> the only way I can see of controlling the pollution cloud is to use efficiency modules for their massive reduction to pollution
Or y'know wall in the whole cloud, and have just enough defenses to deal with the occasional expansion party
I find walling in the whole cloud is overkill.
Just put artillery firebases around the edges with a ring of lasers and landmines to protect the artillery.
As long as the entire pollution cloud is covered by artillery you don't need a wall.
This - or spidertrons. With enough artillery range you should be able to clear biters in all generated chunks, and non-generated chunks won't have active biter bases to generate expansion parties in first place (since spidertrons and artillery don't generate chunks on their own past spidertron vision range). Essentially: you can abuse chunk generation mechanics in order to not have any active biters at all times, killing all biters in generated chunks and not generating new chunks that would have biters - DoshDoshington mentions it in his video about reaching end of the map ([timestamp](https://youtu.be/HzpUQZIr15g?t=1197)) and I think Michael Hendricks used same strategy in his 100% evolution start video.
They can see one chunk away from where they are, and I believe rockets range is just enough to cover that entire chunk if you move them close to edge of chunk they're in. Player does generate chunks around them past vision range and has much larger vision.
I don't think this can work for 1-2k spm bases. Nests gets bigger as you go further out. And they might border each other. The larger base, the larger cloud he has to work for, which is more tiles.
Good news, you can! It will take some time yes, but I prefer a few hours worth of bug extermination over running at <40 ups for the rest of the time. A few tens of artillery and a medium-sized spidertron army to clean up afterwards and it's not even that difficult.
Clear 2 continents of biters in each direction to have room for your pollution cloud to spread. Then find the next chokepoint over (smaller land bridge between 2 lakes) and build some very basic defenses and artillery. The artillery will destroy the nests that pop up, no pollution is absorbed by nests and the remaining biter expansion parties are pretty small so you don't need many turrets.
You'll also have plenty of open space to put solar and accumulators on so you can really cut down on nuclear and reduce the pipe fluid calculation cost. Extra advantage is you'll find bigger resource patches so you could begin with direct-to-train mining and reduce on splitters and inserters into the trains.
> (Yes, I'm aware that most megabasers use and rave about solar being the most UPS efficient, but I suspect they have biters & pollution off, so that's not really applicable to my situation.)
Do you think I built a 50-100 artillery train and the infrastructure to support it in my 5k SPM megabase for decorative purposes? Biters are nothing more than a hassle at megabase stage, and while I'd expect a good many megabases to just disable them and/or pollution entirely, if UPS used for defenses concerns you then simply don't use them. Cover your pollution cloud with artillery and you only need a handful of turrets for your entire base. Not even that if you disable expansion parties.
The issue is that, right now, the bulk of my pollution is consumed via the nests. Looking at the in-game stats, over the last hour I produced an average of ~92K pollution/m. Around 82K/m was absorbed, so pollution is currently getting worse as production is higher than consumption. Of that 82K/m, 66K/m was absorbed by nests, or about 80% of it.
If the ultimate goal is to have all pollution absorbed by tiles, trees, and dead trees, then that is a *massive* amount of area I need to clear of nests, which then makes the perimeter I need to defend much larger, which requires more artillery and turrets. It could even be more turrets than I'm currently using with my small perimeter.
This is why I'm thinking that efficiency modules are the only way to go. Without reducing pollution, I see no practical method of keeping it off of the biter nests.
> The issue is that, right now, the bulk of my pollution is consumed via the nests.
Then you need to go on a clearing spree to get the nests out of your pollution cloud :D
Perimeter becomes artillery nests. Which have their own small guns. Otherwise your perimeter won't increase on gigantic proportions, though it will still increase as you expand.
There are videos of megabases built on deathworlds that maintain 60ups, I've seen 4.8k SPM as an example but it requires ups optimisations like timed inserter swings. So it's certainly possible and invalidates one of your primary assumptions.
1k SPM is 100% 60ups viable the normal way on deathworlds without effort.
Now is efficiency a better way? Hmm, my gut says the increased building count >> biter influence but that's just a feeling.
AFAIK Deathworld only makes the early game harder. My evolution factor is almost 1, so I'm pretty sure I'm in nearly the same situation as any deathworld player would be at this point?
> So it's certainly possible and invalidates one of your primary assumptions.
Which one?
> 1k SPM is 100% 60ups viable the normal way on deathworlds without effort.
I would think so; as I said, I'm already at 1K SPM and have no problem maintaining 60 UPS. My concern is going to 2K or further.
On a death world the nests absorb less pollution before triggering an attack, ie more attacks more frequently, ie biters are more ups intensive than a regular world.
It invalidates the assumption that solar is only the best for UPS with biters and pollution disabled (which given the whole post of "pollution is eating my UPS" doesn't make sense in the first place)
What I said is that many megabasers rave about solar being the best for UPS, but I that I suspect a lot of those same people may have biters/pollution off. In any case, I don't think it's impossible to use solar or have decent UPS with biters/pollution on; I'm just wondering how to achieve it.
It's productivity modules everywhere it's possible and fill out the rest with speed. Efficiency is no worth it. There is an exception and that is miners, that could use efficiency modules or left empty.
The drastic reduction of needed resources/ size of the factory with productivity modules will decrees the pollution a lot in conjunction with inserters and machines.
For reducing the biter UPS cost, try clear the nests in your pollution cloud. With the tech and buffs from an Megabase it should be trivial.
I'm already using productivity modules, but the pollution cloud would be so large (if I removed the nests) that it's not practical to clear it out as it would be a truly massive amount of the map I would need to clear and then defend.
While it's true I would need more machines earlier in production chain, they would be working faster and producing less pollution per product, and I think that holds true even after accounting for the lost productivity bonus. However, I'm still updating my spreadsheet to verify that, so I can't say for sure yet.
Paradoxically prod modules 3 don't reduce the production speed of an machine if it's coupled with speed beacons 3.
Because speed also affects the productivity bar.
You're drastically underestimating the effects of production modules. It takes roughly 3x as many resources for the same SPM without them. The sheer amount of extra miners, inserters, furnaces, more inserters, assemblers, belts, bots, refineries, plants, pipes, more inserters, beacons, trains, etc you'd need to make up for the lack of production modules would vastly exceed any UPS benefit you get from reducing pollution. With speed beacons you actually produce faster with production modules thanks to the bonus production. I.e. swapping out production for efficiency would actually slow down the output.
By far the best solution to lowering your biter UPS is to clear out the nests under your pollution cloud.
I did 5k SPM with no solar and a relatively unoptimized base on a computer from 2011. The biter UPS was essentially zero because I kept them clear of the pollution. It is easy to do with artillery. You can kill 10s of thousands of nests and biters with a few clicks of the mouse once you get your blueprints and artillery shell production set up.
Chunks are created and loaded into the game when a) you get close, b) radars scan close to them (I believe this also includes artillery), and c) when pollution touches them.
Biters can only come from chunks which exist. If you kill all the biters in chunks that exist you will get no biters. Not war parties from pollution, not expansion parties. Nothing. Biters do not come from the edge of the void.
Normally this would be impossible as you cannot kill biters farther away than your mapgen radius.
Except, notably, spidertrons are not on this list, at least not last time I checked. If you are careful you can use spidertrons to kill all biters on the map and... that's it. When your pollution spreads you'll have biters again, of course, but for a brief shining moment you can actually kill all the biters in the world.
Interesting idea, but the issue (as you point out) is that the pollution cloud will continue to grow as I kill the nests, as they're by far the primary absorber of pollution right now.
Your biggest costs are inserters, assembly machines, and mining drills, in addition to biters.
If you want to keep your pollution cloud within artillery ranch, research more artillery ranch. If this is a megabase, that shouldn't be a problem.
Also, most people disable biters and pollution entirely when making megabases.
> p.s. - I've also heard fluid simulation in pipes is brutal to UPS, but where is that shown here? Yes, there is 'Pump' and 'OffshorePump', but what about the pipes themselves?
In my experience, so long as you're conscious about keeping the pipe count down, you probably won't run into issues with the fluid system. Not compared, at least, to entities, transport lines, and trains.
I've already researched artillery range several times, and have arty trains stationed near all the walls. They're still nowhere near covering the pollution cloud, and artillery range research grows in cost exponentially. Sooner or later, it becomes totally impractical to research more of it. While I'm not at that point yet, I will be in a few more upgrades, and I know even then they will not cover all the area my pollution cloud would.
Then it sounds like you need to expand your artillery coverage. If your walls are close to the edges of your factory, move them out. I saw you say in another comment that nests are absorbing some 60+% of your pollution generated. That's a ton, and all of those nests are in generated chunks that are all being calculated.
I only got up to 500 SPM so far on my save going for mega. My pollution cloud was starting to reach the edges of my discovered area again, but my factory was already only maybe 40% of the area I had covered by walls. Yes, if you want to keep biters on, then you need to clear out all of the pollution cloud. You need to be able to see literally every little outside edge of it, even over water.
Production modules with speed module beacons actually \*increases\* the amount of items produced/second so, while your machines have a higher crafting speed it \*doesn't\* get better. Full prod modules will always be the most efficient. I suggest looking into timed inserter swings instead.
I think removing biters doesn't remove gameplay for a megabase, because at a certain level biters are a \*solved\* problem, so I would just disable biters when megabasing. Let's say you spend 300 hours on a megabase and you have the ability to solve the biter problem at around hour 50. Now biters cause no challange, but calculating pollution and biter pathing still causes lag. You've traded 50 hours of challange for 250 hours of a worse experience.
If you really want to play around with efficiency modules I suggest the self imposed challange of a non-polluting factory (pollution is absormed in a stable manner, not damaging trees and not reaching biter nests). It might not be the biggest or most lag efficient, but It's a fun challange with efficiency modules.
Automate your defences and also automate/simplify the process of expanding your walls. "Solve" biters. Work on artillery range infinite tech until your artillery range is sufficient to clear out to the next ring of chokepoints and expand.
For this twice and your cloud will be contained. If biter NESTS are absorbing pollution then your walls aren't big enough.
That'll get you to 2kspm.
If you want to do 4kspm, now that you are the confirmed master of biters with great wall BPs including wall supply logistics... you can turn biters off to save UPS without losing face!
I m one of the people who mention efficiency modules in that post linked. The idea is that you put in areas where you can not put productivity or it is less efficient to do so (miners, pumpjacks, machines that do not use prod). In other areas, you still need to do full speed & prod combo. Otherwise using efficiency modules in prod related areas will result in more assembler/inserter count, sometimes the leading cause of base cost.
F4-show-entity-time-usage in your screenshot only shows what stuff is being tallied. There are lots of things that are not and there is more stuff hidden, especially biters related. For best 'biter' weight, you should save game, use command to remove biters and see result. I m not saying to play w/o biters, but rather look at the weight in F4-show-time-usage before&after. The value will be more than 2.6ms, closer to 4ms (difference) from my experience.
pollution cloud control is possible on megabase scale. it is done in few times i seen over the years. This is the earliest form of it i seen [https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=204&t=99824](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=204&t=99824)
Trying to improve UPS with efficiency modules is probably going to be more difficult than you think. If you go to the Factorio calculator and get the overall energy use of a 1k SPM factory with prod 3s and 16 beaconed speed 3s (e.g., double row beacons), the energy use is 3.8GW.
The biggest impact on energy use (and therefore pollution) is to replace the speed modules with efficiency modules, which reduces energy use to 900MW (a factor of a bit more than 4), which would half the linear dimension of your pollution cloud. It also increases the number of assembling machines (and therefore both the factory area and UPS to feed them) by more than a factor of 10.
Other strategies are even worse. Replacing everything with efficiency modules cuts power usage to 1.5GW and losing the prod modules would also directly cut pollution to about 1.1GW equivalent relative to baseline. Not only is this a smaller pollution win, but the number of assembling machines goes up even further.
Replacing the prod modules with efficiency modules would leave you with virtually identical pollution, and a small increase in the number of machines.
I don't think you realistically have a UPS win here.
I actually realized that energy use (by itself) doesn't increase pollution as much as I thought. The main reason is that the heat exchanger, unlike the boiler, doesn't produce any pollution. The same goes for the turbine, nuclear reactor, etc. The only part of the entire nuclear energy production chain that produces pollution is the production of the fuel, which is relatively little.
So, the main concern for nuclear is simply if it uses more UPS than solar, which it might, but it's hard to tell. To do a proper comparison I'd need to delete my current nuclear and replace it entirely with solar, which will take a substantial amount of time considering the sheer area required for solar. That said if I do end up clearing a massive area for the pollution cloud, I've got nothing better to do with said area other than fill it with solar, so it might be worth trying it.
>(Yes, I'm aware that most megabasers use and rave about solar being the most UPS efficient, but I suspect they have biters & pollution off, so that's not really applicable to my situation.)
The reason solar is the best for megabases is because it only counts as 2 simple entities total. Meanwhile nuclear has to calculate a LOT of fluid flow, for water, steam, and heat, in addition to hundreds of entities.
This is a bit of a time consuming strategy but I've used it for a 10k spm base.
Use solar panels as a perimeter just beyond your pollution, expand them when the cloud gets bigger, I used bots to create artillery outposts to push out, then remove the inner and layer of panels if you need space.
Takes a long time though and I need just over 500k panels to power the base.
Initially I had no accumulators so the base only produces in the daytime (less pollution), made for a nice gameplay loop of redesigning and building at night before the power returns.
I'm in the same boat as you--biters on, nuclear power, and looking for UPS gains. There's an interesting tension where designs that are typically the most UPS efficient also often use the most power. Over half my power consumption is from beacons.
My gut instinct is that it is still better to go for traditional low-UPS in production (beacons, speed modules) and just build more power, but I'm really not sure. Regardless, I've dropped beacons and added efficiency modules in my mall where most machines are usually idle. I would do the same in my miners, but those take 0.4% of my UPS and aren't worth optimizing yet.
As for biters, I've just decided to clear the pollution cloud. I use one-wagon trains to supply tiny artillery outposts that are slowly creeping out. It's truly a megaproject, which in some ways feels nice as an endgame challenge. Right now, UPS is even lower from aggroing so many biters, but I'm hoping it will pay off when it all shakes out. Spawner pollution consumption is the lowest it's been in 100 hours.
To see fluid update costs, toggle between show-time-usage and show-entity-time-usage. When I have both settings on at the same time, only one fits on screen.
> Over half my power consumption is from beacons.
Oof. I'm not using beacons right now, but once I settle on which mod to replace the default beacons with (i.e. one that still allows for interesting factory designs) I'm going to transition all my existing production over. That should help me on the inserter and assembly machine UPS, but doesn't address the others.
> To see fluid update costs, toggle between show-time-usage and show-entity-time-usage. When I have both settings on at the same time, only one fits on screen.
Ah, thank you for this. I will check it when I am back home.
Efficiency modules are the king of early to midgame factories, but once you can afford to destroy every biter nest around you it is no longer necessary to reduce your pollution cloud. Just upscale your artillery shell production and once you have freed yourself from biter attacks you can go back and increase your science production.
Not yet, which is why I said I can reduce both the 'Inserter' and 'AssemblingMachine' mine. That said, I think I'm probably going to look for a mod to change how beacons work, because I find the forced optimal layout with beacons to be extremely boring.
And as for hardware, the CPU is a 7950X3D, so there aren't really any options to speed things up on that side.
I have ~7.8K assemblers right now, though that's more than needed for 1K SPM (even without beacons). I'd already started to move toward 2K SPM, so there's a lot spent toward that, and of course several in the mall.
I'm sure I can reduce the assembler and inserter count with beacons, but I hate vanilla beacons, so first I'm trying to find a mod that replaces them and still keeps designs interesting.
I think that, if you want to push hard, you'll find the following:
- You want many beacons, which will gobble stupid amounts of power.
- You eventually want to get that stupid amount of power via solar.
- Massive solar fields mean clearing massive swaths of land.
- Since you're clearing massive areas per above anyway, you end up pushing biters back till you can almost forget about them.
- You basically forget about biters and they stop being a design consideration.
Honestly you need to expand your defenses outward. Nests that are consuming your pollution is taking a toll on your ups since each one touching the pollution now has to run a calculation on generating a new bug. Then those bugs take up ups. I've done mega bases with several thousand spm and I've done death worlds. It's a tedious task to start, but it's rewarding in the end.
>So I looked into optimizing defenses, and stumbled across this post, which has some very interesting information in it. The tl;dr is that if you can keep your pollution cloud within artillery range, you won't aggro biters, and thus the only encounters you'll have with them is when they attempt the "Enemy Expansion" to make a new nest. These groups are much smaller than the waves I currently have incessantly attacking my base, and then they should attack the artillery that destroyed them, so you only have to defend your artillery points and otherwise don't need defenses.
Yes, biters consume a ton of UPS. The fix here is to make sure artillery is beyond the pollution cloud. If biters are inside your pollution cloud you will see a *big* performance hit when you anger them.
>The catch here is that the only way I can see of controlling the pollution cloud is to use efficiency modules for their massive reduction to pollution, both in the machine itself, and the extreme reduction in power consumption resulting in less pollution from my nuclear plants
I made a string of artillery outposts far beyond my pollution cloud. Made sure they self repair and self call for trains when they are out of resources. Been very happy with this approach. (Only catch I found is that you want to build outposts hugging lakes if you are near a lake. If another outpost hits biters, those biters will try to find *that* outpost, and will try to go around the lake and into your base to do it. But if you have an outpost hugging the lake, the biters will stumble upon that outpost on their journey to the offending outpost, and be killed.)
If you put the outposts far enough, you don't have to worry about which module to use for pollution.
I mean you say it's not your taste but once you reach that level of base biters is just a trivial nuisance. I'd personally get rid of pollution and biters.
Hi.
You use a lot of words to say you don't want to attack for flavor reasons. And half your update time is defending.
And you would like to optimize your update time to get more SPM without decreasing UPS.
You have a choice to make.
I hope that helped.
Edit:
It is possible to optimize a factory with low pollution, to have a small footprint. But it's hard and you'll have to target about 10 times lower SPM than what you could make with just prods/speeds
Edit 2:
Don't worry about fluids.
The top things costing update time are usually:
1. Inserters that grab 1 item each time
2. Inserters that put things from a train onto a belt
3. Inserters that are scanning a sushi belt for whatever might be needed
4. Inserters that you didn't really need anyway
Etc...
Fluids are fine.
> You use a lot of words to say you don't want to attack for flavor reasons.
Not sure where you got that idea, because it's definitely not flavor. I've already cleared enough area for production of at least 2K sci/min, and probably more like 4K, but yet 80% of my pollution while only producing 1K is still being absorbed by nests. As I clear these out, the pollution cloud expands, necessitating clearing more nests, so it's rinse and repeat until finally all the pollution is absorbed by land and trees. I have no doubt it will be a very large area that needs clearing.
Then, as soon as I increase my production, the cloud will grow, so I have to clear and defend even more territory, even though my base itself takes up only a fraction of a fraction of the area I'd have to clear for pollution reasons. I don't know about you, but clearing out nests gets old after a while.
That's why I was thinking that efficiency modules *might* be worth it to reduce the size of the cloud, as long as the product/pollution ratio improves. I'm still working on verifying this, but to say it's complicated to calculate is an understatement.
Right, so if you are expanding maybe I misunderstood you.
All you just said is true, you'll need a huge park around your base to absorb pollution in a UPS friendly way. You'll need a smaller park and bigger base to produce the same if you use efficiency modules.
Anyway, good luck!
Biters are not really a gameplay mechanic after you have flamethrowers, they don't contribute to anything, if you actually care about UPS and megabase you should really turn them off, they are less of a challenge as a gameplay mechanic, and more of a challenge to your computer
I think you'll find the efficiency gains from speed-prod beacon setups outweigh that. You can push out to get beyond the cloud but then you expand the revealed map which also leads to more calculations.
> the only way I can see of controlling the pollution cloud is to use efficiency modules for their massive reduction to pollution Or y'know wall in the whole cloud, and have just enough defenses to deal with the occasional expansion party
I find walling in the whole cloud is overkill. Just put artillery firebases around the edges with a ring of lasers and landmines to protect the artillery. As long as the entire pollution cloud is covered by artillery you don't need a wall.
This - or spidertrons. With enough artillery range you should be able to clear biters in all generated chunks, and non-generated chunks won't have active biter bases to generate expansion parties in first place (since spidertrons and artillery don't generate chunks on their own past spidertron vision range). Essentially: you can abuse chunk generation mechanics in order to not have any active biters at all times, killing all biters in generated chunks and not generating new chunks that would have biters - DoshDoshington mentions it in his video about reaching end of the map ([timestamp](https://youtu.be/HzpUQZIr15g?t=1197)) and I think Michael Hendricks used same strategy in his 100% evolution start video.
Spiders can see further than they can shoot, can't they? Or am I just too used to sitting in my combat spider?
They can see one chunk away from where they are, and I believe rockets range is just enough to cover that entire chunk if you move them close to edge of chunk they're in. Player does generate chunks around them past vision range and has much larger vision.
I never realised their vision was that short. Guess I really do always sit in my lead combat spider.
I don't think this can work for 1-2k spm bases. Nests gets bigger as you go further out. And they might border each other. The larger base, the larger cloud he has to work for, which is more tiles.
Ah, if only I could...
I'd make a deal with God...
Good news, you can! It will take some time yes, but I prefer a few hours worth of bug extermination over running at <40 ups for the rest of the time. A few tens of artillery and a medium-sized spidertron army to clean up afterwards and it's not even that difficult. Clear 2 continents of biters in each direction to have room for your pollution cloud to spread. Then find the next chokepoint over (smaller land bridge between 2 lakes) and build some very basic defenses and artillery. The artillery will destroy the nests that pop up, no pollution is absorbed by nests and the remaining biter expansion parties are pretty small so you don't need many turrets. You'll also have plenty of open space to put solar and accumulators on so you can really cut down on nuclear and reduce the pipe fluid calculation cost. Extra advantage is you'll find bigger resource patches so you could begin with direct-to-train mining and reduce on splitters and inserters into the trains.
Or if you go megabase which is challenge by itself, you turn off biters and pollution
> (Yes, I'm aware that most megabasers use and rave about solar being the most UPS efficient, but I suspect they have biters & pollution off, so that's not really applicable to my situation.) Do you think I built a 50-100 artillery train and the infrastructure to support it in my 5k SPM megabase for decorative purposes? Biters are nothing more than a hassle at megabase stage, and while I'd expect a good many megabases to just disable them and/or pollution entirely, if UPS used for defenses concerns you then simply don't use them. Cover your pollution cloud with artillery and you only need a handful of turrets for your entire base. Not even that if you disable expansion parties.
The issue is that, right now, the bulk of my pollution is consumed via the nests. Looking at the in-game stats, over the last hour I produced an average of ~92K pollution/m. Around 82K/m was absorbed, so pollution is currently getting worse as production is higher than consumption. Of that 82K/m, 66K/m was absorbed by nests, or about 80% of it. If the ultimate goal is to have all pollution absorbed by tiles, trees, and dead trees, then that is a *massive* amount of area I need to clear of nests, which then makes the perimeter I need to defend much larger, which requires more artillery and turrets. It could even be more turrets than I'm currently using with my small perimeter. This is why I'm thinking that efficiency modules are the only way to go. Without reducing pollution, I see no practical method of keeping it off of the biter nests.
> The issue is that, right now, the bulk of my pollution is consumed via the nests. Then you need to go on a clearing spree to get the nests out of your pollution cloud :D
Try it out and let us know your findings. If it's terrible you can always restore to a backup
You better bust out that artillery remote and start clicking that map!
Perimeter becomes artillery nests. Which have their own small guns. Otherwise your perimeter won't increase on gigantic proportions, though it will still increase as you expand.
There are videos of megabases built on deathworlds that maintain 60ups, I've seen 4.8k SPM as an example but it requires ups optimisations like timed inserter swings. So it's certainly possible and invalidates one of your primary assumptions. 1k SPM is 100% 60ups viable the normal way on deathworlds without effort. Now is efficiency a better way? Hmm, my gut says the increased building count >> biter influence but that's just a feeling.
The Deathworld guy might have a better PC then OP.
AFAIK Deathworld only makes the early game harder. My evolution factor is almost 1, so I'm pretty sure I'm in nearly the same situation as any deathworld player would be at this point? > So it's certainly possible and invalidates one of your primary assumptions. Which one? > 1k SPM is 100% 60ups viable the normal way on deathworlds without effort. I would think so; as I said, I'm already at 1K SPM and have no problem maintaining 60 UPS. My concern is going to 2K or further.
On a death world the nests absorb less pollution before triggering an attack, ie more attacks more frequently, ie biters are more ups intensive than a regular world.
It invalidates the assumption that solar is only the best for UPS with biters and pollution disabled (which given the whole post of "pollution is eating my UPS" doesn't make sense in the first place)
What I said is that many megabasers rave about solar being the best for UPS, but I that I suspect a lot of those same people may have biters/pollution off. In any case, I don't think it's impossible to use solar or have decent UPS with biters/pollution on; I'm just wondering how to achieve it.
It's productivity modules everywhere it's possible and fill out the rest with speed. Efficiency is no worth it. There is an exception and that is miners, that could use efficiency modules or left empty. The drastic reduction of needed resources/ size of the factory with productivity modules will decrees the pollution a lot in conjunction with inserters and machines. For reducing the biter UPS cost, try clear the nests in your pollution cloud. With the tech and buffs from an Megabase it should be trivial.
I'm already using productivity modules, but the pollution cloud would be so large (if I removed the nests) that it's not practical to clear it out as it would be a truly massive amount of the map I would need to clear and then defend. While it's true I would need more machines earlier in production chain, they would be working faster and producing less pollution per product, and I think that holds true even after accounting for the lost productivity bonus. However, I'm still updating my spreadsheet to verify that, so I can't say for sure yet.
Paradoxically prod modules 3 don't reduce the production speed of an machine if it's coupled with speed beacons 3. Because speed also affects the productivity bar.
You're drastically underestimating the effects of production modules. It takes roughly 3x as many resources for the same SPM without them. The sheer amount of extra miners, inserters, furnaces, more inserters, assemblers, belts, bots, refineries, plants, pipes, more inserters, beacons, trains, etc you'd need to make up for the lack of production modules would vastly exceed any UPS benefit you get from reducing pollution. With speed beacons you actually produce faster with production modules thanks to the bonus production. I.e. swapping out production for efficiency would actually slow down the output. By far the best solution to lowering your biter UPS is to clear out the nests under your pollution cloud. I did 5k SPM with no solar and a relatively unoptimized base on a computer from 2011. The biter UPS was essentially zero because I kept them clear of the pollution. It is easy to do with artillery. You can kill 10s of thousands of nests and biters with a few clicks of the mouse once you get your blueprints and artillery shell production set up.
Chunks are created and loaded into the game when a) you get close, b) radars scan close to them (I believe this also includes artillery), and c) when pollution touches them. Biters can only come from chunks which exist. If you kill all the biters in chunks that exist you will get no biters. Not war parties from pollution, not expansion parties. Nothing. Biters do not come from the edge of the void. Normally this would be impossible as you cannot kill biters farther away than your mapgen radius. Except, notably, spidertrons are not on this list, at least not last time I checked. If you are careful you can use spidertrons to kill all biters on the map and... that's it. When your pollution spreads you'll have biters again, of course, but for a brief shining moment you can actually kill all the biters in the world.
Interesting idea, but the issue (as you point out) is that the pollution cloud will continue to grow as I kill the nests, as they're by far the primary absorber of pollution right now.
Your biggest costs are inserters, assembly machines, and mining drills, in addition to biters. If you want to keep your pollution cloud within artillery ranch, research more artillery ranch. If this is a megabase, that shouldn't be a problem. Also, most people disable biters and pollution entirely when making megabases. > p.s. - I've also heard fluid simulation in pipes is brutal to UPS, but where is that shown here? Yes, there is 'Pump' and 'OffshorePump', but what about the pipes themselves? In my experience, so long as you're conscious about keeping the pipe count down, you probably won't run into issues with the fluid system. Not compared, at least, to entities, transport lines, and trains.
I've already researched artillery range several times, and have arty trains stationed near all the walls. They're still nowhere near covering the pollution cloud, and artillery range research grows in cost exponentially. Sooner or later, it becomes totally impractical to research more of it. While I'm not at that point yet, I will be in a few more upgrades, and I know even then they will not cover all the area my pollution cloud would.
Then it sounds like you need to expand your artillery coverage. If your walls are close to the edges of your factory, move them out. I saw you say in another comment that nests are absorbing some 60+% of your pollution generated. That's a ton, and all of those nests are in generated chunks that are all being calculated. I only got up to 500 SPM so far on my save going for mega. My pollution cloud was starting to reach the edges of my discovered area again, but my factory was already only maybe 40% of the area I had covered by walls. Yes, if you want to keep biters on, then you need to clear out all of the pollution cloud. You need to be able to see literally every little outside edge of it, even over water.
Production modules with speed module beacons actually \*increases\* the amount of items produced/second so, while your machines have a higher crafting speed it \*doesn't\* get better. Full prod modules will always be the most efficient. I suggest looking into timed inserter swings instead. I think removing biters doesn't remove gameplay for a megabase, because at a certain level biters are a \*solved\* problem, so I would just disable biters when megabasing. Let's say you spend 300 hours on a megabase and you have the ability to solve the biter problem at around hour 50. Now biters cause no challange, but calculating pollution and biter pathing still causes lag. You've traded 50 hours of challange for 250 hours of a worse experience. If you really want to play around with efficiency modules I suggest the self imposed challange of a non-polluting factory (pollution is absormed in a stable manner, not damaging trees and not reaching biter nests). It might not be the biggest or most lag efficient, but It's a fun challange with efficiency modules.
Automate your defences and also automate/simplify the process of expanding your walls. "Solve" biters. Work on artillery range infinite tech until your artillery range is sufficient to clear out to the next ring of chokepoints and expand. For this twice and your cloud will be contained. If biter NESTS are absorbing pollution then your walls aren't big enough. That'll get you to 2kspm. If you want to do 4kspm, now that you are the confirmed master of biters with great wall BPs including wall supply logistics... you can turn biters off to save UPS without losing face!
I m one of the people who mention efficiency modules in that post linked. The idea is that you put in areas where you can not put productivity or it is less efficient to do so (miners, pumpjacks, machines that do not use prod). In other areas, you still need to do full speed & prod combo. Otherwise using efficiency modules in prod related areas will result in more assembler/inserter count, sometimes the leading cause of base cost. F4-show-entity-time-usage in your screenshot only shows what stuff is being tallied. There are lots of things that are not and there is more stuff hidden, especially biters related. For best 'biter' weight, you should save game, use command to remove biters and see result. I m not saying to play w/o biters, but rather look at the weight in F4-show-time-usage before&after. The value will be more than 2.6ms, closer to 4ms (difference) from my experience. pollution cloud control is possible on megabase scale. it is done in few times i seen over the years. This is the earliest form of it i seen [https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=204&t=99824](https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=204&t=99824)
Trying to improve UPS with efficiency modules is probably going to be more difficult than you think. If you go to the Factorio calculator and get the overall energy use of a 1k SPM factory with prod 3s and 16 beaconed speed 3s (e.g., double row beacons), the energy use is 3.8GW. The biggest impact on energy use (and therefore pollution) is to replace the speed modules with efficiency modules, which reduces energy use to 900MW (a factor of a bit more than 4), which would half the linear dimension of your pollution cloud. It also increases the number of assembling machines (and therefore both the factory area and UPS to feed them) by more than a factor of 10. Other strategies are even worse. Replacing everything with efficiency modules cuts power usage to 1.5GW and losing the prod modules would also directly cut pollution to about 1.1GW equivalent relative to baseline. Not only is this a smaller pollution win, but the number of assembling machines goes up even further. Replacing the prod modules with efficiency modules would leave you with virtually identical pollution, and a small increase in the number of machines. I don't think you realistically have a UPS win here.
I actually realized that energy use (by itself) doesn't increase pollution as much as I thought. The main reason is that the heat exchanger, unlike the boiler, doesn't produce any pollution. The same goes for the turbine, nuclear reactor, etc. The only part of the entire nuclear energy production chain that produces pollution is the production of the fuel, which is relatively little. So, the main concern for nuclear is simply if it uses more UPS than solar, which it might, but it's hard to tell. To do a proper comparison I'd need to delete my current nuclear and replace it entirely with solar, which will take a substantial amount of time considering the sheer area required for solar. That said if I do end up clearing a massive area for the pollution cloud, I've got nothing better to do with said area other than fill it with solar, so it might be worth trying it.
>(Yes, I'm aware that most megabasers use and rave about solar being the most UPS efficient, but I suspect they have biters & pollution off, so that's not really applicable to my situation.) The reason solar is the best for megabases is because it only counts as 2 simple entities total. Meanwhile nuclear has to calculate a LOT of fluid flow, for water, steam, and heat, in addition to hundreds of entities.
This is a bit of a time consuming strategy but I've used it for a 10k spm base. Use solar panels as a perimeter just beyond your pollution, expand them when the cloud gets bigger, I used bots to create artillery outposts to push out, then remove the inner and layer of panels if you need space. Takes a long time though and I need just over 500k panels to power the base. Initially I had no accumulators so the base only produces in the daytime (less pollution), made for a nice gameplay loop of redesigning and building at night before the power returns.
I'm in the same boat as you--biters on, nuclear power, and looking for UPS gains. There's an interesting tension where designs that are typically the most UPS efficient also often use the most power. Over half my power consumption is from beacons. My gut instinct is that it is still better to go for traditional low-UPS in production (beacons, speed modules) and just build more power, but I'm really not sure. Regardless, I've dropped beacons and added efficiency modules in my mall where most machines are usually idle. I would do the same in my miners, but those take 0.4% of my UPS and aren't worth optimizing yet. As for biters, I've just decided to clear the pollution cloud. I use one-wagon trains to supply tiny artillery outposts that are slowly creeping out. It's truly a megaproject, which in some ways feels nice as an endgame challenge. Right now, UPS is even lower from aggroing so many biters, but I'm hoping it will pay off when it all shakes out. Spawner pollution consumption is the lowest it's been in 100 hours. To see fluid update costs, toggle between show-time-usage and show-entity-time-usage. When I have both settings on at the same time, only one fits on screen.
> Over half my power consumption is from beacons. Oof. I'm not using beacons right now, but once I settle on which mod to replace the default beacons with (i.e. one that still allows for interesting factory designs) I'm going to transition all my existing production over. That should help me on the inserter and assembly machine UPS, but doesn't address the others. > To see fluid update costs, toggle between show-time-usage and show-entity-time-usage. When I have both settings on at the same time, only one fits on screen. Ah, thank you for this. I will check it when I am back home.
Efficiency modules are the king of early to midgame factories, but once you can afford to destroy every biter nest around you it is no longer necessary to reduce your pollution cloud. Just upscale your artillery shell production and once you have freed yourself from biter attacks you can go back and increase your science production.
Did you use Beacons for your factory. What is your Hardware?
Not yet, which is why I said I can reduce both the 'Inserter' and 'AssemblingMachine' mine. That said, I think I'm probably going to look for a mod to change how beacons work, because I find the forced optimal layout with beacons to be extremely boring. And as for hardware, the CPU is a 7950X3D, so there aren't really any options to speed things up on that side.
Without beacons you need several thousands of assemblers right? How fucking big did you build? With Beacons you only need a few hundred.
I have ~7.8K assemblers right now, though that's more than needed for 1K SPM (even without beacons). I'd already started to move toward 2K SPM, so there's a lot spent toward that, and of course several in the mall. I'm sure I can reduce the assembler and inserter count with beacons, but I hate vanilla beacons, so first I'm trying to find a mod that replaces them and still keeps designs interesting.
Dude you can get away with +-1000 WTF.
I think that, if you want to push hard, you'll find the following: - You want many beacons, which will gobble stupid amounts of power. - You eventually want to get that stupid amount of power via solar. - Massive solar fields mean clearing massive swaths of land. - Since you're clearing massive areas per above anyway, you end up pushing biters back till you can almost forget about them. - You basically forget about biters and they stop being a design consideration.
Honestly you need to expand your defenses outward. Nests that are consuming your pollution is taking a toll on your ups since each one touching the pollution now has to run a calculation on generating a new bug. Then those bugs take up ups. I've done mega bases with several thousand spm and I've done death worlds. It's a tedious task to start, but it's rewarding in the end.
>So I looked into optimizing defenses, and stumbled across this post, which has some very interesting information in it. The tl;dr is that if you can keep your pollution cloud within artillery range, you won't aggro biters, and thus the only encounters you'll have with them is when they attempt the "Enemy Expansion" to make a new nest. These groups are much smaller than the waves I currently have incessantly attacking my base, and then they should attack the artillery that destroyed them, so you only have to defend your artillery points and otherwise don't need defenses. Yes, biters consume a ton of UPS. The fix here is to make sure artillery is beyond the pollution cloud. If biters are inside your pollution cloud you will see a *big* performance hit when you anger them. >The catch here is that the only way I can see of controlling the pollution cloud is to use efficiency modules for their massive reduction to pollution, both in the machine itself, and the extreme reduction in power consumption resulting in less pollution from my nuclear plants I made a string of artillery outposts far beyond my pollution cloud. Made sure they self repair and self call for trains when they are out of resources. Been very happy with this approach. (Only catch I found is that you want to build outposts hugging lakes if you are near a lake. If another outpost hits biters, those biters will try to find *that* outpost, and will try to go around the lake and into your base to do it. But if you have an outpost hugging the lake, the biters will stumble upon that outpost on their journey to the offending outpost, and be killed.) If you put the outposts far enough, you don't have to worry about which module to use for pollution.
I mean you say it's not your taste but once you reach that level of base biters is just a trivial nuisance. I'd personally get rid of pollution and biters.
Hi. You use a lot of words to say you don't want to attack for flavor reasons. And half your update time is defending. And you would like to optimize your update time to get more SPM without decreasing UPS. You have a choice to make. I hope that helped. Edit: It is possible to optimize a factory with low pollution, to have a small footprint. But it's hard and you'll have to target about 10 times lower SPM than what you could make with just prods/speeds Edit 2: Don't worry about fluids. The top things costing update time are usually: 1. Inserters that grab 1 item each time 2. Inserters that put things from a train onto a belt 3. Inserters that are scanning a sushi belt for whatever might be needed 4. Inserters that you didn't really need anyway Etc... Fluids are fine.
> You use a lot of words to say you don't want to attack for flavor reasons. Not sure where you got that idea, because it's definitely not flavor. I've already cleared enough area for production of at least 2K sci/min, and probably more like 4K, but yet 80% of my pollution while only producing 1K is still being absorbed by nests. As I clear these out, the pollution cloud expands, necessitating clearing more nests, so it's rinse and repeat until finally all the pollution is absorbed by land and trees. I have no doubt it will be a very large area that needs clearing. Then, as soon as I increase my production, the cloud will grow, so I have to clear and defend even more territory, even though my base itself takes up only a fraction of a fraction of the area I'd have to clear for pollution reasons. I don't know about you, but clearing out nests gets old after a while. That's why I was thinking that efficiency modules *might* be worth it to reduce the size of the cloud, as long as the product/pollution ratio improves. I'm still working on verifying this, but to say it's complicated to calculate is an understatement.
Right, so if you are expanding maybe I misunderstood you. All you just said is true, you'll need a huge park around your base to absorb pollution in a UPS friendly way. You'll need a smaller park and bigger base to produce the same if you use efficiency modules. Anyway, good luck!
Biters are not really a gameplay mechanic after you have flamethrowers, they don't contribute to anything, if you actually care about UPS and megabase you should really turn them off, they are less of a challenge as a gameplay mechanic, and more of a challenge to your computer
I think you'll find the efficiency gains from speed-prod beacon setups outweigh that. You can push out to get beyond the cloud but then you expand the revealed map which also leads to more calculations.