[0.11.x] Inserter energy balance

[Schmendrick]

In vanilla, inserters, long inserters, and fast inserters all have the same cost per action, as well as the same idle drain. Smart inserters cost more per insert, but all inserters have the same "idle" drain. Other than the (rather minimal) increase in cost of materials (or possibly intricate timing setups that rely on the basic inserter being slow), there is no reason to use a basic inserter once you've unlocked other inserters. This bugs me. So I wrote this, even though the game impact is relatively minimal. I just like to feel like I'm being frugal when I use a basic inserter...

Inserter energy usage (per movement) is now based on the speed of operation, as well as the length of the arm. Smart inserters have a passive power drain of 4kW (ten times the normal 400W) to represent their constant monitoring and calculating.

inserterenergy.jpg (49.4 KiB) Viewed 23649 times

(Image includes my smart long inserters mod, which I just noticed needs a minor adjustment for the icon.)

Should adapt well to any mods, though it will override energy settings the mod had set for its inserters which may be undesirable.

Calculations are based on the basic inserter as a baseline (or the burner inserter, for any mod-added burner inserter variants). Energy cost for longer arms uses the average distance between nominal pickup and dropoff points (if there were a normal 1x1 chest in those locations), and increases linearly rather than with length squared which would be more realistic. Smart inserters have their idle drain multiplied by ten, which is consistent-ish with vanilla.

For reference, the difference between vanilla and the rebalance. (Actually, the screenshot was the opposite and then I flipped it horizontally because the image made more sense...)

insertercompare.jpg (15.16 KiB) Viewed 23649 times

[Peter34]

This sounds like a good mod.

[Peter34]

Can you post some actual stats? The drain for each Inserter type, and the averaged energy use per move for each Inserter type? And if you've changed their speed?

[Xterminator]

Can you post some actual stats? The drain for each Inserter type, and the averaged energy use per move for each Inserter type? And if you've changed their speed?

Agreed, I would also like to know the stats of each inserter. So the idle power drain, and the power usage when the inserter is being used. I really like the idea behind this, because I feel the same way that basic inserters normally seem completely pointless after you get fast inserters etc...
I definitely would like to do a spotlight on this mod, but would prefer to wait until I know the actual stats of each inserter.

Thanks!

[Peter34]

Just seeing the power usage stat, as displayed in-game, isn't sufficient, because it's expressed in watt, that is joules per second, but a Fast Inserter in particular uses less than 1 full second to move an item, and so it's really necessary to compare energy-cost-per-move before one can form an opinion of this mod.

[Schmendrick]

Idle drain on non-smart inserters is 400W, as vanilla. Idle drain on smart inserters is 4kW. Speed is unchanged.

Cost per movement is linearly related to speed, and increases with (average) arm length squared (I remembered incorrectly in the first post). I may change this in an update; while more accurate from a physics standpoint, I don't want to hurt the long inserter overmuch.

Vanilla speeds
Basic inserter .014
Long inserter .02
Fast/smart inserter .035

So with rebalanced vanilla inserters, a fast/smart insert costs 2.5 times as much energy as a basic inserter would in the same situation. A single movement from a long inserter costs 5.714 times as much as a basic inserter's movement.

[Peter34]

Thanks for the data!

I won't suggest to the other players that we should add this mod to our ongoing coop MP game, but if it still works in alpha 12, then I'll suggest we add it to our next game.

[Wiloxe]

Hello there, I happen to both be using this mod together with smart splitters mod and it turns out that this mod affects the smart splitter changing the energy cost from 10.0 kW to 875 GW

So in other words combining these mods together makes the splitter unusable :/

[Peter34]

One thing that really annoys me about this mod is the very non-rounded power usage shown. Factorio has a tradition for using rounded figures, so that for instance a normal Inserter uses 13000 watt when active. But this mod changes that to a much less round figure, something like 11437 or whatever.

It doesn't make any real difference. But it is very annoying, and I'm hoping this mod will get updated (maybe shortly after alpha 12 comes out) to use rounded figures like in the vanilla game.

[Thomasnotused]

Put this in my very old game. Power failed during the day with more than 10k solar panels. 10/10 would factory suicide again.

[Peter34]

Put this in my very old game. Power failed during the day with more than 10k solar panels. 10/10 would factory suicide again.

Well, that's be because the vanilla game is unbalanced. This mod takes an unbalanced vanilla game and tries to improve the balance. So of course your factory ran out of power. That's also why I never suggested to my MP buddies that we start using this mod during our ongoing game. Doing so would have had all sorts of bizarre consequences. And I could know that without needing to actually try it first.

[PROTOS]

it gives balance to the insweters nice job mate

[Peter34]

Can you please update this mod to alpha 12?

[Schmendrick]

Sure. I think I'll be tweaking the way it balances things, too, to be more of a "game-balancey" approach than a "realistic" approach (mainly: long inserters being cheaper than they would be).

[Peter34]

Sure. I think I'll be tweaking the way it balances things, too, to be more of a "game-balancey" approach than a "realistic" approach (mainly: long inserters being cheaper than they would be).

I've actually started making my own Inserters mod. The goal fairly similar to yours, I want to increase the prevalance of the use of normal inserters so that players only use the fast/smart/long ones when they're actually necessary (back before I started using your mod I'd routinely use blue Inserters).

Right now I'm working on altering the recipes. What I do is I increase the crafting time, and I add a Steel requirement to Red and Blue ones.

The recipe for Long-Handed Inserters is changed so that you craft 5 at a time, and it requires 1 Steel, plus x5 times the other ingredients. In this way, each red one costs 1/5 Steel, just slightly discouraging their use except when needed. They also take 2s to craft, not 0.5 (normal Inserters take 1s to craft - which means I'll be altering the Science Pack 2 recipe too, to take that into account).

Likewise, the recipe for Fast Inserters is changed, so that you acraft 2 at a time, and it requires 1 Steel plus x2 the other ingredients, so that each Fast Inserter costs 1/2 Steel. And they take longer to craft.

The only change I made to Smart Inserters, recipe-wise, is craftig time. Longer still.

So far I've only implemented the recipe changes to yellow and red ones, but it seems to work fine (I'm new at modding) so I'll proceed with the others.

But I'd also like to increase the power requirements. I'm thinking of just using the same usage power requirements as in your mod, but I need your OK for that. Can I have it please?

I'm also going to increase the drain of Fast Inserters by 50%, although I think I disagree with your drastic increase of the drain of Smart Inserters. I think that rather than x10 times the drain of normal Inserters it should only be x3 times.

[Schmendrick]

Personally I don't like some of those changes, for thematic reasons (whatever; modding is subjective and that's half the point) but I have no problem with you using the values... if you use my actual code I'd appreciate a mention. When I get around to updating this, the values/method will be a little different though.

[Schmendrick]

One thing that really annoys me about this mod is the very non-rounded power usage shown. Factorio has a tradition for using rounded figures, so that for instance a normal Inserter uses 13000 watt when active. But this mod changes that to a much less round figure, something like 11437 or whatever.

It doesn't make any real difference. But it is very annoying, and I'm hoping this mod will get updated (maybe shortly after alpha 12 comes out) to use rounded figures like in the vanilla game.

Ok so I'm revisiting this (though fortunately the relevant field names for inserters have been unchanged so the mod runs just as well in 0.12 as it did in 0.11, though I do want to be kinder to long inserters) and I decided I would try to address the round number issue, and here's the problem: vanilla inserters do not have nice clean numbers. If they appear to, it is because the mouseover display rounds. A basic inserter lists its power consumption as 13kW, whereas in fact its maximum power consumption is 13.6kW; 13.2 (rounded down for the display) + 400W idle drain. A long inserter's consumption, listed as 20kW, is actually 19.71+0.4 = 20.31 kW. And of course the actual average power consumption of an inserter, even at its most active, is closer to half of these numbers, since a single movement is mostly rotation but partially movement+rotation, a number which might vary every time an item is grabbed from the moving target of a belt.

I am all for making sloppy-looking calculated numbers look nicer for the sake of appearance (I did it in this), but doing so for inserters is just impractical, unless someone has any suggestions about a good target / standard.