Factory Planner


This mod allows you to plan your production in advance, specifying the recipes and machines that make up each assembly line. It provides powerful features that are fast and intuitive to use, so you can focus on actually building your factory.

Utilities
3 months ago
0.17 - 1.1
204K

i [Complicated] Power production recipes

4 years ago

I got this mod to replace Helmod, and so far it's been much more intuitive and less laggy, so thank you very much for your work!

One thing I haven't been able to find - and to be fair I can't find it in Helmod either - is any way to calculate the necessary input of a given fuel to provide a certain amount of power, whether player-defined or calculated by the overall factory plan.

I think it could be done fairly simply - any fuel item has a fuel value attached to it, and every properly-built power generator will convert 100% of that value into electricity. Badly-arranged power setups are probably beyond scope - calculating the power loss you'd see from, say, a MK4 Bob's boiler attached to a steam engine, for example, probably wouldn't be necessary.

The reason this is important to me, and why I don't just do the math by hand, is that in some mods/modpacks, producing fuel consumes a lot of power on its own, and the process loops back in on itself. In my Seablock save, for example, I have to produce Carbon for fuel - 3MJ per item. Producing 7.5 carbon per second - one first-tier belt - gives me 22.5MW, but according to your mod requires an input of 7.35MW (and is actually producing 8.8 carbon per second, but 1.3 is consumed in the same subfactory). I've also had to forcibly adjust certain parts of this subfactory not to massively overproduce - which I am very grateful for the ability to do, since I couldn't find an option for that in Helmod.

Anyway, to summarize, it'd be cool to have a panel for how many of a given fuel item I'd need per s/m/h to keep my factory powered. Bonus points for mixed power sources (solar, for example, or the windmills from KS power if you wanna deal with variable-output sources).

4 years ago
(updated 4 years ago)

" I can't find it in Helmod either - is any way to calculate the necessary input of a given fuel to provide a certain amount of power"
Just like in Helmod, you set your time-scale to seconds, which is going to give you a direct J to W conversion. But you're right that you then need to do extra math to get the overall efficiency of your power setup !

"every properly-built power generator will convert 100% of that value into electricity"
No, power generators can have efficiencies different from 100%.
(I'm still hopeful that bob is going to bring efficiencies back to his mods - having boilers(&/or steam engines) not get any efficiency improvements any more makes the higher tiers almost pointless...
EDIT : Except for pollution, but that's not relevant in mods that disable pollution (or spawners), like Sea Block.

4 years ago

I do know that I can get a J to W value easily enough, but I wasn't asking about efficiency so much as, "How many of [fuel item] do I need per second to power this?" Efficiency is a different issue, which you also addressed. I just don't like having to do fiddly bits of math to figure out how much fuel I need to be producing, especially not when there's a feedback loop of needing more power to produce that fuel (which, this mod already handles loops VERY well with production, I hope a loop in power production isn't too much harder).

And you're right of course, that efficiencies can be different. I was mainly thinking of vanilla generators though, and current-gen Bob's generators. I would LOVE to see Bob bring the efficiency changes back myself. Especially for Seablock, where that can have a huge impact on the power generation loop, but also for other setups.

4 years ago

at least for burner machines (burner smelter, coal piles in fantario, etc) this mod really nicely shows the used fuel right next to the ingredients and thus can be handled like all other ingredients too. NICE!

BUT: even if some machine produces its own fuel, this is shown as additional ingredient (with blue background) as well as some surplus or at least not included in the produced amount (depending on whether the option for the number of machines (hard cap) is used. it's nice that i CAN use that hard cap to force a higher production and then check whether there is still something missing or a small surplus/byproduct (the item can be in the list of ingredients as well as the list of byproducts at the same time!), but that's not what i would call "handling loops VERY well". some time ago, it was said that loops currently are not handled, and that would be on the todo list for some future version ...

I mostly end up to set some machines that are part of loops to some hard cap and manually check the ingredients/byproducts whether i need more adjustments to those numbers. Helmod has some "matrix solver" to do this automatically for loops, but sometimes i got negative amounts of machines from this which is not helpful either.
and with the current problem in this mod (version 0.18.1, for the bugreport see other thread) not even this "hard cap and check manually" is possible since all ingredients are shown in green and neither ingredients nor byproducts are shown in the summary :-(

4 years ago

Alright I'll try to address the points I picked up on separately (sorry for taking so long to respond, your feedback is very much appreciated)

The power production calculation thing has been requested for quite some time, pretty much since I released this mod. The complexity of having 2 parts or 3 parts to most power production setups scared me away thus far, especially when I have to consider all the mods that are out there. Although I have to confess that I didn't investigate it in detail yet. The thing is that it is pretty much a completely different system to the recipe stuff, that would need a completely different UI and backend, only for it to result in one number that related to the rest of the mod. It's a lot of effort is what I'm saying, for not a gigantic benefit, except in some modded edge cases like in Seablock. I definitely see the point in it, it would be great, but as I said, a lot of work. It's not off the table, I'll investigate at some point, and it might turn out that it's not that complicated after all.

Regarding Ansons's point, the case of mining coal with a coal-burning miner is a bit unfortunate. It's not handled yet because, if you think about it, it's quite a rare edge case. I'm also not sure what the solution would be, I think it might require a recursive calculation to approximate the real amount of coal consumption and amount of miners. My calculation model is trimmed for performance, and already quite complicated, so I didn't want to add further calculations. But I'll think about it, maybe there is a somewhat simple way to avoid that situation.

3 years ago

The power production calculation thing has been requested for quite some time...

So I figured out, that I can at least calculate out the amount of steam that would be required to feed into the boilers (3600/m), and calculate steam production as an end result. This works for nuclear and for standard steam engines, and I am using it in a seablock mod currently.

2 years ago

The thing is that it is pretty much a completely different system to the recipe stuff, that would need a completely different UI and backend, only for it to result in one number that related to the rest of the mod.

Is it really, though? Just have it treat electricity as a fluid, and I would think everything would fall into place.

2 years ago

Yeah, this - the hard part is dealing with fluids having different temperatures : see the issues with steam (and combustion mixtures in pY) (still?) in Helmod.