Slot stockpiles at complex production slots...changes and thoughts...

I recently discovered some problems in the game relating to what resources a slot would order, what resources they would use, and the circumstances where an upgrade may be fitted to a slot, but not needed by the car currently being worked on… Anyway,. in investigating this I’ve fixed it, but it has thrown up some interesting problems…

The game logic has always assumed that it should keep a slot stockpile full at all times (sensible) and it assumes that the requirements of the current vehicle will be the same as the next one (ooops…). These two goals are actually at odds with each other as the slots upgrades and options become more complex. Here is an example:

A slot is fitting aircon. It orders aircon for the budget car, and another 15 aircons to keep the stockpile full.

The next car that shows up needs climate control. At this point, the current game junks(discards) all of the aircons, and fills up with 16 climate controls…

The next car is budget again, and so another 15 climate controls are wasted, and the delays and huge cost continues…

I HAVE FIXED THIS.

What happens now is…

The empty stockpile gets filled with 16 aircons for the budget car…
Then (if neccesary) a single aircon gets junked to make room for one climate control…
Then the next car uses one of the aircons…
Then the next car orders in a single climate control…

And that seems much better, but actually the problem is if the next 100 cars are all luxury ones with climate control… then we have 15/16 of our stockpile slots sat there full of useless resources!

We CANNOT be 100% sure in this game which car turns up to a slot, so scanning ahead and configuring appropriately is NOT an option. In the long run I can only see two ways to fix this:

1. Add configurable junctions which send cars of one type one way, and others the other way. Combine this with multiple aircon slots for maximum efficiency.
2. Allow the player to ‘override’ the logic on a slot-stockpile and tell it what ratios of equipment to keep in stock, rather than let it order stuff intelligently.

I’m tempted by 1), as it means more logic fun for the player. Thoughts?

(BTW the 1.27 build doesn’t seem to have a problem, because its hiding the bug from the player. If you watch closely you will see that sometimes slots use the wrong resources to fit certain features)

Maybe I am thinking way to simple; but why not the fill the stock supply with everything? What I mean; instead of 16 aircons, and removing one or more to bring a climate control in, why not doing 50/50 in that case? So 8 aircons, ánd 8 climate controls. When you unlock a new feature, the system cán restock the supply stock for new resources. Maybe this requires bigger stocks though

I have been playing a with a massive factory that has thousands of cars moving through the plant and I am running into bottle necks with Insufficient Resources, and my guess is it’s related to this. I hacked the saved game file and changed the cash to 1 billion and started playing around with layout and capacity stuff, and the real pain the supplies.

I think there is a bug in how the slots request supplies and where they come from. Even setting a slot to use Prefer Local, they still seem to have issues. I am going to play with putting supply slots close to the slots that are using them and make sure that my supply conveyors go through the supply slots to see if that helps any. Right now I have them grouped in separate areas and the code seems to not even recognize they are connected.

Also, sometime the supply slots don’t even get recognized and used at all, still working on that. One thing that would be really nice it the ability to cross supply conveyors without connecting them. I guess that would move into the arena of having height placement.

When will 1.27 be released?

Why not both? Number 2 would be helpful in certain situations like when you are waiting on one resource (lets say sensors) more than any of the others, so you can tell the local stockpile to keep more of that item and less of another (maybe you only need a chip on one of every 10 cars you would be ok with just keeping one in the stockpile). Number 1 could morph into something like circuit conditions in Factorio. You don’t need circuit conditions in Factorio to make an efficient base but you can do all sorts of extra things that are just fun and interesting. You can make junctions to work that way with time and it would make for interesting factories but wouldn’t be necessary to actual make an efficient factory.

Must say I see good things in both options.

1: is something I was thinking about for some time now. So would be a great function.
2: Is great for some of the other bottlenecks in the factory.

If you really want us to choose from those things. I’m picking 1.

Giving the the little stockpiles on the stations the same functionality as the big stockpiles would be useful, so we can manually select how much of each component to store in the little stockpile. Maybe even change it a little so only components and upgrades are listed, so you can’t add doors to fit wheel station for instance.

I agree that the import configuration stuff we have on slots badly needs adding to supply stockpiles. In fact I’ve set aside this coming weekend to try and get that feature in for the next update. Glad to hear that people are not opposed to my solutions for this.
As to why not stock both? Well sometimes its more than 2 things. Already we have aircon/climate/pollen filter. that means dividing that sweet 16-bay stockpile into 3 making it much less efficient. Imagine a lot with 4 or more combinations and the usability of a ‘split’ stockpile goes down and down.

For stations that use more parts you also could simply adjust the layout for them so they have bigger stockpiles. Then splitting up parts wouldn’t be a problem.

Gday from down under,

Can we talk about import priority for a second? I’m not sure it has been mentioned elsewhere, but playing the game last night my time I incurred an error that I thought had been fixed. After researching all the manufacturing aspects such as make window and make door panel, I proceeded to establish my line from the end to the start. I then configured imports to use local only for all slots. However, the imports came from the import slot and not the stockpiles. I have run into the issue for months and was just wondering if anyone else has this issue or I’m doing it wrong. to confirm, I am on the latest patch with my steam client set to always update and I look for any updates before playing the game.
Thanks

Since i posted into the wrong Thread:

viewtopic.php?f=53&t=18928#p86856

It should be pointed out that we added configurable import priorities for supply stockpiles for the latest patch. Interested to know if people are using this, and what they think of it.

can you make that 3 pieces of every part in slot stocpile comes

What about changing the code so the slot doesn’t fill up until 50% capacity is still be used and if they need an item that isn’t an item like climate control and there is onlt air con available then that slot can order a climate control unit and be delivered to the slot much like at a real factory.

What if you add 1 piece of conveyor belt to the stations and then when a car enters that slot the station will look what parts that car needs and orders them. This way, the wait for parts would be less in bottleneck areas.

Part of me says great Idea! A Staging conveyor spot of sorts.

The other part says, Nooooo How will I be able to put the 3 wheel stations in a 3x3 area… (I can adapt)

I think the best and most simple solution would be to add extra storage room to complex prodution slots and or having the ability to change the number they need to keep in stock all the time. Other thing could be to add more slots for single tasks, if they don’t need the part, they can skip through next slot. Some slots have no upgrades at all, some have 4 or 5 upgrades at max.

Having played 22 hours, and unlocked all the achievements (1.28) this is the most annoying issue at the moment.

What if we change the code so the slot doesn’t fill up until 50% capacity is still be used and if they need an item that isn’t an item like climate control and there is onlt air con available then that slot can order a climate control unit and be delivered to the slot much like at a real factory.
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I experimented yesterday (and am still testing) a fairly neat solution to all this :D. The way it works is as follows:

If the slot is a composite one with a whole bunch of tasks, the stockpile limits pre-ordering to 4x the amount required for any task. This doesn’t tend to be where we meet problems though…

With single tasks, the slot periodically calculates what the highest ‘safe’ multiple of a single cars potential requirements may be.

For example, with fit doors, assuming we have the upgrades fitted to the slot, it might need…
4 doors
1 alarm
1 sensor
1 chip
thats a total of 7, and with 16 available stockpile pallets, the slot sets its multiple to ‘2’. That means that when a highly upgraded car arrives, we will only order 2 copies of all that (14 items). We then use 7, leaving 9 free slots for the next cars requirements.

Example 2:
A fit door slot with no upgrades. requirements (worse case) are:
4 doors
This means the pre-order multiple gets set to 4, and the slot continually orders enough doors to fill all 16 slots, for maximum efficiency.
The calculation is redone every 5 seconds or so, to keep processing usage low, but keep the needs relevant. I can probably optimize that a lot, as its only going to change as upgrades change…

So far it seems a vast improvement