Back with my wife today, and this is actually her WIP build for a new Concrete factory, replacing our starter nonsense.
Just managed to get the switch flipped on, and confirmed 100% efficiency. She'll get it all cosmetically finished next time.
Meanwhile, I was out re-finishing the belt systems for our Steel campus, now that we have Steel and Quartz production running, and can build all the associated cosmetics. These lines have all been here for a few weeks, just for functionality.
I didn't get very far, since I spent most of the time blueprinting the structure to build around the belt lines, and then having to re-build the belt lines themselves to not use any 1m inclines. I couldn't get a blueprint to work for a 1m incline segment, on account of there not being any 1m incline catwalks. But I'm all set now to get this finished pretty quickly next time.
"What about that marshland off in the distance, to the east?"
"You must never go there."
Oh, that is SICK. I'm gonna pit "excessively vertical factory" on my todo list.
I love stuff like that. When you get halfway through a build and realize you have to change plans and the way you end up getting it to work is something you'd never have come up with on its own, but it looks REALLY good.
I was asked yesterday about what it took to make this circular platform, and it was a NIGHTMARE at the time, so I thought I'd do a post about just that, in detail.
The standard technique for circles is pretty simple.
Just start with a cross, mapping out the radius/diameter you want.
Staring at the center of the center foundation, and holding CTRL, you can scroll to rotate the foundation in 5 degree increments.
Place another under it, to match the height of the rest...
...then, you can zoop out another T, overlaid on the first. Repeat until circle is complete.
The easy circles to make are 88m (11 foundations) for 10 degree increments, and 168m (21 foundations) for 5 degree increments. That is, with those dimensions, the corners come out very close to perfect, close enough that you don't notice unless you're looking for imperfections.
However, these circle sizes didn't work, for this build. The Space Elevator has a footprint of 54m x 54m, so I went with a circle diameter of 64 meters (8 foundations) to make sure that there's at least a half-foundation of walking space around the whole thing.
That's what we have here, 28 meters on all sides of center, which equates to 3 foundations, nudged away from center by a half-foundation. The gap to be filled in at the end.
Problem with this circle size is that the overlapping is VERY noticable.
The idea for dealing with this is essentially to replace each of the full foundations with a pair of half-foundations, overlapping just enough to get the corners to perfectly touch, at each segment.
To get corners to align perfectly, you have to identify the exact point where you want the corner to be. In this case, that's actually impossible to do perfectly (as far as I know), as the spot where we want the corners to be is the cross-point of the overlapping edges. It's possible to identify this point freehanded, using pillars and barriers, but since this is a circle, we can actually make it simpler. We can just say "I don't care where the corner are, as long as they all line up on the circle." So, it's MUCH easier to just identify the center point of each foundation edge.
Because I'm paranoid, I built out an extra extra "placeholder" piece for each edge, so if I screw up, a corner, I still have the desired point identified.
Now, we can build a perfectly-overlapped edge between two of the desired corner points, by first identifying them...
...then pulling a Freeform beam between them, then snapping pillars to each end.
With the pillars, we have a snapping point for foundations that has both the location of the corner, and the desired angle of the edge.
A quick nudge, and that one's done.
Repeated for the opposite side of that edge, then repeated for the next edge over.
We have in-fact achieved a perfectly joined corner.
I am NOT building out an entire circle of this again. In fact, in the original build, I had to do TWO of these circles, because the lower level that the Space Elevator platform sits on was built this exact same way, but with an extra 2 foundations in diameter.
Looks pretty freakin' good in concrete, even up close. Although, it looks much less good if you color the concrete, since in any color other than pure white, the edge lines show up darker again, just like with FICSIT foundations. Of course, it looks basically flawless with asphalt.
Advantage of perfect corners means we can have perfect cornering of barriers or railings or whatever else you want to line it with. No walls, though, unfortunately, since we still can't overcome the limit of not having half-width walls.
The "wall" covering I used in the real build was just four pillars, snapped neatly to the edges of the half-foundations, and painted with Carbon Steel. I've painted them different colors here, to illustrate the point.
Finally, we can fill in the center. In the original build, I believe I also deleted the inner-most ring of circular foundations, and just made the center grid bigger to overlap. The Space Elevator sits on top of it, so it's not really noticeable anyway, but the perfectionist in me is always worried about using more build pieces than necessary, since there's eventually an upper limit.
The hell is that summary, AI-generated? Why yes, people DO work inside the TikToc building.
Talk about burying the lede, by not elaborating on that title, like the article does. "Stripping" does not mean that teenagers are being "stripped" from the platform, or from feeds, like I figured. It literally means that THEY are stripping. OnlyFans style. For gifts. Jesus fuck.
I'll do a dedicated post on it tonight. I was kind of a nightmare.
Beams were involved, yeah, for getting to non-overlapping corners, but laying out the footprint was far more tedious. I'll do a dedicated post on the process tonight.
A little HQ area I made for myself in my solo game, like 2 weeks ago.
First time I've actually been compelled to use actual lights, instead of just signage. Probably the last.
Total accident that I ended up with like 6 berry plants RIGHT at the entrance to the place.
BOY have I been loving the Carbon Steel cosmetic in this save.
Yup, that's how I built those.
Been getting a lot of instability out of pictrs the last two days. Nothing in the week before that.
By instability, I'm talking 500 errors when uploading images (POST https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image). They seem pretty much random, I can get around the errors by just repeatedly trying to upload the same file until it works. As far as I can tell, there's nothing I'm doing wrong, trying to upload images too large produces a different, and much more reasonable, error. And there's no info at all in the response, except for the 500 code itself.
Hosting in-laws this weekend, so we're in backlog territory. This was the first build my wife and I did together, about a week into 1.0. Although we only got around to finishing it out last week, after getting steel and signs and such running. Actually, she finished out the buildings, but I'd still like to put some finishing touches here on the Water Extractors.
This resource trunk line was mostly my concept, with a few suggestions from my wife...
...while the buildings were almost entirely my wife, with me just doing the belt and pipe routing.
She likes purple.
This is the entrance I need to build out. I'd like to do something that highlights the tree and the berry plant, in some fashion.
Goddamnit, I love these. I need an excuse to use this design again.
Got a great start on a new Iron Rod factory today. Mostly because I leaned heavily on blueprinting and repeating the bulk of the work
Going with a dedicated logistics/maintenance floor again, because it helped me fit into a 32mx32m blueprint footprint.
I don't care if these illuminated barriers are unoriginal at this point, they're freakin' gorgeous.
Nice thing is that with this design, there's a lot more load balancing going on, as opposed to manifolding. Each of the 4 wings has 2 smelters, which get even amounts of resources, and feeds 2 constructors, evenly.
Implemented this little idea for an exhaust vent, above each smelter.
By placing a foundation at the level that they would sit on, placing a foundation on top of that, then placing a sign on the underside of that foundation and nudging it over into position. Then, realizing that the merger's hitbox completely covers the sign, making it impossible to configure it, and being forced to remove all the mergers completely and replace them later, after placing the signs.
I'm going to regret staying up this late, but I got the factory done that I started yesterday.
I love the look of the frame pillars, but this was TEDIOUS as all hell to build. Mainly because these pillars aren't actually hollow, you can't target inside of them.
I mentioned yesterday that I did something interesting with the Iron Ingot line, where I'm alternating between inputs and outputs, and you can kinda see it here, running underneath the catwalk. The smelters here feed into the line, then some lifts pull off of it and feed into the constructors on the upper level, then another set of smelters feed into the belt, and so on.
Same thing, but a view from the outside, on the ground floor. Also featuring the iron ore feed, and the plate/screw outputs hanging above it. Also also, the pillars supporting the detached upper level.
Depot and sinking logistics, and also some nice hanging lighting.
I like the little white stripe along the bottom.
And with that done, I can finally clean up most of this nonsense.
No, there's only one item in play on that line, Iron Ingots.
I was planning on doing some closer-up shots when it's finished.
Today was D&D main story night for my wife, so I'm back to my solo save, starting a new long-term factory for Iron Plates and Screws.
I had the thought to try out a setup with multiple floors, where you can look down on the first floor, from the second, and that morphed into this stacked setup. Really liking it, so far.
This also turned into a manifold strategy I haven't done before, with a manifold that is mixed between providers and consumers. I.E. the Iron Ingot line alternates between smelters adding to it, and constructors pulling off. The numbers work out, but we'll see if it ends up working the way I think it should.
If you're just talking about how I got the curves laid out, it's pretty much this with half-foundations.
We need lots of cosmetic stuff we're probably not gonna get.
I ended up spending way more time than I wanted jerking around with the blueprint system, so I still didn't finish the whole Quartz factory. But the only thing left is the depot and shipping wings. The main building, the mine, and the resource transport are all finished.
Blueprinting this trunk line in particular was what took up all the time.
Happy with the result, though.
Buggy lighting in caves is buggy.
Did you know there's actually no height limit on lifts, if they're placed between two floor holes?
Had to come up with something a little weird to close the gap on this ladder. This also took a LOT of time to get the positioning just right. Also really happy with it.
With the color scheme established, for the trunk line, I was able to finish off coloring and lighting inside the building pretty quickly.
I usually do, but sometimes, it just doesn't feel feasible. Not if you're going for "pretty" factories, like we're trying to, this time around.
Like, this build will be able to accommodate me upgrading the one miner that powers it to a Mk3 at 250% clock, without needing a clock higher than 250% on any machine. And no belt will need more than 1,200 items/min. But, for example, my first attempt to plan for this factory was to use all of the mine-able Quartz in this cave, not just a single Pure node, and that would have required me to have 40 constructors. It just didn't seem worth it to me, when this facility will already produce over 500/min of each item, when it's fully-upgraded. If that does turn out to not be enough, I'll add another miner, and figure out how to either expand this facility, or build a second one right next to it.
Yeah, "lack of vision", that's definitely the problem.
The "vision" of the Israeli government has been clear for quite a while, now: Israeli ownership and settlement of the entire region, achieved by killing off or convincing to leave everyone that's already there.
For sure, it's just unfinished, so I didn't bother yet. The maun facilitiy is pretty much complete, from the outside, except for painting and lighting.
My brother in Christ, this is a social media platform. Idiotic posts is what we live on.
Me personally, I'd do a combined factory.
I also have to make an effort to suppress the design paralysis urge. Like, sure, thinking about how stuff bow will fit with future ideas is good, but it's not worth agonizing over. Figuring out how to connect systems that weren't necessarily made to work with each other is part of the challenge/fun, and usually produces a more interesting result than something fully-planned-out.
Because this community deserves more activity.
Today was spent setting up a basic Quartz/Silica factory, from one of the pure nodes in the giant Rocky Desert cave.
Got it most of the way done. Need to finish running power along the input belt line, finish enclosing the Depot wing, bring the road up to meet the building, setup truck stations, and color and light the whole thing.
So, I thought Hexbear defederated from us a little while back, and we, in turn, defederated from them. Why do I keep seeing occasional (new) Hexbear posts in the "All" feed, lately? Did the defederation get reversed? Is it somehow a bug?
Xenobroom Inc., a young startup fresh out of Silicon Valley started a lengthy process of upgrading their server infrastructure back in May 2020. According to the remaining fragments of CEO's daily journal and CTO's engineering notes, the company enjoyed a sharp rise in daily use in the midst of the ...
The site name's a play on "The Onion" so it's gotta be satire, right? I couldn't find an about page to confirm.
After watching the first couple of episodes, my wife and I were considering having our 8-year-old watch it with us. Then I noticed the TV-MA rating.
Not looking for spoilers, but like, is the show gonna take a bit of a turn, eventually? There hasn't been anything CLOSE to TV-M-worth thus far, in my mind.
So the "fails to complete a cycle without erroring out" rate finally seems to have reached 100%, on the Samsung dishwasher that came with the house.
What do I need to know when picking a new one, and/or what models do y'all recommend?
I'll take recommendations about how to fix the current one too, I guess, but I already got advice from an appliance repair man, who basically said "it would need a new control board, I.E. ditch it." The error code it's giving is supposedly about insufficient water or water flow, but the water feed is completely fine, as far as I can tell.
I.E. the list of my own posts in my profile is always empty, by definition, unless I go manually change the setting before viewing it, and then change it back when I'm done.
Would this be a Jerboa issue, or a general Lemmy issue?
Felt like I had to share this after catching it on Twitch last week.
And no, this is not my YouTube channel.
Side note: apparently I can't change or get rid of the alt text inside the image?