Spaceship Automation Tutorial - Factorio: Space Exploration - Laurence Plays
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- Опубликовано: 28 июл 2024
- How to build and automate a spaceship - covering the basics! I'll talk about making a spaceship, flying it to destinations, triggering it with signals and then automating the whole thing. I've been told that I went over setting up the circuity a bit too quickly, so I've made a followup video here • Spaceship Automation t... which goes through it more slowly and in more detail.
As promised, you can find the spaceship blueprint here: factoriobin.com/post/-vAObejV - note that the site gets a bit confused by the modded items, but it should still work!
0:00 Intro
0:27 Building a spaceship
1:48 Flying manually
4:04 Signals
7:05 Configuring destinations and launch conditions
8:55 Automatic landing
10:34 More advanced ships and outro 
Игры
Very concise tutorial. Can you make one for health insurance for university graduates next?
I'm afraid I can only make tutorials about subjects I have some experience with! I've never had health insurance...
This was genuinely useful
Never really understood signals/combinators properly, and when came to needing to automate a ship, it seemed so impossible!
But now i think i understand it, atleast my ships seems to be flying back and fourth automatically, and have used combinators elsewhere successfully
Doesnt seem so complicated anymore
Thx
Excellent! I'm glad I helped, not only with spaceships, but also circuits. I do have another video about using circuits (and a few others where they're used in builds, such as the LTN one) - you might be past that now, but it's probably worth checking out anyway 🙂
Spaceships are really satisfying once you get them doing what you want, so keep playing and you'll love them!
This is incredible, thank you. I've seen the signals but i've never seen a practical example of how to apply them so it felt like everything I was doing was wrong.
You're very welcome! There are tutorials out there, but they all seem to be a bit vague or they just show you how to make one ship without teaching you how to understand it. So, I wanted to make a better one! There's also a followup video that goes into more detail if you need it.
With reference to your comment at 8:25, about going back to the same location in the trip: I use a similar combinator setup for control, but I do it outside the ship and pass signals back and forth from the spaceship via the clamps (which do wire passthrough (signals and electricity) when anchored) . This means that I can make it considerably more complex without sacrificing space on the ship itself. My ships carry only 2 constant combinators and one each of the decider and arithmetic: one constant combinator to set speed (because I got annoyed at the manual speed stuff), the other constant combinator and decider to set the anchor position (use the same id's across all destinations for that ship/ship type), and the arithmetic combinator for content measurement. I could move that outside, but my setup ended up having fairly complicated wiring needs, using wire colours to separate input and output, and having to switch wires at some point.
But thanks for the tutorial, you should poke Earendel and his lot to make it a pseudo-official tutorial - I'm not aware of any other video tutorial for spaceships on the webs. And the video is much more helpful than the text tutorial provided by the Informatron.
Thank you - I'm glad it's interesting, and I hope it will be useful (at least to SE newbies!). Why do you put the speed and anchor signals in different combinators?
Having the logic outside the ship definitely makes sense because it saves space, I only really do it like this because I started like this and it makes sense to me. It also means that ships with the fuelling points and anchors in the same place can dock in the same place for refuelling, even if they then fly off somewhere else. I imagine a docking point with external logic would always send ships to the same place (unless you got really clever with the logic!)
@@LaurencePlays The different constant combinators are to only send the docking signals when the ship is at the destination (via the decider combinator). Not sure if that is actually needed (i.e., don't know when the spaceship looks for those signals), but it is there as a holdover from when I had different anchor numbers for different destinations.
W.r.t. the external logic, a stop can be tweaked for multiple ships to different destinations without needing too much more: using the ship id and one decider per ship to set the destination. But yes, that is complicated and annoying to keep track of - you'll need at least as much total space as you devote on the different ships together.
As with all the best logistics challenges, it's a compromise: ship space, or logical complexity at the stops, or multiple stops serving the same purpose (e.g., fueling)? My solution is to integrate fueling into one of the stops (usually dropoff in Nauvis orbit), and keep the schedules simple and the same for all ships using a specific stop. For example, I have 8 ships chugging back and forth across the interstellar void to deliver Naquitite, and they are all identical (except for name, where they're ordinal). Same stops, same destinations, and if there is a hiccup at one stop (had it when something broke on Nauvis that broke the unloading in NOrbit) and they all pile up at one location, it was remarkably simple to unpile them: fix the broken bit, and they unpiled themselves. xD
But yes, a compromise, with pros and cons for each direction of the compromise and a definite case of "pick what is right for your situation". Might even want to use multiple ways if there is a performance (logistical performance) benefit.
@@pietersieliepretorius8972 Ah - no, you can keep the anchor signals active all the time - that's what I do. And now the speed signal as well, because it caused issues when I didn't.
A good point regarding using the spaceship ID - with external logic you could use that instead of the anchor ID to choose which signal to pass on to the ship. I should've thought of that 😀 It does occur to me that it would make the logic simpler if you used a different anchor per ship, since you'd only be detecting whether there's the right amount of cargo.
All my fuelling is done in Naubit, so for ships that are going there, that's fine, but there are a few that go to Nauvis itself and those need a third stop in Naubit for the fuel.
Yes, all in all, I think it comes down to "having logic on the ship is easier on the brain 'cos you can see it all" vs "having logic off the ship saves space, which is valuable early on".
Very few times I feel like I'd like to upvote a video in youtube twice. This is one of those. Gods work dude, love.
Thank you! I guess the best way to like a video twice is to like another one on the same channel 😀
I remeber the logic of spaceship automation (this is my second SE run, with K2 this time), but can't help myself to re-watch this video to see if I forgot something. The best tutorial on this topic, thank you! ❤
Thank you - very much appreciated! I've just finished a new video talking about a much more advanced spaceship design - the one Marc made for our current K2SE run. That's out now for channel supporters, and is coming out on Thursday for everyone else. That might give you some useful ideas!
@@LaurencePlays Wow, that's great! I'll definitely take a look, thanks again!
did sturgel to find how can i switch vs the different Destination. Didnt know there was a commad to send all the input signals as output signals with a combiner. Thank you for the good tutorial. I really like that you come straight to the point
Yeah, controlling spaceships is all about circuit conditions! I definitely use them a lot more in SE than vanilla, or other mods. Fortunately, I find them reasonably easy to work with - most of the time!
Very nice tutorial! I loved the idea of loading a train onto your spaceship. I might do it just for fun.
Thank you! Yes, it is a lot of fun. It does also dramatically speed up loading/unloading too, so it's not just a fun idea. Can definitely recommend, even if it's a bit overkill for what I'm actually doing with the ships at the moment.
Great, easy to digest tutorial! Just finished ship research yesterday and I am looking forward to see how small the ship needs to be with 0 tech.
Thank you! The ships do need to be quite small at the start, but I think the one I built is just inside what's possible. You won't be able to carry more than a rocket's worth of stuff at first, but it's still fun and more flexible!
@@LaurencePlays Thanks for the intel! I'm taking a look at your S3 which is kind of the same place tech wise (but much better infra structure)
@@GettingRektGaming yeah, following along my series as you manage the same things makes sense - it avoids spoilers, but still lets you see a different way of doing things. I'm glad it's interesting!
Yay! Nice one Laurence
Hah, thank you! I hope it's useful 🙂
Thanks Lawrence, been waiting for this for a long time. Should do an advanced rocket version
I'm glad you like it! I'm considering one talking about how to load just what you need into a rocket. Probably won't be all that long, but hopefully interesting.
i finally have a spaceship, best game/mod ever :) thanks for kickstart
Well done! Getting a spaceship up and running is definitely an achievement! I'm glad I could help; I guess you'll be checking out my arcospheres video in a few months :-)
Very helpful, although some important moments shouldn't be speeduped. I spent 30 minutes trying to connect wires the same way you did :)
Interesting - did you find it hard to follow what I'd done, or was it just that I'd done it quicker than you were able to? As long as the video covered the topic well enough that you knew what to do, I think it was probably OK, however if not then I'll have another think about it.
Why not just import the blueprint?
@@equinox4467 Some people don't find any fun in just copy pasting blueprints. Its feels different when you understand something and apply in your own way.
Extremely informative and i surely hope this is a series, i just realized i invested way too much into cargo rocket survivability (currently at 19 hehe) because i thought space ships could not dock on planets for some reason? Learned a lot and haha that opening, you surely know how to sell it. Very funny!
Thank you! Yes, I would like to make more tutorio videos, so if you've got any suggestions, I'd be very interested to hear them! I'm already planning an LTN one...
@@LaurencePlays LTN was indeed the one i thought of. Especially mixing different items with different amounts on provider and requester stations. Yeah i got it figured out and with a couple of filter inserters or miniloaders, a combiner and a decider. I use some mods i am sure that are quite populair and i wonder what you make of them. Factory planners are something i noticed you dont use. I find them indispensible with SE. I wonder if you ever consider looking into some of those, they could really upgrade your qol in SE. I think with the way you can deliver funny informative commentary they would make excellent Factorio RUclips content.
@@daanmageddon Yes, LTN and multipurpose LTN stations are definitely worth talking about. Making them work as both pickup and dropoff stations is ... fiddly - you might have seen the issues I was having in the last stream.
I've looked at a few factory planner mods, and they all seem unpleasant to use and really not necessary unless you absolutely want to make perfectly balanced ratios. I generally don't care about that - shoving in one of each machine to make sure the basic idea works, and then going in to speed them up is good enough for me!
There are definitely other Factorio concepts that could use a tutorio though, so hopefully this will become a proper series!
@@LaurencePlays I just love to see how my inputs and outputs are almost perfectly balanced, there is no "right" or "wrong" way and its always nice to see others for inspiration, and different approaches to the challenges. You are way ahead of me in terms of science level. But thats one thing i dont care about: how fast i can get there. I did set a goal of 2k/hr of any science for endgame. I wonder how ambitious that is. Worked out so far. Anyway what about planning, setting up, defending and resupplying an outpost? I know you actually build whole bases, i dont, i just ship rocketparts, ammunition ingredients and vulcanite or core oil parts (for fuel) if needed, bots and setup an automated resupply. It might be interessting to hear why and how you setup your outposts in general. First time SE players often struggle with the question what to take on their first flight, things like that, setting up logistics, power, repairs etc, yeah i would like to hear you rant on that haha.
@@daanmageddon I'm targetting one of each science every 5 seconds at the moment - that's 720/hr, so you're trying to go almost 3 times as fast as me. That seems possible, but unnecessary! My science labs spend a lot of their time idle because it takes longer to build up the systems to make the next science pack than it does to do all the research with the previous one! That said, I've not done a lot of the massive researches, like the high rocket improvement ones. Those would be a huge resource sink!
Yeah, the question of what to have in each outpost, what should be made locally etc is an interesting one. I think if I played again, I'd probably do things quite differently - that might actually make doing another run through interesting. We shall see!
And yes, I still struggle on what parts I should take with me on a trip - I don't think I've done a single one without forgetting at least some stuff...
It's surprising how few videos like this they are most are very long and not precise
The secret is in deciding what needs to be said and writing a script in advance. I think a lot of RUclipsrs just start recording and then talk off the cuff until they're done, which makes for waffly videos.
This just makes me feel like theyre customizable bigger trains.
But you need to do the "train" schedule with circuits.
That's pretty much the case, yes! They're a bit more flexible than trains in some ways, but a bit less flexible in others. We use them very similarly though.
I seem to be way in over my head on this mod and my first playthrough of it. lol, it was fine until I hit spaceships. I will be watching these tutorials you make many many times over in the near future. Thank you for making these so that us smooth brains can understand how to play with this insane mod.
Great! I'm glad to have been able to help 🙂 Make sure you check out the followup video I made on this topic - I go through the process of wiring the ship together more slowly and in more detail. It's linked in the video description.
If you run into any other topics you think I should make a video about, please let me know!
@@LaurencePlays I will, thanks again for making this.
You should make a tutorial on space elevator logistics and maybe a production guide for planning out extra planetary resources. Also please make a power guide to help understand the ratios of high temperature steam and energy beam emitter efficiency
That's a good idea - especially bringing the Interplanetary Logistics guide up to date for version 0.6. I'll do that once we've got space elevators in our current run, which will probably be about a month (at a guess!). I could certainly talk about the different resources and how/where to get them, and power would be very interesting. Different with K2 installed, of course...
Alright, I’ll save this for later. I’ll have to slow down the combinator parts but that’s ok.
I had a few people say that, so I made another video going over it in more detail. It's linked in the description and in the card that pops up during the video.
@@LaurencePlaysDid you just do that now? Wow, thanks dude.
@@UnfortunateWatcher nope! The video's been up there for a while. I put the links in about a month ago, I think. I do try to respond to feedback 😁
Woah. You can load trains into ships!? No more barrel shipping liquids?! 😍
You can indeed! The main reason I did it was to allow the spaceships to load/unload much more quickly. The downside is that it takes up a lot more space inside the ship though - a single 6x6 warehouse holds 500 stacks, a 4 wagon train (like the ones I use) only holds 200 stacks - so those ships have almost the capacity of a single warehouse!
For transporting liquids, I'd recommend building a ship that's full of tanks. Use rocket booster tanks if you're transporting rocket fuel, for oil/water you'll have to use normal storage tanks. I do have an oil tanker ship as well, which you'll see in some of the later episodes of my Space Exploration run.
I hate barrels - I hardly used them in this game, sticking with coal liquifaction and transporting ice around until quite recently.
@@LaurencePlays Skim through my SE LP, I've got probably 20 rockets just devoted to liquid products! :D ...it's a bit overkill
@@TinyPirate That's a lot of barrels, and barrels make me sad! I went with coal liquifaction in orbit for my interim fluid needs. I'm not 100% sure it's better than barrels, but I'm honestly pretty convinced. I should have switched over to something else - either a methane ice outpost or oil spaceship - a bit sooner than I did, but I don't regret minimising barrel use.
Your factory is a lot tidier than mine, and you appear to be trying to build everything at much higher rates than me. Still, the basic ideas look very familiar :-)
What happens when ship doesnt have enough fuel for a journey?
Then it'll just ... stop. And drift in space.
OK, it's not /quite/ that bad, but a ship with problems will move very very slowly. You can either leave it for a few hours to limp to the nearest refuelling point, or you can head out in another ship on a rescue mission!
No one seems to have mentioned for shipbuilding that items in underground belts will be deleted when the ship launches -_-
That's very true, and a good point. Most of the time, it's not too big a deal, if you lose a handful of iron you probably don't care, and it'll be a small percentage compared to the amount transported... But if it's something more valuable, like solar probes, you'll want to be a lot more careful! I'll be talking about this a bit in my next video though 🙂
@@LaurencePlays guess while we're on the subject, I also found that spaceships will squash any items dropped by inserters trying to put them into chests on the ship xD so some automation to tell the inserters to chill while the ship is absent will help
@@nickolasbrown5928 Yeah, we've played around with that. Turning off the power to the inserters helps a bit, but we are still losing a few bits and pieces, unfortunately.
Can you assign multiple ships to the same clamp? Would they wait to anchor until the clamp is free before landing or try to overwrite the already parked Spaceship? I'm setting up Naquitite mining and with my design of spaceship taking 30-40 minutes to make a full trip between Nauvis Orbit -> Foenestra -> Asteroid Field -> Foenestra -> Nauvis Surface -> Nauvis Orbit, I'd like to just set up a bunch of identical ships all rotating along that route, but don't want to set up that many different docking stations unless really necessary.
If there's anything (man-made!) where the ship is trying to land, it'll just wait until there's a space for it, so another ship, a piece of pipe, the engineer himself; it'll just wait patiently in orbit. Once the landing area is cleared, then it'll drop in and start loading/unloading.
Your idea is pretty much what I did (although I didn't bother with Foenestra, my asteroid field wasn't far enough out for that to help), but by the end I think I had about 4 identical ships trundling back and forth. They didn't often need to queue, but they would if necessary.
I also had a fuelling point in Nauvis Orbit that was used by lots of ships - there was nearly always a queue there!
@@LaurencePlays Nice, that makes things a lot easier. I need Foenestra as a refueling point since my ship runs exclusively on Rocket Fuel, which is probably not ideal, but without access to antimatter stream it was the easiest way to get electrical power, fuel and the ability to launch from the Surface figured out on a rather limited spaceship. Downside is it doesn't have enough fuel capacity to make the whole trip, hence the midway point in Foenestra. Distance-wise it's pretty much the same as going straight to the Asteroid Field. Another upside is that going through Foenestra means the ship never has to deal with the higher Asteroid Density.
@@Cyrikyty Ouch, flying out to an asteroid field on rocket fuel sounds painful! I used ion engines for propulsion, and I won't tell you how I generated the power, just in case you don't want spoilers! If you do, it's shown if not in this video then in lots of the SE 0.5 run videos on the channel!
Hero thank you😊
You're welcome! There's a followup that goes through the wiring more slowly, in case that's useful to you.
I _just_ want my personal ship to use clamps when I bring it in to one of my orbital platforms to line itself up properly. I'm not trying to automate the ship to take off & land on its own. Is that even doable?
Yes, should be very easy! I think (although it's been a little while since I built any spaceships) that if you put the clamps in as normal and feed the clamp signals to your spaceship console all the time, it will dock to them whenever it can.
You'll need to make sure you set the destination before you launch, otherwise it will automatically dock again, but that should work nicely.
@@LaurencePlays I'll have to try to figure out what I'm doing wrong tomorrow. For some reason it spams we with a message about solar panels being in the way every second. Which is odd considering that _I don't have any solar panels on the ship, nor anywhere near the dock._ Which is at the end of a long arm specifically to avoid the problem of clipping. So that worked great.
@@OfficerHotpants Ah yes, I've seen that sort of message spam. My guess would be that you've got another clamp with the same number somewhere else on the space station, so I'd suggest you try turning off the combinator, changing the numbers on the clamps to something different, updating the combinator and then turning it back on.
10:54 Does this really work? I can't set an energy beam emitter to a target receiver, when it is on the spaceship on the way. Is there a way to automate the target?
You can power a ship with a beam receiver, yes, but you can't charge it when it's on the move. If you point the beam at it when it's parked - probably in Norbit - the beam will fire at the ship while it loads or unloads. Unfortunately, you can't measure the heat level in the ship, so you just need to make sure everything else it does while it's parked there takes long enough to heat it up again.
The good news is that this means you can use a single beam to recharge multiple ships, as long as they all park in the same place.
@@LaurencePlays Okay, thank you for your answer, that helped me.
I was wondering if I did something wrong, because in your clip with the receiver the spaceship was on the fly and received a beam (the light was "on").
I think I will turn the emitter on for a time (done with a Counter).
@@ScreamyBanana The beam receiver isn't receiving a beam at that point, it's just still hot from being zapped before. You don't need to worry about turning the emitter on/off, it will do that automatically when the ship departs. You might want to consider making sure the ship stays for long enough to heat back up though, although that wasn't a problem for me - unloading took long enough.
@@LaurencePlays Yes, but the emitter drains at least 2 GW, 1 GW for the emitter and 1 GW with one chamber/injector. That doesn't need to run all the time ;)
Fair point, @@ScreamyBanana. I guess I was over caring about power by that point. 😀
I’m trying to follow your guide as best I can but when I activate the system the ship pops up into space and immediately pops back down, and beamed power doesn’t lock with ships in transit.
I fear one of the updates broke something.
At least I can dock automatically….
P.S. it’s version 1.1.69
I've had ships do that; usually it's because you haven't set the destination properly (either no destination, or the current surface), so they launch, don't depart and then automatically dock. I'd suggest you remove the launch signal from your combinator that's making the ship depart and activate it as normal, then see what destination signal is getting sent to it and work out why it's not right!
@@LaurencePlays but then it’s stuck going one way. Say it’s stuck on point b, I shut it down but now is stuck going to a.
With both activated it even stutters through space
@@pikpikgamer1012 You need to set up the logic so that it only passes the correct signal through - so you should only pass the signal to go to point B through when you're at point A and have the right resources loaded. Then when you're at point B, it should only send the signal to go to point A. It sounds like you're sending the signals all the time; you don't need to, the spaceship console will remember the last destination it was told to use.
@@LaurencePlays I hope I figured it out, it’s was that I didn’t know how to send signals from module to module. I hope this works but I have to wait for it to limp back because my failure costs it’s fuel supply
@@LaurencePlays still nothing, how do I turn off and on the combinator?
Blueprint link does not work
play in 10% speed to do the cables, still, thanks i guess
You're not the first person to ask for a more detailed look, so I made this ruclips.net/video/yDm_cHa1bik/видео.html
@@LaurencePlays Awesome, thank you so much!
I was sitting here with no clue how to set this automation settings, found your video and then the actual part I needed was done in a few seconds with very little explanation at all XD This other video seems to be a lot more detailed and explanational, thank you again!
@@anonym1135 Yeah, I guess it can be hard to know what bits need the most attention, so the feedback is very useful!
most important parts of the tutorial was 5x speed
I had a few people saying that I'd gone over the circuit stuff too quickly, so I made a followup video - ruclips.net/video/yDm_cHa1bik/видео.html - this one goes through setting the circuits up a lot more slowly and in a lot more detail!
aerodinámica en el espacio XD
Yep, all that interstellar hydrogen is apparently a big deal! I guess if the ships are going enormously quickly, it would explain that, and why there are so many meteors to worry about.
For a tutorial, it might not be a bad idea not to FAST FORWARD everything you are doing...
You're not the first person to ask me to elaborate, which is why the next video in the playlist is a more detailed look at the cabling.
How fast can you do this video??? I had trouble listening to you and understanding you that fast, let alone watching it. Thanks to your video I know what I have to do, but not how to, there was no chance seing this so fast. Even played the tutorion on slow motion. Close to being useless therefore.. A pity, I think you know your stuff.
You're not the first person to say that, which is why I created another video going through the complicated wiring part a bit slower. It's linked in the description, in a pop up card and in a number of the comments! You can find it here: ruclips.net/video/yDm_cHa1bik/видео.html - hopefully that's a bit more useful. That said, maybe I should make a new one with what I've learned since, both in Factorio technique and video delivery!
man you did that creterian in those things way to fast to understand easy for a newbie
Yeah, I've had a few people tell me that, which is why I made a follow up video where I go through the circuits a lot more slowly 🙂 let me know if that one's any better for you!
@LaurencePlays ok i just figure it out on same day xd. Just slowed down to .025 ;)
@@pawel2846 Ah good! I wondered if I should remake the video, but it's got lots of views and attention already...