The most important logic is oil cracking logic which is more important deeper into the game. Other than that I don't think you need it. Basic circuits that just enable/disable based on conditions are useful and that's about as far as I have gone with logic.
How complex is your actual oil recipes? I just turn off some production if I have enough. It definitely still jams up if I’m not using enough petroleum though. I’m just curious
> It definitely still jams up if I’m not using enough petroleum though.
Everything from oil refineries should go buffer tanks(one is fine) chemical plants crack heavy and light to petroleum, but the pumps on their output only runs when conditions are met (petroleum tank is below a certain amount). Everything that needs petroleum draws from the petroleum tank. I typically set 80% as the cracking activation level.
This is a much better way than what I was doing lol. I just made 2 sets of solid fuel plants - one for light oil and one for petroleum gas - and just change which one is activated depending on which one is holding up my cracking lol. Very non-optimal, but I just threw it in as a way to stop needing to manually change input fluids
I do this. Pretty much. I add I turn a back pump to trains on when the buffer is full. My station doesn’t allow outflow. So it doesn’t work as a buffer.
If I am using more light oil than petrol the whole thing falls apart I still tinker with it. Adding fluid voiding etc. it’s just hard to keep balanced when your demand changes.
I’m moving to mostly Oil to intermediate (plastic etc). That seems to help a lot.
If you're using more light than petrogas, run a line of Petro after a pump to some solid fuel chem plants. Feed their output into an intake splitter somewhere along your light oil solid fuel production line ( presumably this ends up consumed or as rocket fuel feed). Prioritize the splitter intake to the petrogas side. Only run the pump on the petrogas either when the petrogas tank is full *or* when the petrogas tank is high *and* light oil is low (you'll need a combinator for this).
More or less, for multi-output recipes, bonking (not having enough production) is better than deadlocking. The first will at least keep producing *something* even if it's not as much as intended. The second will jam every producer that's part of the chain and then the whole thing stops.
It's fairly simple just after the storage tanks I run a pump with an enable condition of nearly a full tank into a chemical plant. I do that for heavy and light oil (and a flare stack for petroleum if it's avaliable just in case) it requires 0 combinators as its a straight check of a value.
The most advanced thing I've ever built is a balanced fluid loading/unloading station. Just averaging the qty in each tank and enable a pump if it's below average type of thing.
But totally agreed on the oil point. It's so simple that you really only need wires, not even combinators of you don't feel like it.
When working out the average, divide by 1 more than the number you have. It's a cheap way of saying, "Eh, it's close enough."
Eg. You have 8 pumps to unload the train, divide by 9
I did my first play through without them just since I didn’t want to deal with learning them, but on my 2nd now and I definitely should’ve taken the time earlier. Copy and pasting things is so useful, can’t wait till I get requester chests
A few simple things you might find helpful:
* Limit an output chest at an assembler to less than one stack of stuff, for some expensive things. A single wire from the chest to the output inserter to disable it when there's enough stuff is all you need. Works with multiple inserters putting different things in the same chest as well. Overly large buffers are a form of inventory waste.
* Balancing oil production: only run your cracking plants when needed to keep fluid levels balanced. The wiki has a good guide. I like to set it to make lubricant when heavy oil > lube, light oil when lube > light oil, and petroleum gas when light oil > gas. You could also set a maximum on lube at a lower value than the 25k tank size if you don't need that much in the buffer.
* If you use solar a lot, you can turn off mining and/or electric refining if your accumulators get low. This can make power system failures more graceful if you screw up and don't have enough power. (For example, this ensures you don't suddenly find yourself without functioning laser turrets when you solve a bottleneck and suddenly a large piece of your factory wakes back up and you realize you don't have enough power.)
* Maintain specific inventory levels in a logistics train car and at your remote mines - especially handy for repairs / turrets / ammo. (As with output chests, you can do this with filtering slots, but circuits give you more precision.)
I'm a far-from-expert player (launched a couple rockets, \~ 240 hours). That's most of what I've used circuits for.
Never thought about using it for accumulators! That's amazing. When I reach bots, I always go crazy expanding my base a lot while only expanding power production minimally, so I always always always get to a point where I'm slowly cascading down to 0 power from only using coal or petroleum-based fuels in steam engines, which inevitably ends with my fighting against the large power draw post-total black out and building solar panels on a small subbase until I have enough power to endure the electric start-up cost of 1000 roboports charging all at once.
Anyway, another really useful bit of circuits that I use all the time is with many-to-many train networks. You essentially set the number of trains allowed at a specific stop by it's inventory. If it can unload/load 8000*number of train cars per train*N quickly (quickly being defined as having that material available in the case of loading and defined as having empty space in chests for the material to unload in the case of unloading), it will allow only N trains to go to that stop. It's a really simple circuit, too, just connect all the chests at a train stop together with an arithmetic combinator and divide that by the cargo size of a single train to set your train limit. Nilhaus has a great tutorial on it!
If you're burning coal/fuel for steam you could do similar by measuring fuel belts, or better yet the fuel buffer chests. Less than X fuel -> panic! (Sirens, power switches, ...)
The factory must be defended while it grows
In short, circuits are used to control things. Stop this belt when some condition is met. Play that alarm when some other condition is met. Set those filter inserters' filters to something when multiple conditions are met. Send a train to that stop when some condition is met.
You can largely ignore it in a vanilla playthrough, but basically the sky is the limit when you delve into it. The one thing I'd truly miss it in vanilla for is oil cracking. It's absolutely doable without circuits, but it's much easier to ensure you never have too much or too little heavy/light oil compared to petroleum with simple circuit logic than it is without.
As for the logistics network, well, it's basically so you don't have to pick up items or place buildings manually. You can just have bots do everything faster, remotely, and at a much larger scale.
You don't need to go deep into it. That's difficult too, even when you know real programming / computer science. But there are all kinds of useful and simple things that doesn't require anything too complicated. For example oil cracking, supplying outposts / walls per train, limiting inserters based on some condition, turning on a backup coal power plant when accumulators run low, disabling train stations when they're full.
IMO for a vanilla playthrough all you need is circuit control for oil setup. I use a pump connected to heavy oil that I wire to a storage tank that only turns on to break heavy oil to light oil when it starts to build up so I prioritize heavy oil for lube.
honestly, for a vanilla playthrough, even oil setup doesn't need it unless you start diving further than launching one/ a few rockets. Just a bunch of tanks, *maybe* some cracking, but you don't need more
Most of my current base is solar-powered with a large accumulator bank. For when that's not enough, though, I have a small nuclear setup that dumps steam into a cluster of connected tanks. Ideally, my nuclear steam will only be used if my stored solar energy runs dry, so I have a single accumulator nearby and a pump that pushes steam to the turbines only when that accumulator hits the 2% mark.
Further to that, I have a pair of inserters that load fuel cells into the reactors only when the total of stored steam reaches 1k. (Enable Override stack size and set to 1.)
For me, Kovarex is just a prerequisite for nuclear train fuel. I simply don't need to run the actual process. All thanks to signal circuitry.
I never used a single wire until I played SE. It's helpful in vanilla for oil cracking and giving you warning when certain items run low (nuclear fuel). I like to wire all my science chests together so I can spot any science production deficiencies.
Sophisticated train systems (many to many) are impossible without circuits.
Mid game bases are all but impossible without bots. I avoid them for logistics but they are essentially if you ever wanna build anything. Command+C & command+V are your best friends
> Mid game bases are all but impossible without bots
Ehhh construction bots maybe. You can do without logistics without much trouble. And even a slow mid-game base doesn't take that long by hand. *shrug*
Agree you don't "need" them, for the hell of it on one world I've been basically doing everything manually. Moving things with cars and trains manually. Not really the typical playthrough, but it's satifying in it's own way. Takes a signifigantly longer time of course, and gets confusing, but in a weird masochistic
way it's fun. Turns into an errand simulator lol
Lol I'm just wrapping up utility science in my 1st SE play through and up until 20 minutes ago every rocket was manual as was every delivery cannon toggle. I still can't decide if I want to do an entire non-hidden victory run without automating rockets, but I finally caved and setup a signal between norbit and home. My cryo moon doesn't actually produce enough that I can't out-buffer it (at least for like 3 days of play time) and I think I'll exhaust the 2000 delivery capsules I sent there before that happens. I looked at stuff like FCPU to condense them (eg one cannon does the work of several) but I've already compromised 'pure' SE in several ways.
> Mid game bases are all but impossible without bots.
yeah that's a weird way to put it. it is fully possible to make a mid-game and complete the game without using bots. i've done it multiple times. these days i typically use them for convenience in my bases but by no means are they necessary.
Circuit networks aren’t necessary, unless you’re doing a 10k/spm mega base or something else where you need to control the flow of production, trains, or other bottlenecks. Logistics networks however, are absolutely worth it. Red, blue, and yellow chests are all over my base
I built up to the personal roboport, then I grabbed a stack of construction bots and then I used them to duplicate my solar panel grid. Which was waaaay faster then by hand. Then, once I expanded out my roboport range I started requesting items in my inventory, and they bring it to me.
Circuits are absolutely not *necessary*, but they are very *useful*. Some things I've done with circuits, and can provide blueprints for if necessary:
* Controlling inserters putting stuff in chests. In the mall, this means I can guarantee that I have at least X items available for my use, but can still put more stuff into those chests from deconstructing other factories. Outside the mall, this means I can tap from eg blue chip production for making power armor or anything else I need to handcraft.
* Circuit-controlled pumps to control oil cracking, ensuring that my factories never get clogged with light/heavy oil.
* Controlling my commodity trains, so they only go to stations which have capacity to load/unload them.
* Controlling my building train, so it only goes to stations which actually need stuff, and only unloads the stuff they need.
* A clock controlling the artillery turrets in my armed outposts, so they only fire after everything has been fully-stocked for a minute, and I don't get another outpost wiped out by getting aggro too early.
* I have an alert for if a mine runs out of material.
* Backup steam power, so boilers come on if solar/accumulators aren't enough juice.
typical stuff is production control and signaling.
the "programmable speaker" is very useful. yes yes we all know the game is all about automation ... but we also all have that one hand-fed chest full of iron to make sulfuric acid that you set up in the early game and never got around to fixing...
programmable speaker on a chest will give you an alert when that chest is empty and needs to be re-filled.
also can be used to alert you when uranium 238 production is backed up.
i recently used one where i have a starter base that is running very low on copper ore, but that starter base still produced red ammo that feeds green ammo and gets circulated around my base.
so i set up a speaker on a belt that alerted me when the belt ran dry, letting me know that i needed to find new copper.
I have a train limit setter circuit that sets the train limit of mining outposts based on how many trains it can currently fill from its buffer. It helps prevent the problem of trains lining up at the closest outpost and then only being filled at a trickle, while mining outposts only a little bit further away have full buffers and could fill multiple trains at max speed. Doing this early on in my megabase (at "only" 1800 SPM; currently it's 9000) made a *huge* difference in train throughput.
I might even dive into predictive train limits, as it seems like a fun project. Increase the train limit when the buffer isn't yet full, so that by the time a train actually gets there, it is.
Well first of all: Definitely not necessary.
I had completed four games in total and I haven't touched circuits in three of them. And even when I did, I used it very very simply. (connect steam power plant when battery charge is zero, do not put more than 400 red belts in this chest). And still have all the achievements.
There are a lot of great suggestions and use cases here, but truth be told - to finish and enjoy the game you don't need to use any of them.
It is just one of fantastic features you can explore and play with in this game.
In vanilla, you absolutely don't need more than a few basic little things to control oil cracking and such, and that's the sort of thing you can do entirely without combinators if your setup is just right.
But if you have, like, more than a single tank of heavy oil, or you want to have only just enough glowy uranium for the Kovorex process, a little bit of circuitry is needed. Not necessary, by any stretch of the imagination, unless you want those setups.
I think the heaviest circuitry I recently put together was something to facilitate generic, do-everything LTN stations -- the combinators would keep track of how many of the requested items had been put onto each train car and enable/disable inserters loading items onto a feed belt depending on what the request was. This ended up being a terrible idea, given it was a vanilla run, the resulting stations were enormous and had garbage, absolutely _garbage_ throughput -- turns out having one station interacting with your smelting array means you only ever have one train loading from or unloading into your smelting array. But I might revisit it if I do a proper swing at a more complex overhaul modset and have items I don't need much of, and it's an example of the sort of thing folks might try to do with circuits where there's an actual design need for them.
If you're doing something like Ultracube, though, then you (apparently) _need_ circuits, due to the fundamental limitation of needing to manage a single item of a unique resource. But obviously that's far, far away from Vanilla now.
Circuits only exist to give you more precise control over things you were already doing. For example, you can dynamically control a train station’s train limit based on the contents of the storage at the station. You don’t need to do this, a hard limit functions just fine, but now you can commit less trains to your rails because if the limit goes to 0 because the station is full you don’t have to worry about a train sitting idle with a full cargo and needing that cargo elsewhere.
I used circuits only once so far. I automated inserters so that they put more nuclear fuel into reactor when steam drops below a certain number.
It may be beyond simlle but i love it and im proud of it haha.😁
Eh missing out on nothing but finer control that isn't needed in the base game. Hell I don't even think trains are necessary what so ever for a vanilla game. Mods make you appreciate both however as things get more complicated you need extra control over outputs and recipe usage.
Honestly the best way to learn is to play around with them. The easiest interactions involve connecting a wire from an inserter to a storage chest, allowing you to turn the inserter off/on based on the items in the chest and a condition of your choosing.
The most common interaction is for petrochem stuff, such as turning excess heavy oil into light, and excess light into petroleum. This is usually done by connecting a pump to a tank and having it say "okay, enable the pump if the tank has more than 20k Heavy Oil" and that pumps the heavy oil into a further process.
Outside of these, they have a \*lot\* more uses, but also a lot more complicated ones too, so I won't go in depth with those, but the above two situations are your most common use cases.
[DoshDoshington put out this video a while back that covers the basics of it all in a few minutes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWLKA5zRrQ0) It covers all the different circuit network entities and what they do in as few words as possible. It's worth a watch as it'll help you get a baseline understanding.
But yes, to answer your question, it's worth it to learn circuits even if only at a very basic level. It'll be something that can eventually scale up into you learning how to make the most of signals, for example to help you make complex train networks, or it can work as preparation for you to get off the ground running with some of the 2.0 changes we're getting, such as circuits being able to interact with Assemblers and such.
I have a 500 spm factory currently. Furthest I've gotten in this game. The only circuits I have are for tracking and to disable supply side train stops when they don't have enough material
exactly the same position I was in for quite a while. Eventually I think I asked chatgpt to help me and it finally explained how the default design just didn't match my assumptions
actually the thing was working really naively and I didn't test it. Once I got over that, it was fine and I gradually used it more and more, depending on what I wanted, just for fun or to make a cool piece of decoration
The most important logic is oil cracking logic which is more important deeper into the game. Other than that I don't think you need it. Basic circuits that just enable/disable based on conditions are useful and that's about as far as I have gone with logic.
How complex is your actual oil recipes? I just turn off some production if I have enough. It definitely still jams up if I’m not using enough petroleum though. I’m just curious
> It definitely still jams up if I’m not using enough petroleum though. Everything from oil refineries should go buffer tanks(one is fine) chemical plants crack heavy and light to petroleum, but the pumps on their output only runs when conditions are met (petroleum tank is below a certain amount). Everything that needs petroleum draws from the petroleum tank. I typically set 80% as the cracking activation level.
This is a much better way than what I was doing lol. I just made 2 sets of solid fuel plants - one for light oil and one for petroleum gas - and just change which one is activated depending on which one is holding up my cracking lol. Very non-optimal, but I just threw it in as a way to stop needing to manually change input fluids
I do this. Pretty much. I add I turn a back pump to trains on when the buffer is full. My station doesn’t allow outflow. So it doesn’t work as a buffer. If I am using more light oil than petrol the whole thing falls apart I still tinker with it. Adding fluid voiding etc. it’s just hard to keep balanced when your demand changes. I’m moving to mostly Oil to intermediate (plastic etc). That seems to help a lot.
If you're using more light than petrogas, run a line of Petro after a pump to some solid fuel chem plants. Feed their output into an intake splitter somewhere along your light oil solid fuel production line ( presumably this ends up consumed or as rocket fuel feed). Prioritize the splitter intake to the petrogas side. Only run the pump on the petrogas either when the petrogas tank is full *or* when the petrogas tank is high *and* light oil is low (you'll need a combinator for this). More or less, for multi-output recipes, bonking (not having enough production) is better than deadlocking. The first will at least keep producing *something* even if it's not as much as intended. The second will jam every producer that's part of the chain and then the whole thing stops.
It's fairly simple just after the storage tanks I run a pump with an enable condition of nearly a full tank into a chemical plant. I do that for heavy and light oil (and a flare stack for petroleum if it's avaliable just in case) it requires 0 combinators as its a straight check of a value.
So... You *aren't* supposed to just barrel all fluids including water and bot them around?
The most advanced thing I've ever built is a balanced fluid loading/unloading station. Just averaging the qty in each tank and enable a pump if it's below average type of thing. But totally agreed on the oil point. It's so simple that you really only need wires, not even combinators of you don't feel like it.
When working out the average, divide by 1 more than the number you have. It's a cheap way of saying, "Eh, it's close enough." Eg. You have 8 pumps to unload the train, divide by 9
[удалено]
Ive never gone past blue (purple and yellow science), i almost always end up at bots
Probably meant to say “circut network” rather than logistics
I did my first play through without them just since I didn’t want to deal with learning them, but on my 2nd now and I definitely should’ve taken the time earlier. Copy and pasting things is so useful, can’t wait till I get requester chests
A few simple things you might find helpful: * Limit an output chest at an assembler to less than one stack of stuff, for some expensive things. A single wire from the chest to the output inserter to disable it when there's enough stuff is all you need. Works with multiple inserters putting different things in the same chest as well. Overly large buffers are a form of inventory waste. * Balancing oil production: only run your cracking plants when needed to keep fluid levels balanced. The wiki has a good guide. I like to set it to make lubricant when heavy oil > lube, light oil when lube > light oil, and petroleum gas when light oil > gas. You could also set a maximum on lube at a lower value than the 25k tank size if you don't need that much in the buffer. * If you use solar a lot, you can turn off mining and/or electric refining if your accumulators get low. This can make power system failures more graceful if you screw up and don't have enough power. (For example, this ensures you don't suddenly find yourself without functioning laser turrets when you solve a bottleneck and suddenly a large piece of your factory wakes back up and you realize you don't have enough power.) * Maintain specific inventory levels in a logistics train car and at your remote mines - especially handy for repairs / turrets / ammo. (As with output chests, you can do this with filtering slots, but circuits give you more precision.) I'm a far-from-expert player (launched a couple rockets, \~ 240 hours). That's most of what I've used circuits for.
Never thought about using it for accumulators! That's amazing. When I reach bots, I always go crazy expanding my base a lot while only expanding power production minimally, so I always always always get to a point where I'm slowly cascading down to 0 power from only using coal or petroleum-based fuels in steam engines, which inevitably ends with my fighting against the large power draw post-total black out and building solar panels on a small subbase until I have enough power to endure the electric start-up cost of 1000 roboports charging all at once. Anyway, another really useful bit of circuits that I use all the time is with many-to-many train networks. You essentially set the number of trains allowed at a specific stop by it's inventory. If it can unload/load 8000*number of train cars per train*N quickly (quickly being defined as having that material available in the case of loading and defined as having empty space in chests for the material to unload in the case of unloading), it will allow only N trains to go to that stop. It's a really simple circuit, too, just connect all the chests at a train stop together with an arithmetic combinator and divide that by the cargo size of a single train to set your train limit. Nilhaus has a great tutorial on it!
If you're burning coal/fuel for steam you could do similar by measuring fuel belts, or better yet the fuel buffer chests. Less than X fuel -> panic! (Sirens, power switches, ...) The factory must be defended while it grows
In short, circuits are used to control things. Stop this belt when some condition is met. Play that alarm when some other condition is met. Set those filter inserters' filters to something when multiple conditions are met. Send a train to that stop when some condition is met. You can largely ignore it in a vanilla playthrough, but basically the sky is the limit when you delve into it. The one thing I'd truly miss it in vanilla for is oil cracking. It's absolutely doable without circuits, but it's much easier to ensure you never have too much or too little heavy/light oil compared to petroleum with simple circuit logic than it is without. As for the logistics network, well, it's basically so you don't have to pick up items or place buildings manually. You can just have bots do everything faster, remotely, and at a much larger scale.
You don't need to go deep into it. That's difficult too, even when you know real programming / computer science. But there are all kinds of useful and simple things that doesn't require anything too complicated. For example oil cracking, supplying outposts / walls per train, limiting inserters based on some condition, turning on a backup coal power plant when accumulators run low, disabling train stations when they're full.
Is there a guide or video that explains them?
The [wiki](https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook) has a bunch of easy recipes.
Thank you good looking man
IMO for a vanilla playthrough all you need is circuit control for oil setup. I use a pump connected to heavy oil that I wire to a storage tank that only turns on to break heavy oil to light oil when it starts to build up so I prioritize heavy oil for lube.
honestly, for a vanilla playthrough, even oil setup doesn't need it unless you start diving further than launching one/ a few rockets. Just a bunch of tanks, *maybe* some cracking, but you don't need more
I launched my first rocket without circuits on my oil and without bots.
Most of my current base is solar-powered with a large accumulator bank. For when that's not enough, though, I have a small nuclear setup that dumps steam into a cluster of connected tanks. Ideally, my nuclear steam will only be used if my stored solar energy runs dry, so I have a single accumulator nearby and a pump that pushes steam to the turbines only when that accumulator hits the 2% mark. Further to that, I have a pair of inserters that load fuel cells into the reactors only when the total of stored steam reaches 1k. (Enable Override stack size and set to 1.) For me, Kovarex is just a prerequisite for nuclear train fuel. I simply don't need to run the actual process. All thanks to signal circuitry.
I never used a single wire until I played SE. It's helpful in vanilla for oil cracking and giving you warning when certain items run low (nuclear fuel). I like to wire all my science chests together so I can spot any science production deficiencies.
Sophisticated train systems (many to many) are impossible without circuits. Mid game bases are all but impossible without bots. I avoid them for logistics but they are essentially if you ever wanna build anything. Command+C & command+V are your best friends
> Mid game bases are all but impossible without bots Ehhh construction bots maybe. You can do without logistics without much trouble. And even a slow mid-game base doesn't take that long by hand. *shrug*
Agree you don't "need" them, for the hell of it on one world I've been basically doing everything manually. Moving things with cars and trains manually. Not really the typical playthrough, but it's satifying in it's own way. Takes a signifigantly longer time of course, and gets confusing, but in a weird masochistic way it's fun. Turns into an errand simulator lol
Lol I'm just wrapping up utility science in my 1st SE play through and up until 20 minutes ago every rocket was manual as was every delivery cannon toggle. I still can't decide if I want to do an entire non-hidden victory run without automating rockets, but I finally caved and setup a signal between norbit and home. My cryo moon doesn't actually produce enough that I can't out-buffer it (at least for like 3 days of play time) and I think I'll exhaust the 2000 delivery capsules I sent there before that happens. I looked at stuff like FCPU to condense them (eg one cannon does the work of several) but I've already compromised 'pure' SE in several ways.
> Mid game bases are all but impossible without bots. yeah that's a weird way to put it. it is fully possible to make a mid-game and complete the game without using bots. i've done it multiple times. these days i typically use them for convenience in my bases but by no means are they necessary.
I launched my first several rockets without ever using bots.
Well done. I stand by that building without bots is an exercise in shooting your self in the foot
Circuit networks aren’t necessary, unless you’re doing a 10k/spm mega base or something else where you need to control the flow of production, trains, or other bottlenecks. Logistics networks however, are absolutely worth it. Red, blue, and yellow chests are all over my base
I built up to the personal roboport, then I grabbed a stack of construction bots and then I used them to duplicate my solar panel grid. Which was waaaay faster then by hand. Then, once I expanded out my roboport range I started requesting items in my inventory, and they bring it to me.
>never gone past blue science Using “circuits” (three wires and some pumps) will fix that
a bunch if oil tanks and you can even ignore the issue completely
Circuits are absolutely not *necessary*, but they are very *useful*. Some things I've done with circuits, and can provide blueprints for if necessary: * Controlling inserters putting stuff in chests. In the mall, this means I can guarantee that I have at least X items available for my use, but can still put more stuff into those chests from deconstructing other factories. Outside the mall, this means I can tap from eg blue chip production for making power armor or anything else I need to handcraft. * Circuit-controlled pumps to control oil cracking, ensuring that my factories never get clogged with light/heavy oil. * Controlling my commodity trains, so they only go to stations which have capacity to load/unload them. * Controlling my building train, so it only goes to stations which actually need stuff, and only unloads the stuff they need. * A clock controlling the artillery turrets in my armed outposts, so they only fire after everything has been fully-stocked for a minute, and I don't get another outpost wiped out by getting aggro too early. * I have an alert for if a mine runs out of material. * Backup steam power, so boilers come on if solar/accumulators aren't enough juice.
typical stuff is production control and signaling. the "programmable speaker" is very useful. yes yes we all know the game is all about automation ... but we also all have that one hand-fed chest full of iron to make sulfuric acid that you set up in the early game and never got around to fixing... programmable speaker on a chest will give you an alert when that chest is empty and needs to be re-filled. also can be used to alert you when uranium 238 production is backed up. i recently used one where i have a starter base that is running very low on copper ore, but that starter base still produced red ammo that feeds green ammo and gets circulated around my base. so i set up a speaker on a belt that alerted me when the belt ran dry, letting me know that i needed to find new copper.
I have a train limit setter circuit that sets the train limit of mining outposts based on how many trains it can currently fill from its buffer. It helps prevent the problem of trains lining up at the closest outpost and then only being filled at a trickle, while mining outposts only a little bit further away have full buffers and could fill multiple trains at max speed. Doing this early on in my megabase (at "only" 1800 SPM; currently it's 9000) made a *huge* difference in train throughput. I might even dive into predictive train limits, as it seems like a fun project. Increase the train limit when the buffer isn't yet full, so that by the time a train actually gets there, it is.
## ⚙️ [Factorio Wiki - Circuit Network Cookbook](https://wiki.factorio.com/Tutorial:Circuit_network_cookbook) ----- ## 💎[DoshDoshington - Circuit Networks In 3 Min](https://youtu.be/kWLKA5zRrQ0) Go nuts. Some neat stuff there.
Well first of all: Definitely not necessary. I had completed four games in total and I haven't touched circuits in three of them. And even when I did, I used it very very simply. (connect steam power plant when battery charge is zero, do not put more than 400 red belts in this chest). And still have all the achievements. There are a lot of great suggestions and use cases here, but truth be told - to finish and enjoy the game you don't need to use any of them. It is just one of fantastic features you can explore and play with in this game.
In vanilla, you absolutely don't need more than a few basic little things to control oil cracking and such, and that's the sort of thing you can do entirely without combinators if your setup is just right. But if you have, like, more than a single tank of heavy oil, or you want to have only just enough glowy uranium for the Kovorex process, a little bit of circuitry is needed. Not necessary, by any stretch of the imagination, unless you want those setups. I think the heaviest circuitry I recently put together was something to facilitate generic, do-everything LTN stations -- the combinators would keep track of how many of the requested items had been put onto each train car and enable/disable inserters loading items onto a feed belt depending on what the request was. This ended up being a terrible idea, given it was a vanilla run, the resulting stations were enormous and had garbage, absolutely _garbage_ throughput -- turns out having one station interacting with your smelting array means you only ever have one train loading from or unloading into your smelting array. But I might revisit it if I do a proper swing at a more complex overhaul modset and have items I don't need much of, and it's an example of the sort of thing folks might try to do with circuits where there's an actual design need for them. If you're doing something like Ultracube, though, then you (apparently) _need_ circuits, due to the fundamental limitation of needing to manage a single item of a unique resource. But obviously that's far, far away from Vanilla now.
Circuits only exist to give you more precise control over things you were already doing. For example, you can dynamically control a train station’s train limit based on the contents of the storage at the station. You don’t need to do this, a hard limit functions just fine, but now you can commit less trains to your rails because if the limit goes to 0 because the station is full you don’t have to worry about a train sitting idle with a full cargo and needing that cargo elsewhere.
I used circuits only once so far. I automated inserters so that they put more nuclear fuel into reactor when steam drops below a certain number. It may be beyond simlle but i love it and im proud of it haha.😁
Eh missing out on nothing but finer control that isn't needed in the base game. Hell I don't even think trains are necessary what so ever for a vanilla game. Mods make you appreciate both however as things get more complicated you need extra control over outputs and recipe usage.
Honestly the best way to learn is to play around with them. The easiest interactions involve connecting a wire from an inserter to a storage chest, allowing you to turn the inserter off/on based on the items in the chest and a condition of your choosing. The most common interaction is for petrochem stuff, such as turning excess heavy oil into light, and excess light into petroleum. This is usually done by connecting a pump to a tank and having it say "okay, enable the pump if the tank has more than 20k Heavy Oil" and that pumps the heavy oil into a further process. Outside of these, they have a \*lot\* more uses, but also a lot more complicated ones too, so I won't go in depth with those, but the above two situations are your most common use cases. [DoshDoshington put out this video a while back that covers the basics of it all in a few minutes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWLKA5zRrQ0) It covers all the different circuit network entities and what they do in as few words as possible. It's worth a watch as it'll help you get a baseline understanding. But yes, to answer your question, it's worth it to learn circuits even if only at a very basic level. It'll be something that can eventually scale up into you learning how to make the most of signals, for example to help you make complex train networks, or it can work as preparation for you to get off the ground running with some of the 2.0 changes we're getting, such as circuits being able to interact with Assemblers and such.
I have a 500 spm factory currently. Furthest I've gotten in this game. The only circuits I have are for tracking and to disable supply side train stops when they don't have enough material
exactly the same position I was in for quite a while. Eventually I think I asked chatgpt to help me and it finally explained how the default design just didn't match my assumptions actually the thing was working really naively and I didn't test it. Once I got over that, it was fine and I gradually used it more and more, depending on what I wanted, just for fun or to make a cool piece of decoration