Okay, here’s my take on sharing my experience with Factorio AAI loaders and changing recipes.
Factorio AAI Loaders: My Recipe Change Journey (and some headaches!)
So, I was messing around with AAI loaders in my Factorio base, right? You know, trying to automate everything, get that sweet, sweet production flowing. These loaders are pretty cool, but I ran into a snag when I needed to change the recipe they were using. It wasn’t exactly straightforward, and I facepalmed a few times along the way. Let me walk you through it.
First off, I plonked down a bunch of AAI loaders thinking, “Yeah, this’ll be easy. Just tell ’em what to load, and they’ll do their thing.” Wrong! I quickly realized that setting the recipe wasn’t as intuitive as just clicking on the loader and picking something. I mean, the usual interface wasn’t popping up.
Then, I remembered reading somewhere – probably buried in a forum post somewhere – that you have to right-click on the loader. Okay, cool. Did that. But then… what? I was staring at the loader’s interface, and there was no obvious “change recipe” button. I felt like an idiot. Seriously, where was it hiding?
- I tried hovering over every pixel of the UI.
- I clicked everything that looked even remotely clickable.
- Nothing!
After some more fiddling, and a LOT of frustration, I finally spotted it. There’s this tiny little icon, looks like an arrow making a circle. Push that thing! It’s easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention.
Clicking that finally brought up the recipe selection window. Sweet relief! Now I could actually tell the loader what I wanted it to load/unload. I could finally select the new recipe I needed. All done!…. right? Not quite.
Turns out, I hadn’t fully planned out my logistics. The new recipe required materials that weren’t readily available at that location. So the loader was just sitting there, doing nothing. Lesson learned: ALWAYS double-check your input materials BEFORE changing the recipe!
Anyway, once I sorted out the material flow, everything started working like a charm. The AAI loaders were happily chugging away, moving items where they needed to go. I felt like a proper Factorio engineer, even if it took me way longer than it should have to figure out the recipe change.
So, that’s my story. It’s not glamorous, but hopefully, it’ll save someone else the same headache. Remember: Right-click, look for the circular arrow, and plan your logistics!
One final thing I’ll mention is trains. I wasn’t using trains for this particular setup, but for longer distances, they are a life saver. I should have set up a train station closer to my setup.
