Another couple of tips-- (1) Ship handcrafting is a separate queue from module handcrafting queue. This is especially useful when you're still crafting from raw resources, because you can craft ships without delaying other hand crafting jobs. (2) Inserters and cargo drones transfer rates are (transfer amount)/(distance). Inserters can transfer only 5 at a time, shuttles a lot more. So if you want to increase the transfer speed, leave enough space (or move the station to create space) to use a shuttle instead of an inserter... and either way, keep transfer distances down. The longer the ship has to travel, the lower the total rate of items transferred per minute. (3) When working with ship automation (cargo transfer), after you have your design, build (or move) the ship away from the start and end points-- then set waypoints. (4) Along those lines, remember that input/output are always set by the ship design. And maximizing transfer speeds involves aligning all structures. If you don't align everything at the start, and you have to rotate a ship, it adds an additional travel delay. (5) Full/Empty wait conditions only apply if you have actual storage in your ship design. If you have only buffers or cores (which can store some resources), the ship will be considered to have zero cargo and "wait full" or "wait empty" will trigger immediately upon arrival. (The ship will land and then immediately lift and travel to the next waypoint.) (6) Using "wait seconds" instead of "full/empty" increases fuel consumption associated with travel time. Something that's important to consider in low resource maps. (7) Struts not only lower station stability-- they also lower global stability-- global stability determines the threat from attack waves. This makes buffers potentially superior to cargo in some circumstances (obviously, not in the case of tip #5.) (8) Set specific requests for a shipyard before powering it up, that way you don't get spare ships in the shipyard you don't want. (This will fix itself over time, but it's a useful "order of operation" tip to ensure that the shipyard only stores ships you want stored there.) (9) Build shipyards to store defensive bots near the different edges of your territory-- defensive bots will be replaced from the nearest shipyard-- and then the shipyards will be restocked from your main shipbuilding location-- this both ensures that replacements are always available and arrive quickly-- and also ensures that you do not have to build shipbuilding at different places around your territory in order to ensure quick delivery of replacement bots.
Thank you for the tips video. I don't want to distract you from Final Factory but can also confirm that Factorio is also made with a lot of love poured into it. The recent patch notes they publish week by week as they develop their expansion pack have been a fascinating insight into the passion they pour into making it a good game that feels good to play and features cool stuff. I think your mining stations can accept a strut between the mining stations on either side if you want to conserve global stability. This isn't obvious but struts only work in one direction, so for max utility between equally sized structures you need a strut going in both directions. And yes, this should definitely be more clear to the players without having to reach for the community. For the ships, I love the minimalistic ship - been trying to make "how small can I go while still doing the thing?" designs myself. One tip is that you don't actually need to move the cargo or fuel round inside your cargo ship - you can just feed directly into and out of the cargo holds or thruster and skip placing any conveyors at all. Also the mass converter carousel is very pleasing to the eyes. Also glad to see you reinforced your defenses, it's such a relief when you start to feel like you get a handle on the enemy attacks.
Really good episode. Appreciate how informative you are while keeping things simple. Looking forward to seeing how you deal with the next tier of the game, organics were my nightmare, haha.
Another helpful episode, thanks. I really like the design-your-own shipping vessels mechanic in this game. Seems like it opens up the factory design possibilities a lot.
