5 ms·
Playing Factorio helps to demonstrate this. At its core, Factorio is about turning a few base materials into useful things, with many intermediate parts. Every
by cortesoft 6y ago
Playing Factorio helps to demonstrate this.
At its core, Factorio is about turning a few base materials into useful things, with many intermediate parts. Everything you build, then, is eventually competing with those few basic as materials.
The first time I played, I would see some base part being produced faster than it was consumed, and my thought was I should store the excess product, so that the factories creating those products would not back up and stop functioning. This would let me have a buffer, and keep those intermediate material producing machines running at full capacity.
Now that I had this buffer of intermediate materials that was growing, I would try to add more factories that used those materials for the next intermediate material.
However, the next intermediate material would also need other intermediate materials, so I would have to expand the number of factories producing raw materials to feed those other producers. However, additional raw materials were also consumed by the factories that were ALREADY overproducing. This lead to an attempt at a delicate balancing act, to get the number of factories for each type exactly right. I would add some to one material, then have to add more to another. It was impossible.
What I finally learned is that I had to let the factories over producing backup and stop producing. That way, more raw materials would be leftover for the things I was short on. This back pressure allowed the factory to self balance.
Increasing the buffer on something is only useful if the usage is highly variable. Then, you need a small buffer but not too big of one.
- jkhdigital 6y agoBackpressure is the most important force in any production process. Now if only I could figure out how to apply it to my personal life...
- brylie 6y agoYeah same here! I'm just thinking aloud, but let's consider time and money as our scarce resources. We can perhaps put backpressure on time-sink activities, such as endless scrolling Netflix, and open up those time resources for creative hobbies. This essentially boils down to replacing a consumer habit/mindset with one of creativity and self-expression. Similarly, living in a small apartment and not paying for a storage unit can put backpressure on material acquisitions.
- jkhdigital 6y agoWell... the main difference is that backpressure in a mechanized system will always be respected, but a willful human can choose to ignore it. I can choose to live in a small apartment and then proceed to make myself miserable by cramming it so full of junk that I can barely move around...
- loa_in_ 6y agoFactorio would be a better model of the problem if backstuffed factories would keep consuming power despite being idle. This would be analogous to having idle workforce that still has to be paid
- cortesoft 6y agoI guess I was sort of thinking of the workers as the raw material that can be put towards different things.
- alchemism 6y agoProduction in Dwarf Fortress plays with the same supply chain dynamics. The spatial organization of the workshops, raw material stockpiles, output bins, consumption points, and transit time between them must be tuned, otherwise the settlement collapses. The settlement always collapses, but the extrapolation of entropy is almost the point (and entertainment) of the game.