the other (shift+right click to copy and shift+left click to paste) you don't have to manually click on every individual machine and select the correct recipe. So despite these slight downsides, this feature is still a net benefit to the gaming experience.