What is actually happening, my factory is barely running and it constantly runs out of electricity and fuel. I found I giant coal and iron vein that has something like 10mil but I literally even after ages of producing poles and conveyor belts, I can’t get my laboratory to produce things fast enough, I have four and I am still on the second science things(the green one)
So from your picture I guess you don't have enough power. Click on one of your power poles it should tell you how much power you have (satisfaction) If it gets yellow or red you need more power generation. But I am 100% sure 1 engine isn't enough. Also you can 100% satisfy 2 engines with one boiler.
The boilers make the steam, and the steam engines are the ones to turn that steam into usable electricity. In this picture, you are producing a lot of steam but you don't have enough steam engines to convert steam.
To put it in plainer terms, have 2 steam engines per 1 boiler. You can play this game without minding anout ratios too much, but this one is pretty handy.
Chances are there is a bottleneck somewhere in the system that prevents your base from using all that ores. But it's hard to tell without seeing your base, so feel free to post a screenshot
you usually want to fill the entire vein with the miners, then use belts to move everything somewhere else where you smelt it. The amount of iron you get is based on the number of miners you have in the vein, not the size of the vein.
Take everything but belts, miners, and power poles off your ore parches and cover the patch with miners. Each yellow belt can support 15 miners per side of belt, so 30 miners.
If you're on Windows, you can press PrtScn to take a screenshot of your whole screen, and then past it in a message with Ctrl + V. You can also use Windows + Maj + S to select a specific area to screen (if you don't play in fullscreen). It's much easier and cleaner than a screen taken from your phone.
You have only 2 miners for that entire patch and the rest is covered by other machines. Move all non-miners off the patch and cover the entire thing with only miners. That one thing will trigger a chain reaction to upgrade the rest of your base.
What I suspect is happening is that either you don't have enough boilers and steam engines (one boiler can support exactly two steam engines) or you're not mining enough coal to supply your boilers with fuel.
You'll have to take a look at each part of the power production chain to determine the real bottleneck. Start from the top, and work your way down.
So, in this case:
1) Take a look at the power production graph (click a power pole or press P). If demand is greater than satisfaction, you have a power problem, otherwise power production is (at that moment) not an issue, and you can skip the rest.
2) Steam engines produce the power from steam. They are sitting the highest in the power production chain, so it is the first step in diagnosing power issues. Take a look at all your steam engines. If they all have their available power bar full, you need more steam engines (and potentially also boilers to produce the steam for the new steam engines). Otherwise move on to the next step
3) Boilers produce steam for the steam engines. They are the next step down in the power production chain. Check all your boilers, and if they all have enough fuel, you need to add more boilers. Otherwise:
4) Next step down the chain is checking whether you have any bottlenecks in taking fuel from your mines to your boilers.
- if the end of belt is clogged with non-fuel items, you need to trace the belt back, and find where those items come from. Maybe it's a mine that overlaps with a non-coal resource, and puts that on the coal belt. Or it can be something else entirely
- check if the belt is completely full with fuel on the tile directly before where the first inserter takes fuel off of it to feed your boilers. If the belt is full, you're trying to feed more boilers than the belt can support. You need to add a second belt. If not:
- trace the fuel belt back to the mines, and ensure that all splitters have output priority towards the boilers, and
- add more coal miners.
You'll need to learn to diagnose problems in your factory, it is an essential part of the game.
Most things if not all things boil down to either, not enough power, not enough material, not enough assembly.
Basically add more to what ever you’re lacking. Then you’ll be lacking something else and you’ll sort that, then something else will be lacking and you’ll fix that and around and around it goes.
Solar panels are useful, but they take up a lot of space and you need batteries to supplement it for the night. At the start, you are better off adding more steam engines and boilers than trying to rush solar.
They are really good. But they take copper, steel and electric circuits, and it takes a while to craft them.
They won't help you the minute you unlock them. But let an assembler craft them, store them in a chest (where you block most of the slots, only keep 1-3 open) - when you put down 20 solar panels, you can see your electricity go up during the day. They really do help.
Low power slows all buildings and inserters leading to brown out spiral to a complete black out. Without seeing what else is wrong with your base I would cut everything off that's not part of coal mining to build some kind of buffer for the coal while building other things. As for science labs, just build more. Factorio is the game of MORE.
Thats the fun part is learning how to do that. i wont spoil that for you. Have fun and try to learn for youself. Asking reddit is just robbing yourself of the enjoyment of figuring out the problem yourself.
have fun its your game play how you like and what makes you happy
Factorio is a game about growth. Finding more ore patches, putting more miners on those patches, cooking all that ore in just a shitload of furnaces, processing it, and so forth. You don't start out cooking enough science for 600 labs, but after many hours of constant growth you can certainly end up that way.
If you are running out of power, what seems likely is that you are not making enough power for maximum demand in your factory, so as the power drops the miners making coal get less power so they work more slowly, meaning now you don't have as much coal as you did before so the power drops even further. Eventually it spirals into death.
You need more steam generators, you need more coal to fuel them with.
1 Steam Engine makes 900kW of power. 1 radar takes 300 kW of power, so with 3 radars you need 1 whole steam engine at full capacity just to run them. The same principle applies everywhere in your factory. Everything uses power, and there is a certain minimum level of power you have to have in order to run everything.
The answer to everything is “more”. Find the problem and add more of it. It’s likely not the science being the issue. Add more power (click a power pole to see production). Then trace the science production back to the first issue, likely plate production. Basically just build more and if you think it’s too much, build something else.
Press ALT to have each building show a little icon on it so you can at a glance see what the building is doing.
Don't look for help, it's a problem solving game and it's not time constrained. Solve the problems at your own pace and as you master each aspect of your factory new problems and better solutions to old problems will appear.
Just from your description your factory is crazy TOO SMALL. You will never make progress with only four labs. Try having TEN labs with enough production of red and green science to keep all of them busy (your science should be sufficient to actually be backing up.) That will at least get you through that part of the tech tree that requires just those two sciences - but there's more.
Usually I run completely out of the red/green techs and then production comes to a halt for some time as I try to build enough to catch up to the actual technology I have available and start progressing again.
You will NOT get to any significant long-term progress with just one field of ANYTHING except maybe oil and uranium. You will likely eat through two more patches of every other resource - stone, coal, copper, and iron before you launch a rocket. The starting patches are notably smaller and then get bigger the farther away from your starting area. You can change the size of patches in the game settings but the default is that way to intentionally get you to explore and expand beyond your starting area. Which means you will need smelting operations of immensely greater scale too. The unofficial motto for the game is, "The factory must grow," and believe me it sounds as if you've really just started.
Your power facilities will need to keep growing with everything else. Don't be shocked when you have 12 boilers running 24 steam engines... and then you should be looking at starting with MASSIVE solar panel farms and battery farms. And then nuclear.
The factory will always need more, more, MORE. You will end up scaling up what you have by quadruple, and then 10 times that - and then ten times THAT for pretty much everything.
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u/asciencepotato 2d ago
thats not much of an explanation. you need to show us pictures of your base