59
submitted 1 month ago by lucg@lemmy.world to c/factorio@lemmy.world

The Factoriopedia lists one "/m" rate for each asteroid type at a given position on a space route, but you clearly have to kill more asteroids as you go faster so it cannot be "per minute" (Factorio uses /m to mean per minute elsewhere in the game). However, it cannot mean metre either because you travel at many kilometres per second: you'd get thousands of asteroids per second per type! Searching through the forums, Lemmy, and reddit, I didn't find an answer to this conundrum of space versus time

I've now gotten around to figuring out how the spawn rate varies :)

Method

  1. Let the ship fly at the indicated speed (V) for 10 minutes (plus margin, because the asteroids need a bit of time to move from spawn to the ship) between Solar System Edge and Shattered Planet
  2. Open the production stats window, set to 10 minutes, select the kills tab, and take a screenshot so that we can work with nonmoving values
  3. Calculate the ship's average position, namely: position at time of screenshot minus (5 minutes × V km/s)
  4. Look up the expected spawn rate at that position by linearly interpolating between the nearest values in the Factoriopedia (they are precise to 40 km, so we know the value at 0km, ..., 960km, 1000km, 1040km, etc.)
  5. Calculate the ratio between how many huge asteroids were killed per minute (per the kills graph) and how many huge asteroids should have spawned
  6. Plot that value on the graph as a percentage

Results

There seem to be two or three formulas in use: one for 10km/s and below (it appears as though this is in effect when your ship touches 10.xx km/s every few seconds, but that seems strange), one for a rapid but smooth transition (or maybe they blend the two other formulas together?), and then one for speeds above 15 km/s. The middle formula may also just be a blend of the other two, perhaps they average the result between 10 and 15 km/s (or apply a sigmoid or whatnot)

  • The formula for slow speeds seems to spawn 1.1x (or 10%) more asteroids as the speed doubles from 5 to 10 km/s (not many data points in this range; value is very approximate)

  • The formula for high speeds spawns about 1.5–1.7x more asteroids when you go 2x faster

The Factoriopedia value isn't distance-based (one could think "/m" is a shorthand for "/10km" or so), because then it would have been 1:1 linear: when you cover twice as much distance per unit of time, the number of kills would double. It also isn't time-based, because then the graph should have shown a flat line at 100%. It appears to be a derivative of your ship's speed (and perhaps other factors, such as its width)

Sorry for the sparse data above 50 km/s btw. I had spent a bunch of time and already pretty much gotten the answer when I realised that I could go back to an earlier save and do the same thing for an easier section of the route where the ship can safely fly faster. I collected just these two data points and, when that also looked close enough to linear, called it "good enough" =)

Discussion/limitations

  1. I wonder if the Factorio developers made Promethium much more common if you fly slow, to make it easier to collect for players that didn't build a great ship

  2. Not all asteroids that spawn get killed, so the graph must be wrong in absolute terms, i.e., the actual spawn rate is higher than what I calculate using the "killed" statistic. My railguns' range about covers as far as the huge asteroids spawn out and I see that only a few on the edges (faded out, only visible when hovering over them) make it down the length of the ship, so the absolute number is probably not super far off. In any case, my personal goal was to figure out the relative number, not the absolute one

  3. Yes, I know these speeds are rookie numbers compared to some of the things I see online. But it's all my own work :). I purposefully don't look at other designs in detail because the satisfaction of figuring it out is the point of the game for me. The "not invented here" syndrome is a problem for my workplace, not my gaming experience :D

Future work

A. I'm also curious how platform width affects the rates, but did not have time to design another ship for trying that out

B. Check that the results are identical on other routes

C. Check how it behaves at and below zero speed

Supplementary material

The Factoriopedia does not show the total spawn rate and so it's hard to see what the difficulty is of each segment towards Shattered Planet. I've added a few data points to what I needed for the above calculation anyway and now we have the answer to that as well:

Basically a copy of the Factoriopedia graph, but with two lines added: the sum of the four values (sharp increase until 674 at 1.6Mm, then roughly flat (if you plot it on a log scale with a fat marker) until 3Mm, and finally it increases until 795 at 3.96Mm), and the sum of the three base asteroid types, that is, excluding Promethium (peaks at 1.6Mm, just shy of 400)

Spreadsheet with raw data for your enjoyment: https://lucgommans.nl/p/factorio/space-age-asteroid-spawn-rate-factoriov2.0.48.ods

Feel free to share the graphs or infos around, consider it CC-BY-SA or a similar flavor if you like ^^

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Used to be 5km where I grew up in the Netherlands, nowadays living in Germany it's 1km but uphill (don't have those in NL!). In either case I don't want to walk it and there's not a chance I would if it's 30 degrees out: that temperature means it's probably in a month of the year where I burn within 10-20 minutes. I'd have to put on sunscreen for going to the store! They better have a sandy beach aisle

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

"I won't be able to use many computers today." See how much/many in this position would indicate a multiple of computer? As though you could only use a few. But you're not wanting to count the number of computers but the amount of time. In the original, "the" before "computer" indicates it's singular so that the original sentence is simply not grammatical. What you probably mean is: "I won't be able to use the computer much today."

(Edit: I think in older English you could also put "much" earlier in the sentence: "I won't much be able to use the computer today." Makes me think of "Tell me where is gandalf, for I much desire to speak with him." https://youtu.be/uE-1RPDqJAY?t=74)

For the second sentence, swap the verb and the noun. I don't know why. "It's incredible how the time flies!" Putting the verb before the time might fit in a question: "How flies the time? Like an arrow!"

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If you have a lot of intrinsic motivation, Anki will probably make you learn the languages the fastest (or maybe you pick one of the two, idk how Norwegian Bokmål and Nynosk interact)

If not, some gamified thing like Duolingo keeps a lot of people engaged for ages apparently. Keep in mind that even their scientific papers are using engagement as the metric by which they score different spaced repetition parameters, not lesson retention. My grandma has been doing English for a year and I have yet to hear her speak two words, but she loves the characters and enjoys it a lot and that's the important thing for her ^^. If you've already got the book for the in-depth part, this could be a way to supplement by building a habit of daily learning

I'd guess that most other software is somewhere in between, at least on learning efficiency (like listening to audio books as someone else suggested: ok that's great and engaging, once you have a solid foundation at least, but it's only listening comprehension and you already need to know a lot so the further learning is somewhat limited)

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago

What game are you changing exactly with this?

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Exactly this. I don't understand the crack screen people but to each their own :p

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I just hope other EV manufacturers get the lost sales and this isn't pushing people to dino juice sippers

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Where does all that stuff go after it's used? I can't imagine it's all recycled properly (let alone reused) but also not really that the bulk is not separated out at such volumes

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

dack - Dutch

Dutch is alsjeblieft (informal), alstublieft (formal), thanks (informal), dankjewel (informal), or dankuwel (formal). The former probably means "as you desired" in old Dutch, the latter "thank you well", and the formal/informal variants simply insert the right word for "you" (je or u). And then there's thanks being commonly used. Or also bedankt, sounds kinda formal to me as well, not sure when you'd use that instead of dankuwel

Just "dank" (maybe you wrote that and autocorrupt kicked in?) is not really a thing we say, it just means "thank" which you'd also not say by itself in English (unless you're Rocky)

Edit: writing "dank" in an English sentence feels like everyone will think our thank-yous are like dank memes. The pronunciation of the "a" there is as in Clark; the English pronunciation of dank would map to denk in Dutch and means think!

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

You mention 150€/day in the comment thread. I'm struggling to think where in the world you couldn't stay on that budget if you spend some time looking for cheaper accommodation (hostel or something like airbnb) and mind a bit where you eat. Australia seems (per Wikipedia) to have the highest minimum wage at 18$/hour, ×8h to € comes to 127€/day. Sure, temporary accommodation costs like five times more than more permanent places, but in terms of food and transport you can pretty much do whatever the locals do so that, on the whole, you should be able to meet that budget pretty much anywhere

In Europe, Iceland might be the only place where you'd really have to plan ahead to get to an average of 150€/day as tourist. It's Europe's most sparsely populated country and lots of things need to be imported, making essentials like food expensive and accommodation options few and far between. If you don't want to drive a long distance every day (outside of the wider Reykjavík area at least) you'll easily spend three quarters of that daily budget on accommodation, and with food being expensive even in supermarkets and needing a rental car to get anywhere, you'll exceed the budget on a lot of the days

So that's challenge mode! I'm curious what values people who tried to cheapskate Iceland get to. We were at 290€/day for 2 persons. That's including the rental car, eating out most days (not at expensive places necessarily, but sometimes simply the only place), and we booked reasonably priced but not always the cheapest option for accommodation. This price excludes costs of attractions like the lava show, boat tour, swimming pool, etc.—the country is plenty beautiful to travel to without needing those necessarily, though I'd recommend all of the above. This amount is for 2 persons, but the car and rooms don't scale much when you're alone so a per-person cost price wouldn't be fair

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 23 points 5 months ago

You can never have enough socks. Many a christmas goes by where again nobody gifts me a nice pair of socks. People always seem to think I am in need of more books to read!

(Hope I'm somewhat correctly recounting Dumbledore's answer in relation to the mirror of Erised)

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 7 points 6 months ago

Eyeing the replies, does not one other person here get results constantly flooded with content farms? They've gotten significantly worse

But then, I don't use Google so maybe this is still better than Google Search?

It started maybe three years ago, around the same time as LLMs became usable for this, but I'm pretty sure >50% are human-written still. Probably the LLM generates the structure (saves any time they'd have to spend coming up with plausible-sounding texts) and someone from a low-income country is contracted to make it look more legit

Of course, queries for topics that have a Wikipedia page get Wikipedia first, recipes get tons of big-name recipe sites, products get stores. But when there's no obvious market around a topic, 3~4 out of 5 results are content farms pretending to have useful information to show unwary visitors ads

(As an alternative, I still have to try Kagi properly. It seemed on par with DDG when I did a few searches last year, but then their payment processor refused me trying to load my account, support was unhelpful, and I've gotten sidetracked since)

[-] lucg@lemmy.world 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

So long as you enjoyed playing though :D

45
submitted 6 months ago by lucg@lemmy.world to c/factorio@lemmy.world

Shows how https://www.factorio.com/galaxy grew over time. Also has a tool to show where your star is and find whom you're neighbors with :)

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lucg

joined 6 months ago