I love this game, but here's one quirk: You can have a full line of ore on a conveyor being directly sold, having 8 inserters extract from it which should deplete it because 8 inserted into it to make it full, but you can continue the line and get another 2 inserters extracting from it, and when you do that, all 10 inserters visually still extract, but instead of either your income staying the same or increasing, it decreases. I don't know if this is due to discrepancy between visuals and what's actually happening (some inserters operate at lower rate due to missing items that go past but dont look it), or inaccurate income meter, or both, or what.
I made a spreadsheet about an optimal factory that would use all the resources.
- "Ratio" columns can be ignored, they were used to calculate the actual rates.
- "Amount" means the rate of items per 1 in-game "duration".
- Factories > "%" column is the percentage of all the factories/mines of that type that are used for that product.
- Factories > "Fs/Row" is how many factories to put in each row, assuming you have only 1 belt of each ingredient feeding the row.
- The groups of table rows at the bottom are for totals for products (red and green circuits, chemical, and raw resources) that are made for multiple different things.
- I ignore furnaces and the difference between raw and smelted resources because 1 raw turns into 1 smelted and they are easily smelted adjacent to the mine, so it doesn't affect anything.
Some key results about an optimal factory:
- You can run 9 launchers constantly and one 65% of the time, which gives $14M per second.
- You have to use all the iron but can waste 19% of copper and 21% of oil.
- Factory requirements: 36 red > 33 chem > 31 green > 13 skin > 10 blue > 9 robot > 4 brain, = 136 total.
- Other stuff in spreadsheet not mentioned.
3 years ago(+1)
Thank you for all those research, it's not easy to figure out all the correct ratios. I don't quite remember all the details, but at the time I tried to balance all the 3 main ressources (iron, copper and oil) so it's great to see it worked. I don't think I managed to make a factory that efficient and it may be quite tricky (but hopefully doable) to fit everything into the limit space of the game. If you manage to do it, send me a screenshot!
3 years ago(+2)
Hello, inserters can take 1 item from a line per tick (4 frames) and a conveyor can store up to 8 items. There is however a system so that if several inserters are taking from same conveyor square or if the conveyor path continue beyond that square, they will take turn so as to not starve completely any supply path. So putting more than 8 inserters to take from the end of a path cannot extract more than 8 a second (as the conveyor bring only 8 per second anyway) but could potentially take less, because some inserters will be idle some ticks, waiting for items to be shared between others. This code is not very smart to be honest, it was just an easy way to share items among several paths. Bridge work the same but can take half the content of the conveyor (so up to 4 items per ticks if the conveyor is full) this is again so that items are spread between several paths, but two bridges at the end of a conveyor line should empty it I think.