Another factory

[Oldie]

Attempt to add another factory, not as pretty as the cellar door though. The image is modified from Offices - Errica (com_cl4_E5_06_07 by Schnils, Leartin) by adding 2 more floors and some lights in the lift well and a little bit of night time work in winter.

The goal was to shortcut the long comic chain for paper and what better way of getting rid of paper than by having the public service consume it!
You will note that there is an output good "waste" commented out of the dat. That is part of a big project of mine to create a waste chain. That came about when I discovered that the waste from rum distillation is some 15 times the output of the spirit. Nonetheless, the pso has given me a bit of fun.

It consumes paper, tons of it. No  doubt generating lots of benefits to the population - legislature, bills, advertising materials, bills, tax forms, bills, etc. This should result in a lot of outgoing mail but I haven't got that bit right, so if anyone can tell me how to bump the mail generation I'd be grateful.

Translation
pso
Public Service Offices
Many, many bills for council services exit this building much to the dismay of the locals and the small businesses nearby. You can come here in person and complain until your tongue explodes, but it will do no good.


regards

Oldie

[prissi]

Factories anyway produce 6 times more mail than they receive ...

Although I would expect the administration in pak192 to be a little more extravagant, like having a fishtank as top floor or so.

[Leartin]

A factory to consume paper and produce waste?

How about this:



You are right, a public service is best to consume paper



Note: Waste has the disadvantage that you will have an end consumer (like a waste dump), and that might spawn before other chains. Then, factories spawn in order to provide waste, rather than to provide something useful.

[Oldie]

Note: Waste has the disadvantage that you will have an end consumer (like a waste dump), and that might spawn before other chains. Then, factories spawn in order to provide waste, rather than to provide something useful.

Is that possible? I've never seen (that I recall) any downstream factory built where the upstream provider hasn't already been built?

[Leartin]

The game first creates the end consumer. So it would build the toilet first, see that it requires paper, and build a paper factory. Then it sees the paper factory requires wood, so it picks any of the buildings providing wood, and then tries to build that. (There is a woodcutter for each climate to allow for the correct forest surrounding it)

So, a waste consumer would make the game build any factory that produces waste. It might instead connect to existing factories, but there is no guarantee such a factory already exists.



I think waste is something that should be done in code similar to electricity.
- waste dumps spawn based on mapwide demand like power plants
- waste dumps don't form contracts and rather accept all waste (similar to how power plants accept all power consumers)
- waste is not a regular good produced in factories, but rather works like pax, mail and electric demand. Bit weird to give a boost, I'd rather have it as a requirement (factory can't work if there is too much waste), but I have similar qualms with electricity so that's fine.
- perhaps, in a later step, waste could be added to citybuildings. Spawns everywhere, but without goal - any connected waste dump will do.

[Oldie]

Well I'll be.
I think the reason that I have never seen that is because I start games with a relatively low density of factories as I want to control chains explicitly via the public service and that's because I write stories to go with my games (outside the game of course).
I tried about 15 new games today with increasingly high factory densities and still haven't seen what you mention. OK at high factory densities there are a lot more complete chains, but I still see no evidence of incomplete chains starting at the consumer.
To give more background of how my waste system works and is being developed:

• There are 3 types of waste goods, green_waste; recyclables; and waste(landfill).
• There are 3 consumers, a composter; a recycler; and a dump.
• Only certain factories produce some type of waste. (This is because I spend some time researching what the product-to-waste ratio is for an industry. Initiated by my surprise about the rum distillery ratio and the real-world problems it causes. (No wonder rum costs so much!))

Looking at some industry types based on the limited information that I have found:

• Primary producers actually create little waste, with the exception of sugar cane plantations that lose 1/3 each cane in toppings. Fruit producers (tree) have very little waste from the yearly pruning. Ground fruits have negligible waste and it is generally ploughed back in. Vineyards have some waste from pruning, crushing and pulping but nowhere near the ratio for the distillery.
• Secondary industries have widely varying waste ratios. Car parts, electronics, metal fabricators and the like have very low ratios and can be neglected. Some, like papermills, have medium to high ratios.
• End consumers vary even more but most can be ignored (unless there is a special reason, like the pso  )
• Most of the "waste" "created" in the world is by the "customers" i.e. the humans in da houses. Many, many times the amount produced by industries. But I'm ignoring that. 

So, I'm not trying to solve the Simthanian ecological problems en masse.
Another little play around I'm doing is to make the composter and recycler produce desired goods, compost goes to the DIY and is sold rapidly, the recycler may be able to produce paper and plastics (maybe in the future, chemicals...)
The dump, of course, is an end-point and should cease to accept any more waste when its full. I think I have to set its production rate to 0 and capacity to a reasonable level. Haven't worked on the land-fill waste too much yet.

It's given me some reasonable outcomes so far. The players have to manage waste which hasn't got a very high perceived value. But if the factories build up too much of it they stop producing so "steps must be taken".

I take your comment in faith though and will beware of it happening.

regards
Oldie

p.s. Is it just me or are Simuthanians a bunch of alcoholics? I can never keep supply up at the pubs.

[Leartin]

OK at high factory densities there are a lot more complete chains, but I still see no evidence of incomplete chains starting at the consumer.

I mean, they hopefully are not incomplete at all (unless it's impossible to place a producer) - though "completeness" means "everything needed for the end consumer to get their first input exists".


If you already have your waste chains just do this: On a map without any factories, go to the editor and open the factory builder dialog. There, tick either of the chain options (depending on whether your end consumer is urban or not) and place it. Simutrans then will build the complete chain to supply that consumer. You'll notice that factories will spawn to produce the waste, but without consumers for their actual produce.
This is almost the same whenever Simutrans naturally spawns factories. You will never find a coal mine without a coal power plant, that's impossible - but a coal power plant without coal mine is possible IF there is no space on the map for the mine (or none that could be detected fast enough before the algorithm aborts)

(Why 'almost'? Because spawning from the dialog makes it so the end consumer gets ALL wares it wants, wheras natural spawning restricts to the first good and 'expands' later on by providing chains for other goods)

Due to these mechanics, we restricted ourselves
- No "side outputs" that make no sense as the main output. If anything produces more than one thing, all of it must be reasonable on it's own. It's a comic pakset, reason can be stretched. But I think for any factory that produces waste, it either needs to be obvious (like toilets) or a joke on the product quality.
- No "side inputs" that shouldn't be required. Sausage is made of meat. There are a bunch of sausages filled with cheese, yet it makes no sense for the sausage factory to require cheese for sausages to be produced. This issue can partly be solved by splitting the factory - eg. we have two different sugar refineries for beets and sugarcane, rather than one refinery that requires both.
Though end consumers are different - you can have candles and flowers as side inputs for a graveyard, since the graveyard still demands sacrifices corpses first.

I think I have to set its production rate to 0 and capacity to a reasonable level.

Bad idea. Or rather, great idea, won't work. Usually, a consumer creates as many producer as it needs to fulfill it's requirements. But such a dump wouldn't "need" anything, unless you force it to connect to X producers, but that means even higher chances to spawn new factories that do nothing but produce waste. Furthermore, being full won't cause new landfills to spawn, and if they spawn naturally, they won't automatically take over all consumers of the old one...

the composter and recycler produce desired goods, compost goes to the DIY and is sold rapidly, the recycler may be able to produce paper and plastics

For someone who started this thread with "Shortening a chain" you sure like to make them a lot longer.
So let's say a money bin expands to need bills. Only factory to provide is a money printer, so that spawns, and it needs paper, so instead of a paper mill, a recycler spawns. Okay, so... where does the recycler get it's recycleables, which preferably can be turned into paper? Why, a printer comes to mind, so let's settle on that. So what does the printer need? Right, paper...
Now there are three possibilities:
1) to get paper, a papermill spawns. That's the best case scenario actually - it means the chains just get longer. Not too bad.
2) to get paper, a recycler spawns. Which requires a source. Which might require paper. So... the chain can actually get quite, quite long.
3) to get paper, it happens to find a recycler that's already on the map and still has capacities somehow. Great Success! ...until you find out that it's the very recycler that caused the printer to exist in the first place, and now they are in a deadlock demanding goods from each other they can't ever produce.

But if the factories build up too much of it they stop producing so "steps must be taken".

Except that's not a game mechanic at all. If a factory produces two products, but only one is used, it will happily keep producing. If you don't make money shipping it, just leave it.


So yeah, I like what you are trying to do, but I don't think you actually can given the game limitations at this time.

[Antonin]

Your Public Service Office and your Cellar Door Sales outlet look very nice! Is there a simple way I can add them to pak192 Comic? In the past I have tried and failed to add new factories to pak128 Japan,