Factory Failsafes YOU Need To Improve Efficiency in Satisfactory

Factory Failsafes YOU Need To Improve Efficiency in Satisfactory
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After building a 40GW power plant and finding it not running efficiently, it's time we talk about failsafes that will save you big time and keep your factory running at top efficiency.

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About: Satisfactory

Satisfactory is a first-person open-world factory building game with a dash of exploration and combat. Pioneering for FICSIT Incorporated means charting and exploiting an alien planet, battling alien lifeforms, creating multi-story factories, entering conveyor belt heaven, automating vehicles, and researching new technologies.
This Factorio like game has heavy automation, with automated mining, crafting, and you can even automate movement!

#TotalXclipse #Satisfactoryupdate8Letsplay #Satisfactoryletsplayseries

[TotalXclipse]

Do you use Failsafes in your factories?

[MotoMatt]

The fact you had to "prime" the pipes adds a level of realism I really appreciate!

[TheMNWolf]

I have noticed that liquids in pipes behave surprisingly realistically. You can build in a buffer if you ensure that your liquids always flow downwards right before they go into something. That way you're not running into the issue of liquid sloshing around in a pipe, meaning that whatever needs that liquid is occasionally not getting any flow. Because I worked in a factory where many of our resources were fed in from the ceiling (water, pressurized air, argon, nitrogen, coolant, power), I tend to build my factories this way anyway.

[brandonhaag]

I ALWAYS recommend using a “water tower” type of fluid buffer prior to starting up fuel generators. The process can be made much easier by filling up that fluid buffer as you set up all the pipes and build the genny’s with valves built between each section and then opening it up each section and waiting for the lines to fill before opening the next

[ABaumstumpf]

So the video can be summed up in:
"Do not rely on just-in-time production - it is only a tiny bit cheaper to build but will fail spectacularly if even the tiniest bit goes wrong". In 2021 we had seen just how stupid that concept is in the real world - a single ship caused international problems cause nobody had any reserves and nobody could coop with the loss of transportation of a single route.

[giggety]

Ah, my favorite channel that constantly reminds me of how much I suck at Satisfactory.

[thpwninatr]

When you remember that a pipe has to fill up before something can escape the top of it, things get much simpler. When a machine consumes fluid it does so INSTANTLY and it does that every cycle which means that, for a short time each cycle, the pipe is no longer full.

In my factories, pipes going into a machine go downwards. Pipes coming out of a machine go upwards.
This also makes refinery manifolds easier to build because I can build splitters/mergers on the floor with their hologram arrows overlapping the refinery arrows and the pipes won't do any nasty clipping. When I have two rows in a manifold, I line up the rows of refineries by their belt connections and use a 2m foundation to place the pipe junctions first, then I have the splitters/mergers stacked with the junctions and the belts are flat and I maintain my rule of pipe inputs flowing down and pipe outputs flowing up. I never build a junction on an existing pipe unless there is no other option. In the rare cases when I am forced to build a junction on a pipe, I immediately dismantle the pipes and rebuild them. Building a junction on the end of a pipe is fine though, but be careful because it should ACTUALLY be on the end and should not cut the existing pipe.

If I'm making a huge fluid manifold like fuel generators, and I can't wait to turn them on for whatever reason, at the end of the build I can manually switch off a few of the consuming machines at the end of the line and wait for the pipes to fill. Then I'd check the fluid production machines and wait for them to start backing up (at least half of them with yellow lights) and then finally I can switch those consumers back on.


When building a large manifold of fuel generators it usually works best to let the pipes fill up first and then start connecting the power cables because when doing that the generators don't have their cycles synchronised and their consumption is less spikey. Stop making power connections and check the levels after every 20 or so generators. Let them fill.

This is also the reason why pipes cannot provide fluid at their max throughput and remain full at the same time - if you need exactly 300 fluid every 60 seconds, that means on average the pipe was emptying for half the time and filling for half the time. If the pipe was both emptying and filling it would remain at the same level and if that level is empty, it remains empty. If the pipe is full it can remain full, but that won't happen in practise because the production machines take a short while to start up. The pipes themselves act as a buffer and the machines also have built-in buffer (50m³) which you should make the most of by giving all the things time to fill up.

[SKy_the_Thunder]

Don't be stingy with Valves. Placing one at the top after a lift will prevent any backflow falling back down if for some reason production slows, and if you ever merge larger pipe sections, set valves on any input so they won't push into each other. The fluid behavior can be unpredictable, so just restrict it any way you can to limit those options.

[StrifeA]

Yes please cover the belt balancers! I was working one out for concrete but for some reason the first of the 3 lines was backing up to the machines. I thought I had done my math correctly but it appears the mergers will take them 1-1 from each input I semi fixed it by putting a lower tier belt between the smart splitter and merger but I was still having back up issues. So I would love a proper vid on that. its always great to watch your vids and I cant wait to upgrade my GPU to get back to Satisfactory.

[skargarim]

Just found this Video. The "Letting the pipes Fill up" could have saved me from quite a headache a couple of days ago, but i figured it out by myself After all. 😂

[abaile]

One very basic efficiency you're missing out on is input and output buffer containers on stations.
If for example you had 2 nodes feeding a station with 240/min each and a train pulls into the station. Well the station then stops accepting items, the belts fill up and eventually after enough cycles, the miner fills up and stops producing. This means that the average rate of production over time will drop below 240/min.
Similarly, if a factory relies on a belt being saturated all the time, the moment a train pulls into the station, the belt starts depleting and the throughput on that belt will also be less than nominal over time.
Lastly, it's important that they both be used at either end so that items per minute are balanced on both input and output for the entire system. Essentially the only bottleneck of the system then becomes the throughput capacity of the journey itself (total car capacity/trip time); as long as that's higher than the input and output capacity, the entire trainline can be ignored as a bottle neck (providing you let it fill up a little bit first). Items seemingly go in and come out the other end without any interruption in between.
VERY IMPORTANT: the belt connection between the station and the container must have faster throughput than the intended nominal input or output to make up for lost time during the loading/unloading animations.
As an aside, using another equation (total line capacity (i.e. all trains on a line carrying that specific cargo)/input output capacity) gives us the maximum average interval time for a given station. If you have a very large distance to cover, you can use that equation to add either more trains, or split the journey with cargo stations in between effectively creating multiple buffered train routes with balanced inputs and outputs (as above, it can then be discounted as a source of bottle necking since the input and output are balanced and continuous).

[flybywire]

The game really needs a "Flush conveyors" feature like it has for the pipelines. After feeding in wrong items its not just the conveyors full of wrong items, they also get stuck in mergers, splitters etc and keep coming out of there forever. A real pain to clean up.

[Elucidus]

Before update 8, I ran a separate power system for the power systems...if that makes sense, I used different color poles to mark them. The entire supply line ran on their own power, I did this as I ran into the problem you described where I ran out of all of the power.

[Bricejacob]

One fail safe I use is smart splitters for the full manifold. It dramatically smooths out power spikes as the manifold fills one machine at a time. It also allows for interesting designs like my steel factory that can build entirely pipes or beams depending on need. Balanced if both are needed, fully one or the other if one is backstuffed.

[gravehearts]

honestly i think a video id like would be about pipes, pumps and flow control, how high pipe can go without a pump, all the bugs the pipes can get and the fixes and to check the flow properly. those are the things i struggled the most with

[NathanTaub]

I always include a "bootstrap" section in every primary power plant I build ("primary" meaning intended specifically as a power plant; I occasionally use generators as a method of getting rid of byproducts). A bootstrap section is a section that can power all of the infrastructure necessary to get the plant going, is operable from a completely cold start (meaning my main grid is completely down and all attached power storage has run dry), and can keep going for at least five minutes.

My preference is a set of biofuel tanks that feed into a pipe which goes above their head lift level and a pump run by a normally-off switch to a biofuel generator or power storage. If the power dies, just run to the nearest priority switch, isolate the power station from the main grid, then turn on the pump -- it will push biofuel over the 'hump' and into the backup generators, which will then bootstrap the power plant back to life.

It's also possible to make a remote-start for solids by placing a smart splitter next to a sink controlled by a priority switch, leaving the switch off, adding some limestone to the belt, and setting the splitter to route limestone to the sink and undefined to another output; while the sink is unpowered, the belt is blocked, but as soon as it gets a little bit of juice it's going to clear the belt and allow items to flow. You can use this for a remote-start backup coal or nuclear plant, but be sure that the plant has water reserves as well.

[wild_lee_coyote]

I had one 2 meter long belt to a sink I forgot to connect that slowly shut down my entire turbo fuel power plant. Since 90% of my power came off this one plant it took several hours to get it running again. My big issue was getting the enough energy to power the plant to produce enough fuel to power the generators. To prevent it from happening again I created a huge fuel storage facility, this included emergency buffers for all the materials coming into the factory so that I wasn’t coming from a cold start. I also isolated a small section that would power only the machines needed for fuel production so that I didn’t have to worry about cold starting the entire factory, just a smaller plant. This all was before power storage and smart switches. Even still I design storage and fail safes in so that I never have to cold start all of my power again.

[DavidCookeZ]

When creating a power station you really need a plan for how to bring it back online after a brown-out or black-out.

My tips would be:

* Build in end-to-end "slices": Work out the minimum set of machines that efficiently produce what you need. eg. for DPF - 1xOil extractor, 2xunderclocked HOR, 1xWater extractor, 2xPackaged water, 2x DPF, 2xUnpack Fuel, 10xFuel gen, 1xPower switch.
* Get this to stable running, working "live" so pipes/manifolds fill up, and there's minimal additional load on the existing power sources, and to find bugs fast.
* Measure the power needed by this self-sustaining slice. Build power storage to run it, charge it up, then disconnect the batteries ready for a cold re-start. Use a manual power switch to connect the storage to slice one for a restart. Alternatively run the first slice of geothermal with power storage for smoothing.
* Work out how many slices you will build total, and what proportion of the generated power is needed to run them.
* Build separate power grids: 1 for the first slice (that can be battery booted), one for x other slices to power the rest, and one for the load to the rest of your factories. Priority power switches are not needed as an outage on one isolated circuit can never bring down another.
* Build the remaining slices one at a time. Now you know what a working slice looks like, go to town with blueprints. It's all self sustaining so you aren't loading your main power grid by building them.
* Relax knowing you'll have reliable power, and if the worst happens it's one switch away from running again.

For liquids:
* Use gravity: arrange for liquids to flow *down* to the next machine in line, even if it means initially having to pump the crude oil up high. Always feed from above, and make sure the input pipe segment to a machine has a larger volume than the machine's "gulp" size (vol/min * 60 / cycle time in seconds). Pipe floor holes "fail" because short pipe elbows from floor to machine input don't satisfy this condition.
* Working in slices means never having to merge all the fuel (or whatever) into a single pipe. Big pipe manifolds are where you'll have all the sloshing trouble. Don't use them.
* To ensure fuel gens start and run reliably place humps (elevated pipe supports or stackabe pipe supports) between the junctions to each generator. That way the first fuel gen is completely filled before the next one starts and so on.

Also:
* No "unreliable" transport (tractors, trucks, trains, or drones) should be part of a power generation plant. The goal is to maximise steady power output!

[Nevir]

One thing you forgot to mention, make sure your power storage is always in fuse group 1, so if things are going offline, which will only happen if storage runs dry, your storage can be recharging while you fix the issue.

[KKingPin]

I don't use fail safes, but I am heavily into the math side of Satisfactory. For me it is not complicated to simply calculate how much I need and build on a healthy margin. I also tend to have a goal of producing twice as much power as my average use and always keep it above the max use line.