Factorio

Built my first Naqium Ingot factory, pretty happy with it.

downscaled:



full pic


Naquitite processing is notoriously busy because it has to be mined outside the solar system and only stacks till ten. Most people do an intermediate processing at the mining site (which precludes the usage of production modules), but I chose to bring it in raw because I wanted to stress a high throughput system.

There's a few things I changed up. Generally for my 4 cargo wagon trains I funnel the four buffer chests into a single buffer chest to guarantee even consumption of the buffer chests, ex, my copper chests here:



This has two problems:
1. You incur a UPS cost from the entry and exit of the buffer chest (which can be quite large for large chests)
2. You then have to distribute out of that chest to through your factory, which can be quite annoying in high consumption scenarios.

So I tried to ditch that funnel buffer and instead output it raw. This has the issue of imbalancing the chests which can either cause the factory to be underprovisioned or cause overshipping of trains, which can cause trains to be occupied longer than you want (which isn't a big deal in this situation because the only 1-4-1 trains I have coming from nauvis orbit to nauvis is for this purpose, but whatever).

To address that I did two things:
1. Used some fancy circuits to set my request amount (and even integrated in the LUA scripting mod: Moon Logic )
2. Used some basic circuits to balance the chests.



You can see the circuit logic for #1 here, basically it takes the most needed resource and multiplies it by 4 to request only when one chest needs it. The inserters to the left do some balancing of the chests. I generally have equivalent consumption of each chest, but it's imperfect.

After pulverising the naquitite ore, I'm using direct insertion to move them to the chemical factories, which is made easy with Bob's Inserters



This is more UPS efficient than going building->belt->building, but requires a lot more effort.

Another thing I tried for the first time is used a sort of self-feeding inserter going into a loader


This factory has a lot of byproducts, and in this case there are three byproducts that the system itself consumes *rolls eyes*. I think that mechanic is dumb and have historically solved it by creating an output that feeds back into a belt with some basic prioritization. This makes use of the fact that loaders will overfeed factories more than inserters, so it'll load up that byproduct and only use the inserter when it needs to.

At some point when I upgrade this factory the big change is to have the rail cut through the center.



and offload on both sides. This will increase how much direct insertion from buffer chest to pulverizer, which is better UPS. It'll also simplify my inputs/outputs a bit being able to use the left side. I'm tempted to ditch the buffer chests and go train->factory directly, but that would reduce throughput. I might also give up the idea of sending raw naquitite and instead process it onsite, we'll see.

The way I do ratios is with Helmod where I create this production block and then roughly create the right ratios.



Beyond the ridiculous amount of naquitite stacks going through, this processing is an absolute monster with 6 solid inputs, 5 liquid inputs and 5 outputs.

meStevo said:

I read all this amazing shit and then spend like 4 hours trying to get my trains not to crash into each other just because im not using city blocks / blueprints / etc to standardize shit and have them flying all over willy nilly.

View attachment 525852

Click to expand...

Solving this without rail chain signals is probably impossible.


It's non-trivial to understand but once you get used to them become super obvious. Chain rail signals in, rail signals out.

Note that bidirectional rails is often considered bad practice. Using a bidirectional rail for sections of low throughput rail networks would definitely earn you style points, which are the most valuable of points.

Gravel said:

Pretty much this. The only caveat being if there's not enough room for a full train, use a chain signal.

I'm almost 250 hours into SE now and I'm kind of burning out. Shit just takes so many resources it's kind of beating me down. The items at the end of the chain for outpost materials like aeroframe bulkheads (or shit, even scaffolds), heavy composite, or anything bio past bioscrubbers, take so many damn resources and are needed in such insane quantities that I just don't even feel like trying. Iridite so far is the worst. I finally had to go to a secondary field on the planet and found out that the raw material only stacks to 10. So a train wagon load is a whopping 400. That train is just constantly going.

I've heard that naq makes that look like child play and is significantly worse. And looking at the rest of the tech tree is depressing.

Click to expand...

I played vanilla Factorio for a brief time and never got into megabases that process 1k+ SPM or whatever. For most solutions (build masssssive bases) the logistical challenges of megabases is pretty different to Space Exploration which has highly diverse recipes and relatively low throughput of all items along with much more powerful beacons and modules. So as I've been playing SE I've been feeling left out of the megabase fun. Even my Iridite and Vitamelange factories are pretty modest in size.

So the Naquitite ore problem that requires quite a bit of scale is pretty exciting. I don't know how busy my naquitite factory will get before my factory is "done", but I'm hoping to get enough for very busy railway traffic of my naquitite factory.

For non-Naquitite resources, yeah, most players will create an initial outpost and then need to return to scale up that resource in order to produce those resources and an appropriate pace. You can mitigate this by being disciplined about letting that resource steadily collect while working on other parts of you base, but then your shit has to not break immediately after you look away, which is something I'm trying to get better at. One thing I keep telling myself is that most belts in any given factory are either 100% full because you're overproducing or 100% empty because something is broken or underproducing, few spend their time constantly processing materials. So just build competently and let it run while you rotate through the dozen things you can do to improve your factory..

I went to my Vitamelange planet and rebuilt the factories. This heavily uses direct insertion like the naquitite factory but tries out a new idea of building each factory next to a Core Miner, moving all the core mining to each quadrant while consuming it with priority but still getting most of the materials from either nearby vitamelange ore or trained in.

This particular factory uses trained in ore. After building it my stone and sand transport totally depleted, which is fairly satisfying in terms of building such a massive vita production my entire system can't support it. I have six of these factories, but might drop down to 4.

My Cryonite moon was one of the most reliable factories and the last of the new resources to adopt core mining. It just chunked along indefinitely, providing sand and cryonite to the solar system with only the rare need to find another mine.

I rehauled it using the same kind of style as before, which I'm now calling "box of chocolates" and am getting kind of tired of the aesthetics of.



The new idea I tried is adding what I'm calling a "buffer wart":



This belt comes from the core fragment pulverizers. This will read the belt contents of the input belt and if full, add the items to the storage. The idea here is that normally there's no buffering, but if the factory is interrupted for whatever reason, the core fragment pulverizers will continue processing and reduce the amount of non-core fragments being processed in the facility. I think it's more important on my vitamelange where the byproduct of core mining (stone) is essential to continuing to process vitamelange, so ensuring the core fragment pulverizers are operating is useful.

Behold, Naq Hauler Mk. II. I don't think I showed off Naq Hauler Mk. I but this one uses antimatter drives, has 4 warehouses for Naquitite and has force fields to prevent damage from rare events where asteroids are very dense.

There are 4 different locations it cycles through.


I've been looking forward to building space ships in SE and it hasn't let me down at all. I'm still iterating on simple, obvious designs but it's satisfying.

Gravel said:

Wait, your entire ship runs on just the steam from that one tank?

Click to expand...

Yes. It's super duper hot (5000C). It'll finish its interstellar journey with like, 40k out of 50k steam left.

I have this little factory that emits a beam on the top into the receiver on the bottom, which turns the heat into 5000C steam that is sent via train to different parts of my Nauvis Orbit base.