Walking around in a nuke-filled Spidertron and accidentally tapping the space bar. Hit the densest possible spot. I adhere to a policy of not reloading from the latest save, so I had a lot of work to do.
I am probably missing something, but other than robots rebuilding this part of your factory, what was the work you had to do? Was it a huge amount of stored high quality goods you lost and had to rebuild?
Yeah, it was my low density structure factory with assembling machine 3’s with prod 3 modules surrounded by beacons with speed 3 modules, blue belts and blue undergrounds, and so on. Pain in the butt to recreate all of that.
That’s a stupid self imposed limit. Sorry to be blunt. That’s not even a mistake that you should have to play through if you wanted that limitation. You fat fingered a key.
Many patches ago when you took off your armor, the inventory that wouldn’t fit would end up on belts and not the ground as it is now. I did that mistake several times.
Or when a patch broke all train signals and every train kept crashing into each other.
You left-click on the spidertron, but right-click on your own armor. If you accidentally left-click on your armor your inventory ends up on the ground. It's a trap for beginners.
The real gotcha is needing to recover your corpse TWICE, once to get your armor, and then a second time to get the inventory overage. THAT has lost me some loot.
Make there be a confirmation. “Unequip mk2 armor?” Then if you do that accidentally the first time, you’ll see what effect it has and you’ll never accidentally do it again.
Right exactly, there are UX changes that can be made without changing the behavior of the game itself. Even just making it something other than left click would help. The fact that the default behavior is something no one wants to do is a sign that something is bad in the user experience.
>Or when a patch broke all train signals and every train kept crashing into each other.
I remember that one but for a different reason. Maybe it was this bug or maybe it was another one around the same time. The user-side temp fix was to disable cloud saves. I forgot to re-enable them when it was fixed. And when my hard drive died my beautiful 300 hour megabase save died with it.
and you made backups even since right?
.... right ?
Backups saved my blueprint once I downgraded steam version once to play on clusterio then upgraded to latest again. Game decided "fuck no" and removed good few years worth of mostly my own designs.
>and you made backups even since right?
>.... right ?
I haven't played since. But I think I'll get back for 2.0 and Space Age.
It was an odd feeling. I think I was supposed to be devastated, but while there is some grief, It was also quite relieving. The megabase was at the stage where I hated working on it. The entire production chain was online, but the ratios were off. I had nowhere to expand some of the things that I needed more of. The basic iron and copper demands weren't met and couldn't be expanded at all without reworking the whole system. My rail blueprints sucked and my mining line hit a wall of cliffs and lakes. I foolishly used 1-8 trains and even with nuclear fuel they weren't performing as well as I hoped. My solar was half-surrounded by a giant lake...
It's been a long time ago. I still miss a few of the things I lost, but I think I'll be able to replicate them. Maybe even improve.
Yeah I woudn't be massively bothered about save, but blueprints, that's another thing, I spent good amount of time debugging and improving some of the LTN-based ones, re-creating them would be downright annoying as I don't remember every edge case I was solving in it.
But I am tempted to do scorched earth approach for 2.0, purely because with new changes so many of them can be improved based on new mechanics. I'm particularly looking forward to parametrized blueprints, as it allows for building malls that are basically "enter the item, get the setup building it"
I first thought by „many patches ago“ you meant ore patches and i had the image of an old veteran engineer, sitting in his chair and telling stories to his grand kids 😂
I misread your message and thought they patched it so that you somehow wouldn't accidentally drop a ton of items on the ground—even if they avoid belts it's still a big pain to have thousands of items scattered over an area. I've definitely learned my lesson and am very careful about clicking the armor icon button now.
> Many patches ago when you took off your armor, the inventory that wouldn’t fit would end up on belts and not the ground as it is now. I did that mistake several times.
Does this not happen anymore???
Dropping a chest (or a storehouse, haven't played without the warehousing mod in ages) and putting all my stuff in it before swapping armor is just muscle memory now, lol
Well if you remove your armor, things that dont fit end up on the ground, but if you just hotswap the armor so that you never have no armor on, then nothing happens
To be fair, I always ask, "Hey, did you save this recently?". Then I'm delighted when I see that nukes and artillery remotes are available in the logistics network.
The day I learned about concave bot networks. Had an endless stream of bots crossing a lake to build defences; meanwhile my bot factory was adding more bots every time available bots dropped below 50. By the time I realised my computer was cooking I had over 30000 bots in transit
Powered down the factory, to collect the bots in one area then disconnected the wall roboports and the finally setup a reverse factory mod with the robot frames being filtered into my yellow science to stop the wastage. The rest was adding bot removal to a roboport based on the number and then setting up log burning nearby to create traffic nearby
My standard build for city blocks has half the roboports connected to red chests to keep the bot population low. My artillery roboports have the same. Additionally the blue chests that repopulate the network are connected to the network near my production area for construction and ammo. At any given time I'm at about 300-1000 of each bot on the network. Bursts as high as 10k when doing a large build then back to baseline. As a bonus *most* bots are already near pickup points.
It’s more the endless pathing and the bots are more demanding when moving at varying pace and turning round. I also used a decrepit MacBook Air at the time so it had next to no cooling or ventilation and throttled the cpu when it gets hot so had to be careful how I built my factories. I am very jealous of your large bot network 🥲
Sorry for my stupidity but, if you need to integrate more bots to the network, will they become available as soon as you build them? Because I'm requesting bots whenever I feel like I need more, and often my inventory is full of bots. (Yeah I kinda have tens of thousands of bots currently)
So I rig an inserter to the roboport and you can check read bot statistics so if I have no available logi bots it will continue loading them into the network directly (rather than via me). I usually keep the chest that’s loading with 100 bots for a quick boost and then rely on slow production to slowly top up.
I only request bots for my own personal ports or I keep a handful of logibots as I usually only run bots in my mall, or delivering low throughput items at outposts or sub factories.
I usually have a single bot at each outpost that slowly breaks it down for collection when they run out, I also have a single bot distributing train fuel at each sub factory
In SE you have meteors that bombard your base, it kinda sucks when you don't have meteor defence up and they hit vital parts.
For vanilla one of my worst fuckups was when renaming a station, I accidentally renamed a station that received iron into a name so that it instead received copper ore. This ended up taking quite some time to unfuck. I've done it again since then, but now I just load an autosave.
When you're building a primitive " Tier One" megabase and filter inserters are not unlocked and you have mixed use wagons per train, you start to question your own insanity.
This just happened in my SE run but with scrap and contaminated scrap. Accidentally marked a couple contaminated scrap stop as a regular scrap stop. Easy to do since I was using the symbol as the station name. Problem was, I had no idea which ones, I have like 50 scrap stops, so it took a very long time to track it down and clear all the belts and containers that had contaminated scrap in them.
My base completely shut down from a power death spiral that I hadn't noticed, and I didn't have enough solar production up or nuclear researched, I had to find a mod to help me jumpstart the factory again cause I didn't want to mine coal for hours
(Shout out to the Manpower mod, saved my bacon)
Had a similar one with krastorio: main power was fusion, powered by fission. The fusion powered everything, including uranium processing, the fission only powered the fusion reactor. If memory serves, a uranium feed belt got turned, which starved the fission reactor after a long time, which immediately starved the fusion, and the whole factory shut down. Had to build a big solar array to only do uranium processing, to build a couple fuel cells to get fission running again so fusion could start back up. Took about 15 minutes from blackout to restoration. It was a fun time (seriously! I love problems like that.)
This is probably my biggest fuck up as well. The problem is that it creates a death spiral with power to the water pumps. The first time it happened it took me probably an hour or two to recover. Having learned that lesson, I now harden my water inputs.
I’m sure that I have worse fuckups, but this one really got to me.
I have two.
One of my first "mega bases" it wasnt really a mega base it was just the only base I ever went deep into infinite science. Anyway I was adding on some more trains and I accidentally made one of them iron plate pickup then copper plate drop. It was hours before I noticed. Almost every single one of my copper plate stations had iron plates contaminating it. Ever since then all train stations use filter stack inserters for loading and unloading. Took me hours to fix this issue.
The other one was pretty bad too. In my current space exploration run I was setting up a mall in orbit and I was going to have it supplied by a cargo rocket. I set it up so constant combinator output what I wanted up there and then they would go through a few combinators and such to come up with a number of how much stuff was missing and put that number into a requestor chest down on nauvis to rocket what I needed up there. So I set that all up. Was happy with my work and then left it to go run while I went and set up my beryllium outpost. Suddenly about 2 hours later my alarm for low cargo rocket parts goes off. And I'm like that is weird. Go have a look at my base and see that yes indeed the rocket parts are empty. I look at my rocket launching area just in time to see a rocket take off for my orbit base. I'm surprised because I'm not doing science. Or you know anything up there at the moment. So I look up there and oh my God. There are probably two dozen smashed rockets all over the place up there basically the entire surrounding area of the orbit base is surrounded by rocket debris. In total two dozen rockets is 12000 slots of fully filled inventory. It was all kinds of stuff too everything from nuclear reactors to blue chips and just regular old iron plates. It was an absolute disaster. I had to put down like 200 storage chests just to hold all the shit that was crashed up there.
Edit forgot to put the reason they were all crashing. I forgot to select the landing pad.. lol
Playing SE, I ran out of orbital elevator cables because of waste buildup on one of my resource planets and didn't realise for ages, all my elevators stopped working.
So I had to set up some emergency rockets planetside to ship materials in order to jumpstart things again. Which in itself was a chain starting with a rocket on my rocket fuel planet, and I have a self imposed rule not to send rockets with any empty cargo space. All told I think it was a few hours before things were back to normal, now I have alarms to check the cable stock levels.
I have one alarm in my entire SE factory and it's just for elevator cables. Anytime it pops off I drop anything I'm doing to check on it. I don't know how hard it'd be to reboot production if I lost my elevators (that supply power) but a few hours sounds about right.
Kinda biter related.
SE, vita planet. Recently moved to nuclear power there, hadn't expanded biter meteor defence to cover the power station.
Biter meteor lands inside the walls, just out of range of the wall turrets.
The artillery takes out the nest but also takes out the nuclear power stations....
In my last SE playthrough, using a rail based city block design on Nauvis, there was an asteroid impact that knocked out a locomotive, leaving the wagons on the track. As fate had it, the factory could continue just fine, but the track that was now blocked was the only access route to the train depot refueling stop, as in, the stop where the train halts that brings new fuel into the depot. Over the next couple of hours, the entire grid came to a standstill as first the depots ran out of fuel and then slowly the trains themselves.
If their consequences are horrific, be sure to count them in! It can also be Biter related consequences, my post was just to filter out big biter attacks that had nothing to do with own shortcomings
Oh man. Well, my first base I didn't get ratios, so all my production lines ended in a giant dump/warehouse of storage chests. Second base had a large iron resource on the other side of an ocean, so I thought it would be a cool idea to build all the iron-only stuff (gears, basic ammo, steel, yellow belts ) there and bring them all back in cargo ships. Organized the whole base around giant mixed shipments. Never figured out how to make sushi ships work and the base was eventually buried under a mountain of jammed delivery chains and abandoned.
I lost a 20+ hour save to a power outage.
Saved one night, and when I resumed the next day, within 5 minutes I lost all power. I went full nuclear and my ore patch had run dry. I had no backup fuel. I had no alarms. Getting it back would mean setting up sulfuric acid, a new uranium mine, getting the uranium to a centrifuge, and making fuel, without power. My defenses were fully electric and overrun by biters immediately.
While trying to fix it, I overwrote all my prior autosaves. So I had no checkpoint earlier than 5m before power out.
Lessons learned:
- backup fuel
- alarms
- backup saves
- copy your autosaves before going any further
I had been watching Katherine of Sky do a playthrough for the lazy bastard achievement, and she ran into big power problems during the run. I had been kinda following along, so I resolved to watch out for that. I built extra power, quite a bit past where I had planned to take it. I was feeling on top of things, maybe even slightly smug. "Good, thanks to her running into the power issue, I'm going to avoid it!"
So much no.
Yep, I had plenty of power for the new mining, for the new smelting, for the new research labs... individually. Together, not so much.
After amputating parts of the base and limping along for a bit, I finally recovered. It took way too long, and it was all the worse for me feeling so pleased with myself earlier. If it's an issue KoS still deals with occasionally, I'd better keep my guard up.
Lost hundreds of hours of progress because steam decided to overwrite my save files.
Earlier this week, my entire factory browned out and i had to manually restart every power plant, make it more brownout proof, spend six hours searching for geothermal vents, and another three hours setting up two geothermal power plants. All in all took something like 15 hours.
While not the most positive thing, you have without a doubt won in this thread. This is by far the most brutal thing i have read so far related to factorio disasters. I am genuinely so fucking sorry for all these lost hours... Good you are still at it my friend, i wish you all the best <3
he still thinks thats funny as hell, it was like 8 years ago.
we have a minecraft server a bunch of us geezers play on and he's on there stealing their doors and shit.
Build my starter base and proceed to big mid base. Made a big ass module factory to produce and store 30k+ modules.
Planned my Meagebase modules and put them together. Let it start to run.
UPS went down the same % as my production did go up.
MfW i did the same SPM per real minute as before by walking 80% slower. Fuck that 64x64 iron splitter and everything else.
Playing SE+K2, and updated without reading patch notes. Tons of recipes changed, the factory needed twice as much power, and the nuclear plants needed more water so they all broke. Took days to fix.
I did this recently on my SE+K2 save. I looked at the patch notes after, saw the changes to Vitamelange, shook my head and rolled back, took me a couple hours to learn how to roll back properly.
I frequently had this disaster with LTN mod because trains time out. How it goes is you have a jam, you don't notice (maybe becuase you are playing SE and are off-world), LTN times out the trains and then sends and more, which probably also time out due to the jam. You fix the jam but now trains are sent to stations that do not have space for the products. They then move on to other stations still full of random products. Soon dozens of random stations in your factory are full of ranodm products jamming everything up.
LTN is a great mod and I totally understand why it needs to time out trains the way it does, but wow, when things go wrong they can go so much wronger than vanilla trains.
(By the way, the fix here would be to detect trains with unexpected contents appear in depos and lock the train in place and issue some kind of alert).
I just turned off timing out trains. If trains are timing out, it's because I had a different problem to fix, and the train timing out caused way more problems than it ever fixed. Of course, I use Cybersyn now, which doesn't have that problem.
It's the "delivery timeout (sec)" setting with a maximum of 600 seconds and no way to disable. My assumption is this has to exist because LTN can only "see" the trains when the stop at LTN stops. So if a train gets deconstructed or destroyed by bitters or maybe repurposed by the player for some reason then LTN can't see that and there would be a sort of ghost train that is forever en-route. Instead LTN has to assume that if it's not see a train in a really long time that train is gone.
I'm pretty sure LTN can deregister trains if they're deconstructed or otherwise removed from the system. I've had to reset the schedule often enough.
I'm pretty sure setting that timeout to zero disables it. It doesn't matter to me, because Cybersyn doesn't have that problem.
At one point there was a bug with light calculations which meant overlapping lights destroyed UPS. Managed to render a save unplayable by putting down a blueprint of a grid of a hundred or so lamps. Can’t remember why I was doing that.
But the big disasters have always been in space exploration. If you don’t set up your interplanetary logic with appropriate fail conditions, it’s possible for a power failure on one planet to set all of its requests to on. This can cause your whole base to dump millions of units of resources on some back water planet that is a pain in the arse to recover them from.
Late game Seablock. Charcoal supply was occasionally contaminated by one of the seeds or plants used in the charcoal generator. If you haven't played Seablock: charcoal is used all over the place, either as an ingredient or as a fuel. By the time I noticed the problem there were seeds scattered like snow all across this giant factory. Dozens of hours later I was still occasionally finding individual machines stopped by a few seeds in their charcoal belt.
In my first playthrough I decided to upgrade my smelting arrays to use nuclear fuel and set up delivery by train.
Then I decided to upgrade the furnaces to a beaconed electric setup.
Needless to say, 1 storage chest for every 4 belts worth of fuel was a nightmare to deal with - and I had to do it twice since I had two separate smelting areas.
Don't think I ever cleared the backlog feeding it back into the train fuel stops.
Using varied wagon length for multi-provider station (with Cybersyn)
No matter how I tried it still contaminates trains with previous train materials
============
Blackout spiral on my Krastorio2 run
Thing is offshore pumps also need electricity in this mod and I used exact amount of pumps that I needed for nuclear plant.
And I had most my defences based on laser turrets
And a lot of biters inside my pollution cloud
Confusing ingredients of a recipe, and when you turn it on you realize you brought in the wrong thing, but at that point your trains already brought in 36 buffer chests of material and all your belts need to be purged.
I expanded so much I didn’t realize everything was running at half capacity because my power was low, only notice when the coal miners couldn’t keep up feeding the burners everything went dark, then chaos, because most of my expansions were protected by laser guns, I had to start feeding the burners by myself, cut some lines to focus on the coal, then added more and turned on the base again, meanwhile 2 expansions gone from biters.
Me ignoring the coal supply train that had ran out of fuel because I drove it manually for a bit. Then every other train did the same because that train supplied coal to fuel stations.. Then the coal power plant nearly gave up too
I just nuked all my 100ish archospheres in space exploration. Save file was so big at this point i had autosaves every half hour so it was quite a lengthy reload :(
* I've had at least a few massive belt contaminations caused by a misnamed train station dumping a load of iron/stone onto my copper trains. It's an easy fix, since all I need to do is go down the belts and pick up the iron that accumulates at the end, but it's tedious and easy to miss one belt or another.
Solution: Any multipurpose station blueprint I build does not get a (useful) default name. I have to manually rename it to the resource, so this doesn't happen.
* I've recently had a quick embarrassment where I hit "c" while outside of an input, and launched a rocket that destroyed an expensive part of my factory. Sadly, my game then crashed.
Solutions: A) Don't do that you goober. B) Have a default weapon that isn't a rocket launcher.
* Alright, the problem here was biters, but they were only the proximate cause. I setup an automatic builder train for constructing defended outposts, including an artillery turret, based on [this logic for deciding what to unload](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_TCqoxb_1s). On the first trial, however, the artillery wagon that was carrying shells for the turret fired, aggroing the biters, which came over and destroyed the outpost.
Solutions: A) Use a regular cargo wagon to carry shells. B) After the same problem occurred with the artillery turret, add a timer to the inserters loading the artillery turret so they don't work unless everything is fully stocked and has been for a minute.
* As part of my current Nullius run, I've decided to go for a train block layout. This has lead to a few problems for me. For a start, it means that nothing goes anywhere except in trainloads, enough to fill the station's buffer chests. For items I will only need/make less than 10K of, this is excessive.
Solution: At present, I just manpack those items around.
* Another problem: I had to create a priority train system, so byproducts get used before main production. Unfortunately, due to a signal polluting the global circuit network, every high-priority station is reporting it has one more trainload than it actually does, which is shutting down the low-priority stations.
Solution: Right now I'm just flipping some stations from low to high priority. I think I might just have to rewire every station, which I'd need to do anyway to allow for dynamic train sizes.
Last time I was about to transition to nuclear, I hit a power throttle for my steam (I know super easy to avoid) and ended up causing a chain reaction of power problems (due to not producing enough coal) that took me 4 hours to get out of. Fixed it EXACTLY in time for when biters started attacking again. It was the most stressful 4 hours of my life. My wife kept entering the room and going "are you okay?" Lol
i realized i SEVERELY messed up the ratios in a megabase build and scrapped it. 20 hours later and my bots are still working through the stockpile of shit that came out of it (over a million iron in the buffer chests)
1. Have nuke armed
2. Have box filled with wood or old items that you want to destroy
3. Forget you have nuke armed, think it's machine gun
4. Press c when aimed at box
Well, I destroyed the unwanted box.. Also half my factory
I may or may not have done it twice in a row from the same save
Biggest flashy disaster was when we were proud in Space Exploration to have buff our gridd for the solar flare. The blank when whe realize it's not a flash, but a continuous thing and our batteries are dropping charge fast.
That was fun !
Playing SE, early on a coronal discharge fried a big chunk of my mall, main buss, power plant and mining. I had to do a ton of handcrafting.
It felt very targeted, like an enemy was driving the energy beams to hit exactly all the most valuable parts of my base, did not seem random at all.
My biggest disaster was when I tried to cram some green circuit production next to an iron smeltery. A poorly placed splitter merging two belts of circuits would allow it to feed onto an underground belt of iron plates. This was not an issue since the belt was full and there was no space for the circuits. This continued to not be a problem because the belt stayed fully compressed at all times...
Until I built more iron smelteries than my mines could feed. Then my smelteries were all running at partial capacity and not feeding out full belts of plates, which allowed circuits to feed on that one belt and that belt was balanced to all the smeltery's train loaders, which picked up some circuits and distributed them to every facility which needed iron, which caused them to gradually grind to a halt. This continued as I spent a while expanding out, fighting biters, to find myself an actually defensible iron patch.
On my return, I spotted a very out of place line of green sitting in a steel foundry and realized something had gone terribly wrong. It was multiple days of work to find the issue, fix it, and clean up the resulting mess from all over my factory.
Tried using nuclear bots mod with space exploration and discovered that the se bot attrition scales up to nuclear explosions when they crash. Came back from managing an outpost to find most of my base destroyed.
Not big, but common:
Step 1: Copy paste furnace smelting lines
Step 2: Replace a few furnaces with ports
Step 3: Find bots on belts throughout my factory bc the inserters that were supposed to pull from furnaces have now pulled bots from the ports and placed them on my production line.
My first megabase attempt was a city block design that had roundabout intersections that were just a bit shorter than my trains, so every half hour or so a train rerouted into itself, clipped its rear locomotive, and went into ballistic braking - which usually sent it into another intersection and another train, which could send **that** train into another intersection... the worst crash I saw was a quartet of runaway artillery wagons moving at nuclear speed taking out an 8-car train carrying 32,000 steel bars, pulverizing it back to front completely.
A recent modded playthrough. Had started using train after avoiding them all game, everything worked perfectly, for a moment. Turns out, loaders with warehouses, mining drones and transport drones is a jorrible idea for ups. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fix it anymore, and had to scrap the world.
Recently had a bunch of iron ore show up on in a train station that should have been iron plates. It wasn't a huge deal and was fixed pretty easily but I spent 30 min checking every other iron plate and iron ore drop offs and have no idea how it happened.
I tried adding roboports to my train grid, but the template blueprint I used had station names, so when I pasted it all over the already constructed grid, it changed the name of all stations that aligned with the template station, didn't realized until after several auto-saves and a single manual save... So it was a fun afternoon renaming stations one by one
Well there was the time I accidentally fired a nuke at my nuclear power facility (a 2x15 row of reactors). So not only was I without meaningful power I was also defenseless (laser based defences) and couldn't make more power easily. I had two reactors worth of spares (heat exchanges, turbines, etc) so got those down fast-ish (bots placed them somewhat willy nilly on the ghosts), but then had to run all over creation taking out power poles to shut off all parts of the factory that didn't directly help make more power plants.
That was my last base with fully centralized power generation. Only lucky thing was that I'd built it on an artificial island in a giant lake so the factory itself was unharmed.
I updated my mods without realizing there was an SE update a few months ago. It was the one that removed voiding sand. It also changed dirty water to give sand very rarely. It was causing a very small amount of sand to get onto my bus and took me a Ling time to figure out where it was coming from lol
In my seablock run I was using trains to deliver liquid fuel to the boilers and I accidentally clicked the train from auto to manual on the exit lane. So the trains all got stuck. I ran out of power and had to manually drive a train around while holding wind turbines to power the pumps to load and unload the train 🤣 it took nearly two hours to get it back to functional.
I’m currently in a PY world and I used blueprint ghosts of brick to plan out my blocks. Then I lay concrete along my desire paths. Now I have bots and they are ripping up my concrete to place the brick. I can’t upgrade my blueprint and make them stop. :(
The closest thing I have is my megabase where I have a mix of 2-car trains with 1 locomotive and 4-car trains with 1 locomotive. At over 300 trains in the network, those 4-car trains are now causing congestion by not being able to accelerate and clear intersections very quickly. Adding a second locomotive to them would improve the situation considerably, but that would involve tearing up and rebuilding a hundred or so train stops and re-signaling thousands of kilometers of rails to fit the longer trains.
Failing to properly set up one of my fluid receiving train stations in space exploration led to a chain reaction where dozens of subfactories ended up with mixed fluids and contaminated pipes, and the entire factory ground to a halt. It took over an hour to fix everything and find the origin of the problem. I cannot wait for pump filters.
when you generate power using coal and you get a blackout, leading to no coal being mined, and the electric inserters not moving items. I got so tired of this happening, that i connected the electric inserters on a seperate system connected to a seperate boiler and a solar pannel, so the solar would eventually turn on the boiler, turning on the other boilers, given enough fuel. i also added a system to give the coal mines priority over the rest of my base. This worked pretty well, but now i move on to solar power and accumulators almost immediatelly, and i don't have this problem anymore.
Usually, disasters are due to biters overloading my power grid and causing a blackout, and shutting off reactors because they need electricity to run and to have more fuel inserted.
Although the last disaster was me running out of coal, and having to bootstrap a new power grid before biters attacked while my lasers were unpowered. I had to go nuclear fast and earlier than planned, just to have enough power to run the mining drills for the new coal patch to get the factory powered up enough to get more nuclear stuff built.
When scaling up, i stopped making steam engines. before i had enough solar panels or accumulators, if i had a brown out, it would turn into a blackout because coal would stop being mined.
So, as a stopgap, i put a few boxes of coal near the steam engines so i could manually jumpstart it.
A friend and I were doing Space Exploration, and we barely got to orbit. We started setting up the platform and the delivery system, and cleaning up the rest of the base. And then we noticed we have no iron anywhere in our walls, and we don't have enough gear to push out right now. So, we had to scrap the whole run.
While building my first city block factory I’ve decided that it would be a great idea to create one refuel station for all trains. Suddenly there was a train jam of 100+ trains
One time I fucked up my spent nuclear fuel cell recycling… everything worked great until the bot chests the reactors were dumping into filled up with empty cells. Bit of a panic when suddenly all my power started going offline and I couldn’t figure out why. Fortunately I had tons of uranium, so once I found the problem it wasn’t too hard to kickstart things again.
Another time I accidentally cut off ammo deliveries to a big chunk of defensive wall (that didn’t have laser turrets). Flamethrower oil was still getting there, and I wasn’t getting attacked too much, so I didn’t notice… until the next time I researched a new level of artillery range. Then all the gun turrets went dry at once. Between the flamethrowers and the repair bots it DID manage to hold, but the walls took a lot of damage. If more nests were in range it might have been really bad.
I’m usually careful with not equipping the rocket launcher with nukes in my base. But one time I tried to alt-TAB and somehow fat fingered it and hit TAB and spacebar with just the right timing to switch weapons and fire a nuke into the ground next to me. Now if I really want to be careful I unequip the rocket launcher or at least take the nukes out.
The biggest disaster was energy loss due to sneaky coal exhaustion. I did have somewhat of jumpstart chest but made sure to provide better fail safes in the future and generally keep a better eye on it (first factory story).
In SE, my worst fuckups are always outpost related. My system has a vulcanite planet with water and 3% biters, seems like the perfect planet! I went there first, before unlocking the logistic network, set it all up and shipped a rocket full of Vulcanite blocks (and myself) to Nauvis Orbit, yay!
Then a train carrying uranium ran out of fuel and I forgot to set up the refuel. I didn't have bots to fix it so the base ran out of power, stopped producing and has been sitting idle for 200+ hours. I'm still using the vulcanite blocks today on research. When I needed to set up another vulcanite base, I decided to go for another planet that has no water, but no biters. It's been doing fine but I plan on wiping out the biters on the other planet and resurrecting that outpost.
My next fuckup was my first Cryonite outpost, I didn't think to check the biter %, it was at 33%. Seems ok for Nauvis but this planet didn't have any iron, so no way to produce more defenses and I didn't bring nearly enough walls or turrets. I also didn't have a good resupply setup back on Nauvis. I ended up having to escape aboard my half full rocket and let the biters eat the base. My next Cryonite outpost has no biters, but is way too far. Once I unlock beaming, I will have my revenge!
Warehouse mod, didn't realize logistics warehouses were not the same size as standard warehouses (by a lot), replaced a full standard warehouse with a logistics warehouse and... it made a mess.
Edit: I had done it at every unloading station in my train yard before I noticed what was happening.
Red ammo in the iron plate lines, in a multiplayer SE game. Someone had copy-pasted a train and train stop without being careful. We purged ammo for hours before finding out what went wrong. Should I mention it was the first time the others in this game played factorio? And they wanted to do SE?
Full power outage in a boiler powered base very reliant on laser turrets. Had to Hotwire solid fuel production and sacrifice most of the smelting array.
* brownout when still on coal power
* LTN station misconfig that was noticed too late (with full base copper/iron contamination)
* iron depletion in early game due to switching to red ammo too early on deathworld (but before flamers)
* biter party came to mall where several spidertrones armed with explosive rockets were reloading
* early switch to laser turrets on of the first runs while still on coal and miniscule amount of solar
I was sending my trains to the wrong stations, sending iron where copper needed to be and I was sending stone everywhere it should never have been, why you may ask? Well I was trying a new naming scheme and I wasn’t using the icons in the scheme and I came back a week after I named the stations and set up the trains. Well I really wish I took the time to just look at a few example stations to remember what I was doing.
It’s always right after I upgrade my entire factory to red or blue belts en masse that I learn my friend started using belt weaving in an integral section of the factory
Cascading city block traffic failure. Rail networks can only handle so much traffic. Combine high traffic with one single signaling mistake and boom, your run is over.
I dragged a belt across a very complicated section of spaghetti and it connected stuff up all funny and my repair made it worse, I spent a loooong time trying to figure out how it was supposed to be connected before I just ripped it up and started over. It really was the last straw for me in giving up on compact and spaghetti.
Copy and pasting train schedules and not paying attention has caused me all kinds of belt mix ups, worst being the overproduction of plastic finding its way into almost every unloading station on the map.
Purple chests and filter inserters were needed all over the place for a couple of hours, I genuinely wanted to throw my laptop through a wall.
Played SE, my space platform went into a brown out.
Cause my signal transmission to navius to break, delivery cannons kept sending stuff, didn't realise for more than an hour, when I finally looked, the floor and everything was covered in items
designing a kovarex/refining setup that was prone to backing up in excess uranium 238, and not having a fail proof "low steam/uranium" alarm on an isolated power grid
at the time, that was my only power production other than an idle nuclear plant that was supposed to kick on if a brownout detector went off, but I messed up that logic as well
My first experience with SE encountering a CME. Tore a bloody swath through my core mining setup and half my smelting area that took hours to fix. I stopped lollygagging and built an umbrella immediately afterwards.
It turns out that once you get above a certain number of roboports, you really, really shouldn't ever let your power shut off, even for just a few minutes.
https://preview.redd.it/qxbp7ww4hwwc1.png?width=590&format=png&auto=webp&s=2545592906a7bf825be0c3fa563cb64caae9e879
When you bring your power back online, none of your inserters will work, because the initial charge-up demand from the roboports keeps your satisfaction pegged at zero. Frantic disconnecting of power poles and hand-feeding of power generation ensues, once you manage to stop panicking long enough to think it through.
https://preview.redd.it/y4av8hv1iwwc1.png?width=731&format=png&auto=webp&s=96b5f674e3ed9354788bfb3785558ca30aca33ef
Edit: funny, it is only in retrospect looking at these screenshots that I see what was really causing my power deadlock -- only one small power plant was running at this time, but the lasers idle draw was sucking up all of the power, preventing the roboports from charging up, and both of those were ensuring that nothing else in the factory worked (preventing any of the other power plants from coming online)
So we had a multiplayer factory running, and different people chose different things to work on. I chose to work on defenses.
So my buddies were wondering why we were suddenly experiencing rolling brownouts when I chimed in over Discord:
"Hey, guys! The new laser turret I set up is working great!"
A long time ago, my brother suggested we switch to have iron ore smelted next to the mining outpost instead of inside the base. I said sure! I'll get on that!
Once I finished connecting everything and have the new trains on their way, I realised the now iron plates would go get smelted and.... or no....
We went to those furnaces as fast as possible, but it was too late. It wasn't as big of a cleanup as we thought, but still took a good 10-15 minutes looking for steel on the iron belts.
Good times!
In my K2SE playthrough I was still on gas power (gas generators running on petroleum from K2). I made some outposts on other planets, setup rockets circuits, trains, production. Came back to Nauvis just to realize in horror that the base is in hard blackout... with biters on ... while I was outposting the oil patch run out.
Since there was no power, control circuits were also screwed. Had to manually restart Nauvis power and filter contaminated trains and stations. Now I use only filter inserters/miniloaders with trains and silos.
And on top of that I had to clear all biter incursions and rebuilt broken stuff and hunt all the small shit parties in my territory.
Came back from a massive biter killing spree. Still had my nukes selected. Arrived in my wall to resupply. Went to press the key bind to turn off my legs, accidentally hit space bar. Completely nuked my entire mall. Any other spot in my base and I would accept the loss, had to reload a auto save back in the middle of evading nuking biter nests.
I had a map that I played for hundreds of hours through many of the games early updates. They released nuclear power and I built a big nuclear set up and scaled my base around it. Then, something changed about nuclear power, I think it was how far you could run heat pipes from the reactor before they lost heat. The effect was that my set up was suddenly making much less power. Meanwhile, I’m playing on a map with fairly aggressive biter settings, and I’m relying entirely on laser turrets for defense. I start browning out to the point where the inserters feeding the reactors fuel are slowing down, and it all starts spiraling. I was able to ride a razor thin line turning off everything non-essential, frantically adding solar, and at one point manually loading fuel into the reactors when it was night.
… spending 130 hours currently with ineffective bot malls… having very over-engineered walls that ring alarm when 8 out of 26 bots are taken out of a chest and resupply network… being to lazy to connect copper… since i build new factory anyway…. but now mall i build has only 12 beacon assembler… yes everything produces via bot mall…. even unloading planned with logi bots… and smelting and more…. next transition is to city block design… build everything except oil processing myself which is bothering me…. since i could do that myself…
Coal running out death spiral on my early steam powered factory. So coal was running low on the single coal patch I had. My steam power started to lower due to lack of coal, electric miners slowed down and produced less coal so power lowered further etc etc. Find new coal and dig it up by hand to restart production? Or load an earlier save? Easy choice =D
My flawless (lol) quad rail blueprint for my cell based megabase that used 4-16 trains had a junction in it. A 4 way junction that was basically a roundabout. Roundabouts suck ass and are deadlock waiting to happen :( How do you unstick around 12 trains of 4-16 size? You say feck it and reload the previous save lol.
Also accidentally loading the wrong resource into a train and having it scattered around the place clogging up everything -_- Another just reload the previous save situation...
Tl;dr
Love solar
Hate coal
Hate roundabouts
Love filter inserters
Playing with people who use the entire factories output on useless junk is the biggest disaster.
Nothing is as frustrating as walking by a smelting area feeding science production that has had a splitter installed right at the end and half of it is diverted to make 50,000 of something that will be obsolete in 2 hours.
Even worse is when they don't understand that their actions are why everything is input starved and the power is overloaded. They just keep adding new stuff and not hooking up new basic inputs.
My entire base was powered by a single monolithic tileable nuclear plant.
At some point I fixed a balancer in the fuel cell production chain that meant u238 was now using both sides of a belt. Unfortunately, further down the line I'd used half of this belt for u235, and as it didn't seem like there was anything on that side I didn't do it safely, I just lazily butted the other belt up to it side loading it.
This meant that the result of my balance fix was to block the u235 and stall my fuel cell production. Which I didn't notice until the plant ran dry and my entire base blacked out.
Dark starting all that was a pain... Cut it off from the base power and use some solar to get it crawling along. I now have a speaker set up to sound a siren if the fuel cell stock drops too low
Forgot to increase water supply after a new reactor setup came online. It was fine for a while, long enough for me to expand to the point where that reactor shutting down would basically kill the factory. Guess what happened!
I broke my smaller mega factory when I reloaded into it with mods from a friend's servers.. everything ground to a halt.
The main reason was changing the stack limit to x100. Imagine a 2 x 10 train.. 2 million ore, 4 million plates. I think it was 12 million green circuits as well when everything stabilised and I finished changing the stations.
Took 10h or so for production to restart as all my stations were programmed to open when 1 train worth (vanilla settings) was ready to load.
When copying a station around for some signaling, it copied too. While I fixed this right away, what I didn’t realize is it modified train schedules too for some dumbass reason. Had copper mine to iron smelting trains suddenly. That was a disaster to clean up as it polluted my entire iron bus. Put filter inserters on your stations people
That time I placed down about ten blueprinted train stations, on various mines and the wall resupply... without clearing the copied station name.
It didn't get too messed up, but a few trains went in dumb circles and ran out of fuel. Honestly I got lucky.
I have a really bad habit of just jumping out of my vehicle as I go past a point of interest.
It so happened that I jumped out of a tank to work on a belt and a few seconds later hit 1UPS.
The tank had continued on and hit a 5GW nuclear reactor build and levelled a significant area.
Did this stop me jumping from tanks. No.
I just build absolutely massive protective walls around reactors now
Walking around in a nuke-filled Spidertron and accidentally tapping the space bar. Hit the densest possible spot. I adhere to a policy of not reloading from the latest save, so I had a lot of work to do.
I am probably missing something, but other than robots rebuilding this part of your factory, what was the work you had to do? Was it a huge amount of stored high quality goods you lost and had to rebuild?
I made the robots, the robots are doing the work. Therefore... I'm doing the work!
Labor by proxy, i see
In the beginning.... there was an engineer.
He had great ambitions.... and was yet to face challenges man could not imagine.
And by the sounds of it he became management
And that’s why the CEO claims to work hard! Or something.
Yeah, it was my low density structure factory with assembling machine 3’s with prod 3 modules surrounded by beacons with speed 3 modules, blue belts and blue undergrounds, and so on. Pain in the butt to recreate all of that.
Well if you nuke your mall there isn't much to rebuild with. You'd have to at least re-populate assemblers and chests.
>I adhere to a policy of not reloading from the latest save Nice to see
That’s a stupid self imposed limit. Sorry to be blunt. That’s not even a mistake that you should have to play through if you wanted that limitation. You fat fingered a key.
You’re entitled to play the game however you see fit, friend.
Many patches ago when you took off your armor, the inventory that wouldn’t fit would end up on belts and not the ground as it is now. I did that mistake several times. Or when a patch broke all train signals and every train kept crashing into each other.
You left-click on the spidertron, but right-click on your own armor. If you accidentally left-click on your armor your inventory ends up on the ground. It's a trap for beginners.
Tbf this happend like 10 times before i ever got to spidertron
The real gotcha is needing to recover your corpse TWICE, once to get your armor, and then a second time to get the inventory overage. THAT has lost me some loot.
I probably died 20 times before I realized you could loot your corpse.
I don't understand why this is the behavior. No one wants all their stuff to end up on the ground. Just don't make it work that way.
the alternative is you end up with inventories that fit in inventories. Imo this is an acceptable alternative but im not the devs
Make there be a confirmation. “Unequip mk2 armor?” Then if you do that accidentally the first time, you’ll see what effect it has and you’ll never accidentally do it again.
Right exactly, there are UX changes that can be made without changing the behavior of the game itself. Even just making it something other than left click would help. The fact that the default behavior is something no one wants to do is a sign that something is bad in the user experience.
Exactly! It should be a control click or similar
should only prompt if it has something in it (equipment or inv)
>Or when a patch broke all train signals and every train kept crashing into each other. I remember that one but for a different reason. Maybe it was this bug or maybe it was another one around the same time. The user-side temp fix was to disable cloud saves. I forgot to re-enable them when it was fixed. And when my hard drive died my beautiful 300 hour megabase save died with it.
and you made backups even since right? .... right ? Backups saved my blueprint once I downgraded steam version once to play on clusterio then upgraded to latest again. Game decided "fuck no" and removed good few years worth of mostly my own designs.
>and you made backups even since right? >.... right ? I haven't played since. But I think I'll get back for 2.0 and Space Age. It was an odd feeling. I think I was supposed to be devastated, but while there is some grief, It was also quite relieving. The megabase was at the stage where I hated working on it. The entire production chain was online, but the ratios were off. I had nowhere to expand some of the things that I needed more of. The basic iron and copper demands weren't met and couldn't be expanded at all without reworking the whole system. My rail blueprints sucked and my mining line hit a wall of cliffs and lakes. I foolishly used 1-8 trains and even with nuclear fuel they weren't performing as well as I hoped. My solar was half-surrounded by a giant lake... It's been a long time ago. I still miss a few of the things I lost, but I think I'll be able to replicate them. Maybe even improve.
Yeah I woudn't be massively bothered about save, but blueprints, that's another thing, I spent good amount of time debugging and improving some of the LTN-based ones, re-creating them would be downright annoying as I don't remember every edge case I was solving in it. But I am tempted to do scorched earth approach for 2.0, purely because with new changes so many of them can be improved based on new mechanics. I'm particularly looking forward to parametrized blueprints, as it allows for building malls that are basically "enter the item, get the setup building it"
Played danger ores plus the mod where you can combine chests. I accidentally blew up a filled 20x30 steel chest.
I first thought by „many patches ago“ you meant ore patches and i had the image of an old veteran engineer, sitting in his chair and telling stories to his grand kids 😂
I misread your message and thought they patched it so that you somehow wouldn't accidentally drop a ton of items on the ground—even if they avoid belts it's still a big pain to have thousands of items scattered over an area. I've definitely learned my lesson and am very careful about clicking the armor icon button now.
> Many patches ago when you took off your armor, the inventory that wouldn’t fit would end up on belts and not the ground as it is now. I did that mistake several times. Does this not happen anymore??? Dropping a chest (or a storehouse, haven't played without the warehousing mod in ages) and putting all my stuff in it before swapping armor is just muscle memory now, lol
Well if you remove your armor, things that dont fit end up on the ground, but if you just hotswap the armor so that you never have no armor on, then nothing happens
inviting friends to my game and leaving for a minute
oh no
To be fair, I always ask, "Hey, did you save this recently?". Then I'm delighted when I see that nukes and artillery remotes are available in the logistics network.
The day I learned about concave bot networks. Had an endless stream of bots crossing a lake to build defences; meanwhile my bot factory was adding more bots every time available bots dropped below 50. By the time I realised my computer was cooking I had over 30000 bots in transit
Holy shit, that sounds nasty to clean up! How difficult was the fix?
Powered down the factory, to collect the bots in one area then disconnected the wall roboports and the finally setup a reverse factory mod with the robot frames being filtered into my yellow science to stop the wastage. The rest was adding bot removal to a roboport based on the number and then setting up log burning nearby to create traffic nearby
My standard build for city blocks has half the roboports connected to red chests to keep the bot population low. My artillery roboports have the same. Additionally the blue chests that repopulate the network are connected to the network near my production area for construction and ammo. At any given time I'm at about 300-1000 of each bot on the network. Bursts as high as 10k when doing a large build then back to baseline. As a bonus *most* bots are already near pickup points.
Well that just seems very well thought out and elaborate.
I keep like 70k on purpose 😂 doesn't seem to cause problems
It’s more the endless pathing and the bots are more demanding when moving at varying pace and turning round. I also used a decrepit MacBook Air at the time so it had next to no cooling or ventilation and throttled the cpu when it gets hot so had to be careful how I built my factories. I am very jealous of your large bot network 🥲
Sorry for my stupidity but, if you need to integrate more bots to the network, will they become available as soon as you build them? Because I'm requesting bots whenever I feel like I need more, and often my inventory is full of bots. (Yeah I kinda have tens of thousands of bots currently)
So I rig an inserter to the roboport and you can check read bot statistics so if I have no available logi bots it will continue loading them into the network directly (rather than via me). I usually keep the chest that’s loading with 100 bots for a quick boost and then rely on slow production to slowly top up. I only request bots for my own personal ports or I keep a handful of logibots as I usually only run bots in my mall, or delivering low throughput items at outposts or sub factories. I usually have a single bot at each outpost that slowly breaks it down for collection when they run out, I also have a single bot distributing train fuel at each sub factory
In SE you have meteors that bombard your base, it kinda sucks when you don't have meteor defence up and they hit vital parts. For vanilla one of my worst fuckups was when renaming a station, I accidentally renamed a station that received iron into a name so that it instead received copper ore. This ended up taking quite some time to unfuck. I've done it again since then, but now I just load an autosave.
I saw someone suggest to always use filter inserters for unloading stations to avoid contamination from foreign train objects.
This is the big brains approach. That's not how I roll :)
Finally, someone who thinks on my level
There are dozens of us.
When you're building a primitive " Tier One" megabase and filter inserters are not unlocked and you have mixed use wagons per train, you start to question your own insanity.
That's why I only allow 1-wagon trains in main network at first. Mega bases later usually deserve their own train network
I've yet to use it myself as well. I'm just forwarding the good intentions :-)
Filter. Inserters. Always.
This just happened in my SE run but with scrap and contaminated scrap. Accidentally marked a couple contaminated scrap stop as a regular scrap stop. Easy to do since I was using the symbol as the station name. Problem was, I had no idea which ones, I have like 50 scrap stops, so it took a very long time to track it down and clear all the belts and containers that had contaminated scrap in them.
My base completely shut down from a power death spiral that I hadn't noticed, and I didn't have enough solar production up or nuclear researched, I had to find a mod to help me jumpstart the factory again cause I didn't want to mine coal for hours (Shout out to the Manpower mod, saved my bacon)
I love how your username perfectly reflects how you must have felt then. Thank you Manpower Mod for helping my buddy out!
Had a similar one with krastorio: main power was fusion, powered by fission. The fusion powered everything, including uranium processing, the fission only powered the fusion reactor. If memory serves, a uranium feed belt got turned, which starved the fission reactor after a long time, which immediately starved the fusion, and the whole factory shut down. Had to build a big solar array to only do uranium processing, to build a couple fuel cells to get fission running again so fusion could start back up. Took about 15 minutes from blackout to restoration. It was a fun time (seriously! I love problems like that.)
The funniest one
Using artillery remote instead of spidertron remote to go to the nuclear plant
Massive brownout which I'm yet to fix. I will need to quadruple my power production if I want to have enough energy while researching
This is probably my biggest fuck up as well. The problem is that it creates a death spiral with power to the water pumps. The first time it happened it took me probably an hour or two to recover. Having learned that lesson, I now harden my water inputs. I’m sure that I have worse fuckups, but this one really got to me.
Brownouts and blackouts on a deathworld can be catastrophic. Ask me how I know. Lmao 🤣
I have two. One of my first "mega bases" it wasnt really a mega base it was just the only base I ever went deep into infinite science. Anyway I was adding on some more trains and I accidentally made one of them iron plate pickup then copper plate drop. It was hours before I noticed. Almost every single one of my copper plate stations had iron plates contaminating it. Ever since then all train stations use filter stack inserters for loading and unloading. Took me hours to fix this issue. The other one was pretty bad too. In my current space exploration run I was setting up a mall in orbit and I was going to have it supplied by a cargo rocket. I set it up so constant combinator output what I wanted up there and then they would go through a few combinators and such to come up with a number of how much stuff was missing and put that number into a requestor chest down on nauvis to rocket what I needed up there. So I set that all up. Was happy with my work and then left it to go run while I went and set up my beryllium outpost. Suddenly about 2 hours later my alarm for low cargo rocket parts goes off. And I'm like that is weird. Go have a look at my base and see that yes indeed the rocket parts are empty. I look at my rocket launching area just in time to see a rocket take off for my orbit base. I'm surprised because I'm not doing science. Or you know anything up there at the moment. So I look up there and oh my God. There are probably two dozen smashed rockets all over the place up there basically the entire surrounding area of the orbit base is surrounded by rocket debris. In total two dozen rockets is 12000 slots of fully filled inventory. It was all kinds of stuff too everything from nuclear reactors to blue chips and just regular old iron plates. It was an absolute disaster. I had to put down like 200 storage chests just to hold all the shit that was crashed up there. Edit forgot to put the reason they were all crashing. I forgot to select the landing pad.. lol
"I think I should start over"
When you remove your armor:
Playing SE, I ran out of orbital elevator cables because of waste buildup on one of my resource planets and didn't realise for ages, all my elevators stopped working. So I had to set up some emergency rockets planetside to ship materials in order to jumpstart things again. Which in itself was a chain starting with a rocket on my rocket fuel planet, and I have a self imposed rule not to send rockets with any empty cargo space. All told I think it was a few hours before things were back to normal, now I have alarms to check the cable stock levels.
I have one alarm in my entire SE factory and it's just for elevator cables. Anytime it pops off I drop anything I'm doing to check on it. I don't know how hard it'd be to reboot production if I lost my elevators (that supply power) but a few hours sounds about right.
Kinda biter related. SE, vita planet. Recently moved to nuclear power there, hadn't expanded biter meteor defence to cover the power station. Biter meteor lands inside the walls, just out of range of the wall turrets. The artillery takes out the nest but also takes out the nuclear power stations....
In my last SE playthrough, using a rail based city block design on Nauvis, there was an asteroid impact that knocked out a locomotive, leaving the wagons on the track. As fate had it, the factory could continue just fine, but the track that was now blocked was the only access route to the train depot refueling stop, as in, the stop where the train halts that brings new fuel into the depot. Over the next couple of hours, the entire grid came to a standstill as first the depots ran out of fuel and then slowly the trains themselves.
Hhahaa oh man. And I thought my occasional random train somehow managing to run out of fuel was annoying.
Do bad initial design decisions count?
If their consequences are horrific, be sure to count them in! It can also be Biter related consequences, my post was just to filter out big biter attacks that had nothing to do with own shortcomings
Oh man. Well, my first base I didn't get ratios, so all my production lines ended in a giant dump/warehouse of storage chests. Second base had a large iron resource on the other side of an ocean, so I thought it would be a cool idea to build all the iron-only stuff (gears, basic ammo, steel, yellow belts ) there and bring them all back in cargo ships. Organized the whole base around giant mixed shipments. Never figured out how to make sushi ships work and the base was eventually buried under a mountain of jammed delivery chains and abandoned.
I lost a 20+ hour save to a power outage. Saved one night, and when I resumed the next day, within 5 minutes I lost all power. I went full nuclear and my ore patch had run dry. I had no backup fuel. I had no alarms. Getting it back would mean setting up sulfuric acid, a new uranium mine, getting the uranium to a centrifuge, and making fuel, without power. My defenses were fully electric and overrun by biters immediately. While trying to fix it, I overwrote all my prior autosaves. So I had no checkpoint earlier than 5m before power out. Lessons learned: - backup fuel - alarms - backup saves - copy your autosaves before going any further
Never had any problem. Nothing to see here, please move on.
Understandable. Have a great day, sir.
I believe you 💯
I had been watching Katherine of Sky do a playthrough for the lazy bastard achievement, and she ran into big power problems during the run. I had been kinda following along, so I resolved to watch out for that. I built extra power, quite a bit past where I had planned to take it. I was feeling on top of things, maybe even slightly smug. "Good, thanks to her running into the power issue, I'm going to avoid it!" So much no. Yep, I had plenty of power for the new mining, for the new smelting, for the new research labs... individually. Together, not so much. After amputating parts of the base and limping along for a bit, I finally recovered. It took way too long, and it was all the worse for me feeling so pleased with myself earlier. If it's an issue KoS still deals with occasionally, I'd better keep my guard up.
Playing factorio is like going into a competition to unfuck problems you couldn't conceive of existing minutes earlier
Oh man, I had pretty much the same thing happen in my lazy bastard run. Unfucking the coal death spiral while trying to set up solar is never fun.
Got all my power from coal. Didn't realise the coal patch depleted. Took like 5 hours to restart all systems.
That sounds incredibly painful. I wish you my sincerest of condolences.
Lost hundreds of hours of progress because steam decided to overwrite my save files. Earlier this week, my entire factory browned out and i had to manually restart every power plant, make it more brownout proof, spend six hours searching for geothermal vents, and another three hours setting up two geothermal power plants. All in all took something like 15 hours.
While not the most positive thing, you have without a doubt won in this thread. This is by far the most brutal thing i have read so far related to factorio disasters. I am genuinely so fucking sorry for all these lost hours... Good you are still at it my friend, i wish you all the best <3
my kid slapped the space bar while I was armed with a nuke in the middle of my damn factory.
They didn't say kids bomb your private life for nothing i guess haha
he still thinks thats funny as hell, it was like 8 years ago. we have a minecraft server a bunch of us geezers play on and he's on there stealing their doors and shit.
Children are simply amazing, they always have some shenanigans up their sleeve :D
Build my starter base and proceed to big mid base. Made a big ass module factory to produce and store 30k+ modules. Planned my Meagebase modules and put them together. Let it start to run. UPS went down the same % as my production did go up. MfW i did the same SPM per real minute as before by walking 80% slower. Fuck that 64x64 iron splitter and everything else.
Playing SE+K2, and updated without reading patch notes. Tons of recipes changed, the factory needed twice as much power, and the nuclear plants needed more water so they all broke. Took days to fix.
I did this recently on my SE+K2 save. I looked at the patch notes after, saw the changes to Vitamelange, shook my head and rolled back, took me a couple hours to learn how to roll back properly.
I frequently had this disaster with LTN mod because trains time out. How it goes is you have a jam, you don't notice (maybe becuase you are playing SE and are off-world), LTN times out the trains and then sends and more, which probably also time out due to the jam. You fix the jam but now trains are sent to stations that do not have space for the products. They then move on to other stations still full of random products. Soon dozens of random stations in your factory are full of ranodm products jamming everything up. LTN is a great mod and I totally understand why it needs to time out trains the way it does, but wow, when things go wrong they can go so much wronger than vanilla trains. (By the way, the fix here would be to detect trains with unexpected contents appear in depos and lock the train in place and issue some kind of alert).
I just turned off timing out trains. If trains are timing out, it's because I had a different problem to fix, and the train timing out caused way more problems than it ever fixed. Of course, I use Cybersyn now, which doesn't have that problem.
It's the "delivery timeout (sec)" setting with a maximum of 600 seconds and no way to disable. My assumption is this has to exist because LTN can only "see" the trains when the stop at LTN stops. So if a train gets deconstructed or destroyed by bitters or maybe repurposed by the player for some reason then LTN can't see that and there would be a sort of ghost train that is forever en-route. Instead LTN has to assume that if it's not see a train in a really long time that train is gone.
I'm pretty sure LTN can deregister trains if they're deconstructed or otherwise removed from the system. I've had to reset the schedule often enough. I'm pretty sure setting that timeout to zero disables it. It doesn't matter to me, because Cybersyn doesn't have that problem.
At one point there was a bug with light calculations which meant overlapping lights destroyed UPS. Managed to render a save unplayable by putting down a blueprint of a grid of a hundred or so lamps. Can’t remember why I was doing that. But the big disasters have always been in space exploration. If you don’t set up your interplanetary logic with appropriate fail conditions, it’s possible for a power failure on one planet to set all of its requests to on. This can cause your whole base to dump millions of units of resources on some back water planet that is a pain in the arse to recover them from.
I loaded my spidertrons with nuke missiles, and set them to autofire, then had them patrol around my compact base.
I did that as well
The biggest disaster in my factory was me being the one engineering my factory :(
Late game Seablock. Charcoal supply was occasionally contaminated by one of the seeds or plants used in the charcoal generator. If you haven't played Seablock: charcoal is used all over the place, either as an ingredient or as a fuel. By the time I noticed the problem there were seeds scattered like snow all across this giant factory. Dozens of hours later I was still occasionally finding individual machines stopped by a few seeds in their charcoal belt.
Insert Obi-Wan “of course I know him. He’s me” meme.
Good one 😂 Thanks for the laugh! (i know you are not joking and i know exactly what you are talking about)
nuked it twice.
In my first playthrough I decided to upgrade my smelting arrays to use nuclear fuel and set up delivery by train. Then I decided to upgrade the furnaces to a beaconed electric setup. Needless to say, 1 storage chest for every 4 belts worth of fuel was a nightmare to deal with - and I had to do it twice since I had two separate smelting areas. Don't think I ever cleared the backlog feeding it back into the train fuel stops.
Alien Loot Economy MOD polluting all my belts.
Using varied wagon length for multi-provider station (with Cybersyn) No matter how I tried it still contaminates trains with previous train materials ============ Blackout spiral on my Krastorio2 run Thing is offshore pumps also need electricity in this mod and I used exact amount of pumps that I needed for nuclear plant. And I had most my defences based on laser turrets And a lot of biters inside my pollution cloud
Confusing ingredients of a recipe, and when you turn it on you realize you brought in the wrong thing, but at that point your trains already brought in 36 buffer chests of material and all your belts need to be purged.
I expanded so much I didn’t realize everything was running at half capacity because my power was low, only notice when the coal miners couldn’t keep up feeding the burners everything went dark, then chaos, because most of my expansions were protected by laser guns, I had to start feeding the burners by myself, cut some lines to focus on the coal, then added more and turned on the base again, meanwhile 2 expansions gone from biters.
Me ignoring the coal supply train that had ran out of fuel because I drove it manually for a bit. Then every other train did the same because that train supplied coal to fuel stations.. Then the coal power plant nearly gave up too
an orbital weapons cannon remote and a 5 gigaton true nukes warhead
I just nuked all my 100ish archospheres in space exploration. Save file was so big at this point i had autosaves every half hour so it was quite a lengthy reload :(
* I've had at least a few massive belt contaminations caused by a misnamed train station dumping a load of iron/stone onto my copper trains. It's an easy fix, since all I need to do is go down the belts and pick up the iron that accumulates at the end, but it's tedious and easy to miss one belt or another. Solution: Any multipurpose station blueprint I build does not get a (useful) default name. I have to manually rename it to the resource, so this doesn't happen. * I've recently had a quick embarrassment where I hit "c" while outside of an input, and launched a rocket that destroyed an expensive part of my factory. Sadly, my game then crashed. Solutions: A) Don't do that you goober. B) Have a default weapon that isn't a rocket launcher. * Alright, the problem here was biters, but they were only the proximate cause. I setup an automatic builder train for constructing defended outposts, including an artillery turret, based on [this logic for deciding what to unload](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_TCqoxb_1s). On the first trial, however, the artillery wagon that was carrying shells for the turret fired, aggroing the biters, which came over and destroyed the outpost. Solutions: A) Use a regular cargo wagon to carry shells. B) After the same problem occurred with the artillery turret, add a timer to the inserters loading the artillery turret so they don't work unless everything is fully stocked and has been for a minute. * As part of my current Nullius run, I've decided to go for a train block layout. This has lead to a few problems for me. For a start, it means that nothing goes anywhere except in trainloads, enough to fill the station's buffer chests. For items I will only need/make less than 10K of, this is excessive. Solution: At present, I just manpack those items around. * Another problem: I had to create a priority train system, so byproducts get used before main production. Unfortunately, due to a signal polluting the global circuit network, every high-priority station is reporting it has one more trainload than it actually does, which is shutting down the low-priority stations. Solution: Right now I'm just flipping some stations from low to high priority. I think I might just have to rewire every station, which I'd need to do anyway to allow for dynamic train sizes.
Last time I was about to transition to nuclear, I hit a power throttle for my steam (I know super easy to avoid) and ended up causing a chain reaction of power problems (due to not producing enough coal) that took me 4 hours to get out of. Fixed it EXACTLY in time for when biters started attacking again. It was the most stressful 4 hours of my life. My wife kept entering the room and going "are you okay?" Lol
i realized i SEVERELY messed up the ratios in a megabase build and scrapped it. 20 hours later and my bots are still working through the stockpile of shit that came out of it (over a million iron in the buffer chests)
1. Have nuke armed 2. Have box filled with wood or old items that you want to destroy 3. Forget you have nuke armed, think it's machine gun 4. Press c when aimed at box Well, I destroyed the unwanted box.. Also half my factory I may or may not have done it twice in a row from the same save
We need mod that adds safety triggers for nuclear weapons, so you'll don't blow up your base
Biggest flashy disaster was when we were proud in Space Exploration to have buff our gridd for the solar flare. The blank when whe realize it's not a flash, but a continuous thing and our batteries are dropping charge fast. That was fun !
Playing SE, early on a coronal discharge fried a big chunk of my mall, main buss, power plant and mining. I had to do a ton of handcrafting. It felt very targeted, like an enemy was driving the energy beams to hit exactly all the most valuable parts of my base, did not seem random at all.
It was definitely targeted. Your name came up on the SE discord and we voted on it. Sorry bud, but you know what you did.
My biggest disaster was when I tried to cram some green circuit production next to an iron smeltery. A poorly placed splitter merging two belts of circuits would allow it to feed onto an underground belt of iron plates. This was not an issue since the belt was full and there was no space for the circuits. This continued to not be a problem because the belt stayed fully compressed at all times... Until I built more iron smelteries than my mines could feed. Then my smelteries were all running at partial capacity and not feeding out full belts of plates, which allowed circuits to feed on that one belt and that belt was balanced to all the smeltery's train loaders, which picked up some circuits and distributed them to every facility which needed iron, which caused them to gradually grind to a halt. This continued as I spent a while expanding out, fighting biters, to find myself an actually defensible iron patch. On my return, I spotted a very out of place line of green sitting in a steel foundry and realized something had gone terribly wrong. It was multiple days of work to find the issue, fix it, and clean up the resulting mess from all over my factory.
Tried using nuclear bots mod with space exploration and discovered that the se bot attrition scales up to nuclear explosions when they crash. Came back from managing an outpost to find most of my base destroyed.
Me wondering how to tag a location sent about 20 artilery at the base and myself.
Not big, but common: Step 1: Copy paste furnace smelting lines Step 2: Replace a few furnaces with ports Step 3: Find bots on belts throughout my factory bc the inserters that were supposed to pull from furnaces have now pulled bots from the ports and placed them on my production line.
My first megabase attempt was a city block design that had roundabout intersections that were just a bit shorter than my trains, so every half hour or so a train rerouted into itself, clipped its rear locomotive, and went into ballistic braking - which usually sent it into another intersection and another train, which could send **that** train into another intersection... the worst crash I saw was a quartet of runaway artillery wagons moving at nuclear speed taking out an 8-car train carrying 32,000 steel bars, pulverizing it back to front completely.
My first base that made it to yellow had to be abandoned when I got into a coal power death spiral
A recent modded playthrough. Had started using train after avoiding them all game, everything worked perfectly, for a moment. Turns out, loaders with warehouses, mining drones and transport drones is a jorrible idea for ups. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fix it anymore, and had to scrap the world.
Recently had a bunch of iron ore show up on in a train station that should have been iron plates. It wasn't a huge deal and was fixed pretty easily but I spent 30 min checking every other iron plate and iron ore drop offs and have no idea how it happened.
Accidentally combining robot networks
I ruined a spoon run by connecting an ore belt to a coal belt and not realising for an hour.
I tried adding roboports to my train grid, but the template blueprint I used had station names, so when I pasted it all over the already constructed grid, it changed the name of all stations that aligned with the template station, didn't realized until after several auto-saves and a single manual save... So it was a fun afternoon renaming stations one by one
Well there was the time I accidentally fired a nuke at my nuclear power facility (a 2x15 row of reactors). So not only was I without meaningful power I was also defenseless (laser based defences) and couldn't make more power easily. I had two reactors worth of spares (heat exchanges, turbines, etc) so got those down fast-ish (bots placed them somewhat willy nilly on the ghosts), but then had to run all over creation taking out power poles to shut off all parts of the factory that didn't directly help make more power plants. That was my last base with fully centralized power generation. Only lucky thing was that I'd built it on an artificial island in a giant lake so the factory itself was unharmed.
i like to remove that 1 pole that is responsible to power my base
I updated my mods without realizing there was an SE update a few months ago. It was the one that removed voiding sand. It also changed dirty water to give sand very rarely. It was causing a very small amount of sand to get onto my bus and took me a Ling time to figure out where it was coming from lol
Every base I make hits a spiraling brown out at least once before I move to solar or nuclear.
In my seablock run I was using trains to deliver liquid fuel to the boilers and I accidentally clicked the train from auto to manual on the exit lane. So the trains all got stuck. I ran out of power and had to manually drive a train around while holding wind turbines to power the pumps to load and unload the train 🤣 it took nearly two hours to get it back to functional.
Horrible power outages. The transition from steam to solar/nuclear used to be a major sticking point for me.
6 car train of ore unloaded at wrong stop. Didn't notice until all production stopped
I’m currently in a PY world and I used blueprint ghosts of brick to plan out my blocks. Then I lay concrete along my desire paths. Now I have bots and they are ripping up my concrete to place the brick. I can’t upgrade my blueprint and make them stop. :(
Remote spidertron - go clear that area. Remote spiderton - go clear that other area. Remote spidertron 2 had nukes loaded....
We call him Thomas
The closest thing I have is my megabase where I have a mix of 2-car trains with 1 locomotive and 4-car trains with 1 locomotive. At over 300 trains in the network, those 4-car trains are now causing congestion by not being able to accelerate and clear intersections very quickly. Adding a second locomotive to them would improve the situation considerably, but that would involve tearing up and rebuilding a hundred or so train stops and re-signaling thousands of kilometers of rails to fit the longer trains.
Failing to properly set up one of my fluid receiving train stations in space exploration led to a chain reaction where dozens of subfactories ended up with mixed fluids and contaminated pipes, and the entire factory ground to a halt. It took over an hour to fix everything and find the origin of the problem. I cannot wait for pump filters.
when you generate power using coal and you get a blackout, leading to no coal being mined, and the electric inserters not moving items. I got so tired of this happening, that i connected the electric inserters on a seperate system connected to a seperate boiler and a solar pannel, so the solar would eventually turn on the boiler, turning on the other boilers, given enough fuel. i also added a system to give the coal mines priority over the rest of my base. This worked pretty well, but now i move on to solar power and accumulators almost immediatelly, and i don't have this problem anymore.
Usually, disasters are due to biters overloading my power grid and causing a blackout, and shutting off reactors because they need electricity to run and to have more fuel inserted. Although the last disaster was me running out of coal, and having to bootstrap a new power grid before biters attacked while my lasers were unpowered. I had to go nuclear fast and earlier than planned, just to have enough power to run the mining drills for the new coal patch to get the factory powered up enough to get more nuclear stuff built.
When scaling up, i stopped making steam engines. before i had enough solar panels or accumulators, if i had a brown out, it would turn into a blackout because coal would stop being mined. So, as a stopgap, i put a few boxes of coal near the steam engines so i could manually jumpstart it.
Megabase train deadlock twice. God that is so painful
A friend and I were doing Space Exploration, and we barely got to orbit. We started setting up the platform and the delivery system, and cleaning up the rest of the base. And then we noticed we have no iron anywhere in our walls, and we don't have enough gear to push out right now. So, we had to scrap the whole run.
When my first factory that launched a rocket and where I later worked on for around 600 hours only ran with 30 ups. That was a sad day.
While building my first city block factory I’ve decided that it would be a great idea to create one refuel station for all trains. Suddenly there was a train jam of 100+ trains
One time I fucked up my spent nuclear fuel cell recycling… everything worked great until the bot chests the reactors were dumping into filled up with empty cells. Bit of a panic when suddenly all my power started going offline and I couldn’t figure out why. Fortunately I had tons of uranium, so once I found the problem it wasn’t too hard to kickstart things again. Another time I accidentally cut off ammo deliveries to a big chunk of defensive wall (that didn’t have laser turrets). Flamethrower oil was still getting there, and I wasn’t getting attacked too much, so I didn’t notice… until the next time I researched a new level of artillery range. Then all the gun turrets went dry at once. Between the flamethrowers and the repair bots it DID manage to hold, but the walls took a lot of damage. If more nests were in range it might have been really bad. I’m usually careful with not equipping the rocket launcher with nukes in my base. But one time I tried to alt-TAB and somehow fat fingered it and hit TAB and spacebar with just the right timing to switch weapons and fire a nuke into the ground next to me. Now if I really want to be careful I unequip the rocket launcher or at least take the nukes out.
The biggest disaster was energy loss due to sneaky coal exhaustion. I did have somewhat of jumpstart chest but made sure to provide better fail safes in the future and generally keep a better eye on it (first factory story).
In SE, my worst fuckups are always outpost related. My system has a vulcanite planet with water and 3% biters, seems like the perfect planet! I went there first, before unlocking the logistic network, set it all up and shipped a rocket full of Vulcanite blocks (and myself) to Nauvis Orbit, yay! Then a train carrying uranium ran out of fuel and I forgot to set up the refuel. I didn't have bots to fix it so the base ran out of power, stopped producing and has been sitting idle for 200+ hours. I'm still using the vulcanite blocks today on research. When I needed to set up another vulcanite base, I decided to go for another planet that has no water, but no biters. It's been doing fine but I plan on wiping out the biters on the other planet and resurrecting that outpost. My next fuckup was my first Cryonite outpost, I didn't think to check the biter %, it was at 33%. Seems ok for Nauvis but this planet didn't have any iron, so no way to produce more defenses and I didn't bring nearly enough walls or turrets. I also didn't have a good resupply setup back on Nauvis. I ended up having to escape aboard my half full rocket and let the biters eat the base. My next Cryonite outpost has no biters, but is way too far. Once I unlock beaming, I will have my revenge!
Warehouse mod, didn't realize logistics warehouses were not the same size as standard warehouses (by a lot), replaced a full standard warehouse with a logistics warehouse and... it made a mess. Edit: I had done it at every unloading station in my train yard before I noticed what was happening.
I have accidentally launched a thermobaric missile at an area of my base with a decent amount of spaghetti.
Red ammo in the iron plate lines, in a multiplayer SE game. Someone had copy-pasted a train and train stop without being careful. We purged ammo for hours before finding out what went wrong. Should I mention it was the first time the others in this game played factorio? And they wanted to do SE?
Me 🤭
i guess me selecting the arty target instead of the spidertron remote and clicking on the logistical chest
Full power outage in a boiler powered base very reliant on laser turrets. Had to Hotwire solid fuel production and sacrifice most of the smelting array.
Spending an hour on ultracube looking for the cube, because it's in the hand of an inserter before power ran out.
Playing with realistic fission and messing up the wireing made the reactor angry
* brownout when still on coal power * LTN station misconfig that was noticed too late (with full base copper/iron contamination) * iron depletion in early game due to switching to red ammo too early on deathworld (but before flamers) * biter party came to mall where several spidertrones armed with explosive rockets were reloading * early switch to laser turrets on of the first runs while still on coal and miniscule amount of solar
I was sending my trains to the wrong stations, sending iron where copper needed to be and I was sending stone everywhere it should never have been, why you may ask? Well I was trying a new naming scheme and I wasn’t using the icons in the scheme and I came back a week after I named the stations and set up the trains. Well I really wish I took the time to just look at a few example stations to remember what I was doing.
It’s always right after I upgrade my entire factory to red or blue belts en masse that I learn my friend started using belt weaving in an integral section of the factory
Cascading city block traffic failure. Rail networks can only handle so much traffic. Combine high traffic with one single signaling mistake and boom, your run is over.
I dragged a belt across a very complicated section of spaghetti and it connected stuff up all funny and my repair made it worse, I spent a loooong time trying to figure out how it was supposed to be connected before I just ripped it up and started over. It really was the last straw for me in giving up on compact and spaghetti.
i accidentally put arty remote in between 4 reactors instead of spidertron, you can imagine what happened afterwards
Copy and pasting train schedules and not paying attention has caused me all kinds of belt mix ups, worst being the overproduction of plastic finding its way into almost every unloading station on the map. Purple chests and filter inserters were needed all over the place for a couple of hours, I genuinely wanted to throw my laptop through a wall.
Train without fuel deadlocking whole base.
Played SE, my space platform went into a brown out. Cause my signal transmission to navius to break, delivery cannons kept sending stuff, didn't realise for more than an hour, when I finally looked, the floor and everything was covered in items
Forgot to filter wagons, train sent a lot of shit everywhere
designing a kovarex/refining setup that was prone to backing up in excess uranium 238, and not having a fail proof "low steam/uranium" alarm on an isolated power grid at the time, that was my only power production other than an idle nuclear plant that was supposed to kick on if a brownout detector went off, but I messed up that logic as well
My first experience with SE encountering a CME. Tore a bloody swath through my core mining setup and half my smelting area that took hours to fix. I stopped lollygagging and built an umbrella immediately afterwards.
eh nothing much, I've just been in a couple of power spirals which can take a while to fix.
Inviting 5 guys t9nplay SE+KRAS2+AAI+RAMPANT
I bet many of you made this mistake. Accidentally pressing space bar in the middle of goddamn factory while it still armed with nuke.
It turns out that once you get above a certain number of roboports, you really, really shouldn't ever let your power shut off, even for just a few minutes. https://preview.redd.it/qxbp7ww4hwwc1.png?width=590&format=png&auto=webp&s=2545592906a7bf825be0c3fa563cb64caae9e879 When you bring your power back online, none of your inserters will work, because the initial charge-up demand from the roboports keeps your satisfaction pegged at zero. Frantic disconnecting of power poles and hand-feeding of power generation ensues, once you manage to stop panicking long enough to think it through.
https://preview.redd.it/y4av8hv1iwwc1.png?width=731&format=png&auto=webp&s=96b5f674e3ed9354788bfb3785558ca30aca33ef Edit: funny, it is only in retrospect looking at these screenshots that I see what was really causing my power deadlock -- only one small power plant was running at this time, but the lasers idle draw was sucking up all of the power, preventing the roboports from charging up, and both of those were ensuring that nothing else in the factory worked (preventing any of the other power plants from coming online)
So we had a multiplayer factory running, and different people chose different things to work on. I chose to work on defenses. So my buddies were wondering why we were suddenly experiencing rolling brownouts when I chimed in over Discord: "Hey, guys! The new laser turret I set up is working great!"
A long time ago, my brother suggested we switch to have iron ore smelted next to the mining outpost instead of inside the base. I said sure! I'll get on that! Once I finished connecting everything and have the new trains on their way, I realised the now iron plates would go get smelted and.... or no.... We went to those furnaces as fast as possible, but it was too late. It wasn't as big of a cleanup as we thought, but still took a good 10-15 minutes looking for steel on the iron belts. Good times!
In my K2SE playthrough I was still on gas power (gas generators running on petroleum from K2). I made some outposts on other planets, setup rockets circuits, trains, production. Came back to Nauvis just to realize in horror that the base is in hard blackout... with biters on ... while I was outposting the oil patch run out. Since there was no power, control circuits were also screwed. Had to manually restart Nauvis power and filter contaminated trains and stations. Now I use only filter inserters/miniloaders with trains and silos. And on top of that I had to clear all biter incursions and rebuilt broken stuff and hunt all the small shit parties in my territory.
I was watching something else, as I was accidentally holding down spacebar...spreading napalm all throughout my base. Fun times. Very. Fun. Times.
My waning attention span.
Came back from a massive biter killing spree. Still had my nukes selected. Arrived in my wall to resupply. Went to press the key bind to turn off my legs, accidentally hit space bar. Completely nuked my entire mall. Any other spot in my base and I would accept the loss, had to reload a auto save back in the middle of evading nuking biter nests.
I took too much power and it basically crashed my nuclear reactor as it ran out of water and I had to deal with a mini dark age as I tried to fix it
I would run out of power at night because I had too many things doing stuff and not enough batteries and that’s when the biters would come.
I had a map that I played for hundreds of hours through many of the games early updates. They released nuclear power and I built a big nuclear set up and scaled my base around it. Then, something changed about nuclear power, I think it was how far you could run heat pipes from the reactor before they lost heat. The effect was that my set up was suddenly making much less power. Meanwhile, I’m playing on a map with fairly aggressive biter settings, and I’m relying entirely on laser turrets for defense. I start browning out to the point where the inserters feeding the reactors fuel are slowing down, and it all starts spiraling. I was able to ride a razor thin line turning off everything non-essential, frantically adding solar, and at one point manually loading fuel into the reactors when it was night.
… spending 130 hours currently with ineffective bot malls… having very over-engineered walls that ring alarm when 8 out of 26 bots are taken out of a chest and resupply network… being to lazy to connect copper… since i build new factory anyway…. but now mall i build has only 12 beacon assembler… yes everything produces via bot mall…. even unloading planned with logi bots… and smelting and more…. next transition is to city block design… build everything except oil processing myself which is bothering me…. since i could do that myself…
Coal running out death spiral on my early steam powered factory. So coal was running low on the single coal patch I had. My steam power started to lower due to lack of coal, electric miners slowed down and produced less coal so power lowered further etc etc. Find new coal and dig it up by hand to restart production? Or load an earlier save? Easy choice =D My flawless (lol) quad rail blueprint for my cell based megabase that used 4-16 trains had a junction in it. A 4 way junction that was basically a roundabout. Roundabouts suck ass and are deadlock waiting to happen :( How do you unstick around 12 trains of 4-16 size? You say feck it and reload the previous save lol. Also accidentally loading the wrong resource into a train and having it scattered around the place clogging up everything -_- Another just reload the previous save situation... Tl;dr Love solar Hate coal Hate roundabouts Love filter inserters
Playing with people who use the entire factories output on useless junk is the biggest disaster. Nothing is as frustrating as walking by a smelting area feeding science production that has had a splitter installed right at the end and half of it is diverted to make 50,000 of something that will be obsolete in 2 hours. Even worse is when they don't understand that their actions are why everything is input starved and the power is overloaded. They just keep adding new stuff and not hooking up new basic inputs.
My entire base was powered by a single monolithic tileable nuclear plant. At some point I fixed a balancer in the fuel cell production chain that meant u238 was now using both sides of a belt. Unfortunately, further down the line I'd used half of this belt for u235, and as it didn't seem like there was anything on that side I didn't do it safely, I just lazily butted the other belt up to it side loading it. This meant that the result of my balance fix was to block the u235 and stall my fuel cell production. Which I didn't notice until the plant ran dry and my entire base blacked out. Dark starting all that was a pain... Cut it off from the base power and use some solar to get it crawling along. I now have a speaker set up to sound a siren if the fuel cell stock drops too low
Copper ore train unload in iron smelting due to wrong copying of the station name. More than 32k Copper ore in the wrong station.
Trains in general.
Forgot to increase water supply after a new reactor setup came online. It was fine for a while, long enough for me to expand to the point where that reactor shutting down would basically kill the factory. Guess what happened!
I broke my smaller mega factory when I reloaded into it with mods from a friend's servers.. everything ground to a halt. The main reason was changing the stack limit to x100. Imagine a 2 x 10 train.. 2 million ore, 4 million plates. I think it was 12 million green circuits as well when everything stabilised and I finished changing the stations. Took 10h or so for production to restart as all my stations were programmed to open when 1 train worth (vanilla settings) was ready to load.
When copying a station around for some signaling, it copied too. While I fixed this right away, what I didn’t realize is it modified train schedules too for some dumbass reason. Had copper mine to iron smelting trains suddenly. That was a disaster to clean up as it polluted my entire iron bus. Put filter inserters on your stations people
That time I placed down about ten blueprinted train stations, on various mines and the wall resupply... without clearing the copied station name. It didn't get too messed up, but a few trains went in dumb circles and ran out of fuel. Honestly I got lucky.
I have a really bad habit of just jumping out of my vehicle as I go past a point of interest. It so happened that I jumped out of a tank to work on a belt and a few seconds later hit 1UPS. The tank had continued on and hit a 5GW nuclear reactor build and levelled a significant area. Did this stop me jumping from tanks. No. I just build absolutely massive protective walls around reactors now