Best games with production chains?

Yeah - I’d be up for a Qt3 game as well if anyone else is interested

Maybe this will help:

Hahaha ok. I hadn’t had any caffeine yet, ok?

And to be fair I at least got your joke in the Star Traders thread, so I’m batting 500.

My whole life is a joke.

Nice! I had to dig down to level -5 :P

I thought about scrapping everything, but then just tried to add efficiency to existing productions chains: more ingot molds more coal pits, etc. Starting doing mass production of single items used for builds on lower levels, etc. My level 0 is a giant, glorious, tangled mess:) I am really enjoying this game.

omg, I just got electricity. The whole game changes. I need to build some serious storage and transport infrastructure.

Also, can I just mention how annoying it is that the lifters switch directions on the other level? You can’t preview that and it took several very frustrating iterations to figure it out.

I haven’t hit electricity–just about to start researching it. I thought it was a huge improvement once I got digging to be pretty much automated. I basically put a whole floor on producing one good, which really dramatically simplifies things, and allows me to ignore the spaghetti mess on the top floor. (There’s really no equivalent to this kind of physical and mental compartmentalization in Factorio, I think.)

Is there some way to get rid of waste products? I’m just stuffing them into those 5,000-size warehouses. Can I dump them in a pristine lake somewhere?

Not as far as I’ve seen. You can delete the warehouses, but the game actually recovers some fraction of what was in there. Waste management seems to be one of the central puzzles of the game. I try to use flow control to deal with them. It also helps to know that barrels act as actual storage containers that you can draw from to build stuff. You can use them as conveyor “capacitors” and as a way to store waste.

Yeah, I’ve got tons of barrel buffers all over the place. I’ve been looking to see if there’s a way to powder and re-form and re-powder stuff, but I haven’t found anything. Each dig down uses up some amount of stuff, but not the stuff I want it to use up. :-/

I got electricity and haven’t got up the will to really dive in. I spaghetti’d some stuff through a bunch of different levels to make some turbines or whatever they’re called, and played around with some water wheels, but that’s it so far.

Oh I thought it was because tin doesn’t occur as an ore, per se.

" Tin does not occur as the native element but must be extracted from various ores. Cassiterite (SnO2) is the only commercially important source of tin, although small quantities of tin are recovered from complex sulfides such as stannite, cylindrite, franckeite, canfieldite, and teallite."

Needless to say, I also missed the joke quite dramatically. Thought someone was splitting hairs. :D

That’s about where I am. I’m having to start to pay attention to production rates, especially with the water. It took me 4 tries to get a water wheel/substation arrangement that I like, and I clearly haven’t paid enough attention to copper pipe production. I have a whole level of my factory devoted to copper now.

I might request an admin to split the Quarry posts to a new thread, since I think it deserves it.

I just started playing the quarry a bit. Over lunch. Apparently in the beginning, you can run yourself out of resources in an unrecoverable way since some things take wood and scaffolding, but you can’t produce that yet. Id probably like a stronger tutorial than the super-basic one in game, like how do you deal with stuff you do not want. IE: I have a clay mine that produces 3 clay and 1 dirt. I do not want the dirt, just the clay. I have a filter on an input of a furnace and I just build a long track for the dirt and then delete it when it gets full. Also clay sometimes gets on that track for some reason.

Yeah, you can hose yourself by using up necessary resources until you start producing iron ingots. Once you reach that point, you can recover from almost anything, unless you decide to wholesale delete large sections of your factory or something.

How you deal with stuff you don’t want is a significant part of the game’s puzzle. It’s part of the fun:) I’ll mention that there is nothing that is truly waste. Every material in the game is useful for something (or many things.) What you’ll end up with so much you don’t know what to do with is stone. What you’ll always need more of is steel.

Are you using a filter or a funnel? Funnels will shunt “useful” materials if the machine they’re attached to is already full. When a filter receives a material it first checks to see if it has any open outputs. (A backed up conveyor is not an open output.) If any of the open outputs specify that material, it will output on it. If none of them specify that material, the filter will choose an output somehow. So if you have a filter with one output specifying clay and the other one blank, clay will go out of the blank output if the clay output is full.

Also just be aware that when you delete stuff, some fraction of it is recovered and sent to an available storage container.

  1. there’s a tech that makes things much more recoverable
  2. I don’t think the contents of a deleted warehouse are recovered.

You might be right. I’d just been assuming they were. Huh. That will change a few things for me.

I finally got some sulfur powder and am on my way to making batteries. Power generation and oil refining is a whole other crazy paradigm. I really need to reorganize some of my factory at this point. It takes way too much active management–I’m rotating conveyors by hand to reroute things where they need to go. It works, and it keeps me busy, but my factory occupies many levels now, with production of something (or many things) on nearly every level, and it’s hard to keep track of what goes where and how. I have more than 25 hours in the game so far. It’s my favorite mobile game ever and is definitely in my top 5 games of this year overall.

Also playing The Quarry. Anyone know why my Rock Crusher won’t accept coal ore as input?? Driving me crazy.

Edit: you don’t put coal ore in a rock crusher, you put it in a ball mill. Duh!

I don’t think the was mentioned in this thread, but I just came back to it myself to try out: Anno 2070 with the Anno 2170 A.R.R.C. mod. Adds tons of extra stuff.

http://www.anno2170-arrc.de/index.php?page=info&language=en

Nice! This is such a good game. It needs more exposure. Regarding oil, when you’re tearing your hair out because you can’t figure out how to generate a certain material (you’ll know), see this spoiler:

spoilery oil related tip

distillation columns stack on top of each other, the output of one funnel graphic feeding the input of the next one… that’s what “in series” means

Took me about an hour of fooling around to figure that one out.

Kind of bogged down in The Quarry now. Batteries are kind of tedious to generate. I could automate and speed up the process somewhat, but I really need to beef up my power infrastructure to probably double of what I’ve got: from 200 kJ/s to 400 kJ/s. And I need to spend a bunch of time reconfiguring my turbine and rotor assemblers so that they’re completely autonomous.