Factorio

Now that I'm more effectively using all my different outpost's materials and being more efficient in general, I'm shrinking my Nauvis base and abandoning areas I cleared of biters to get resources. This expansion was very resource and time consuming and is one of the many reasons my playtime was so long. Though this area was used for solar panel farms, which I don't need now that I've got space elevators to transmit solar energy from space back to the surface.

Picture are my walls that have flame throwers, artillery and laser cannons. Also picture are my waves of construction bots cleaning up one of my walls.

Gravel said:

My vulcanite planet is also heavy on imersite. No water. Although that seems common with vulcanite.

I was getting ready to go there and had everything ready to make rocket fuel on site because there's tons of oil, too. Then I realized...no water. Fuck. I scrapped the whole plan and got sidetracked by other shit. I really need to get there soon though. I'm just about done with my utility technologies. I'll likely load up half the rocket just with water barrels.

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here's how I deal with that on my imersite and vulcanite planet. The waterless planets receive Water Ice (lol) from an asteroid belt.

Gravel said:

I appreciate the advice, Tuco, but you're on a whole different level of game than I am. I'm super early space still (in my opinion) and you're what seems close to end game. Some of the shit you've got going on is just exponentially bigger than I can even grasp yet.

I did finally make it to my vulcanite planet. Man what a fucking disaster it ended up being. I took a bit of rocket fuel with me, and about 30k water. Turns out it was only about half what I needed. And since I'm not that far in yet, I didn't have a rocket capsule and silo ready to go for a 2nd rocket to the planet I was on. I was tempted to just suicide. Luckily everything is on provider chests now and I've got plenty of everything made. So I said fuck it, I won't take the easy way out. I built that fucker with robots, loaded up with about 5x as much rocket fuel as I needed, and sent it to myself.

I've got an assload of volcanite just because the rocket was filling for the entire time I was dicking around. I've got it doing the dance around with some centrifuges to make more enriched, but haven't gotten to the blocks portion yet. Oil is still a clusterfuck for me so I need to figure out a good method for getting the petroleum gas for volcanite blocks. And what to do with all the steam.

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Not sure if you have access to this recipe, but here's what I do with my steam on my vulcanite planet



Sending shit to yourself in barely filled rockets will never end. It'll just get less painful. I'm about to send a mostly empty rocket with a beam emitter to my imersite planet because I've got so much damn excess solar power, might as well start glaiving biters.

Here's one of my vulcanite quadrants.



All the balancing magic happens here, and is how I do most of my balancing now for all my different systems with byproducts.



Each type of output is put into a container, and then circuits are used to allow or prohibit output. In this case if I have too much Enriched Vulcanite, I won't output Crushed Vulcanite to my Centrifuges.

One thing I've learned is that large containers are bad for UPS, so when I revisit this quadrant I'll probabgly reduce the size of the storage containers *sigh*

I'm using Coal Filtration to turn my oil into water. The problem is what to do with all the coal.



It's still slow AF with this approach. I'm thinking about getting a mod that lets me void stuff, I dunno. Dealing with byproducts is an intentional difficulty in Space Exploration but giant fields of burners are kinda dumb.

Gravel said:

Yeah, all those recipes are K2 which I decided against including. Bummer.

I think people say K2 makes early game a nightmare for SE, but as you go on it really helps out. Those types of recipes are probably why.

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If I play SE again (in like, 5 years at least) I probably won't include K2. Not because I don't enjoy it, but because I'd want to do things differently than I have already. Whether I'd recommend it I guess comes down to how many levels of progress a player wants, and how much they want to make the kind of factories that K2's super buildings enable.

In Factorio you start off making Spaghetti, where either you're new to the game or making dirty, temporary malls with low tech belts. Then in endgame Factorio or midgame SE you move onto making lasagna (like the above burners) with long rows of high-speed belts, inserters, beacons (in vanilla) and buildings. In endgame SE, the recipes and relatively low research requirements move you into making what I'm calling "Charcuterie Boards" with relatively organized but diverse factories composed off a handful of different types of buildings together all built around beacons. K2 enables you to make more charcuterie boards and less lasagna, but in the end it's all the same game.

But I love spaghetti

Seananigans said:

But I love spaghetti

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The spaghetti never ends.

The efficiency of my relatively organized city blocks is massively increased by a few strands of spaghetti between the blocks. A single belt between two nearby blocks will save a huge number of train transfers, when scaled up to all my city blocks that's a significant UPS improvement.

I turned on Scan Surface for a looong time on my waterless planet and found 3 million Water Ice.... 6253 space transport and space platform later, I now have my longest belt.






I'm kind curious how much water ice it'll take for 7,000 belts/space platform to be less expensive. Not a trivial calculation since transport costs decrease with research.

2 moons down, a couple planets and some moons to go

Gravel said:

I've gotta say there's just something super satisfying about this game. SE just compounds it. Like last night I got my vulcanite processing setup and made the first couple hundred red science. This morning I got some holmium processing going (up to plates) and that was awesome since I'm drowning in crushed holmium. Each time you make use of something, or make a more efficient processing station just feels good.

I do have another question for anyone who's played through SE. I'm rushing towards space elevator, and wondering if I should go ahead and retool Nauvis to start using 1-2 trains so they transition to space better? Currently using 1-4 trains on a two way rail system (I intend to keep the two way in space for easier city blocks), and Cybersyn mod for logistics. Also, any suggestions for block size? Nauvis I did 100x100.

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I dunno.




I use LTN and I started with 1-1 (one locomotive, one cargo) trains and 1-4-1 (1 loco, 4 cargo, 1 loco). I used the 1-4-1 cargo for higher throughput (mining, iron plates, core fragments etc) and then 1-1 for everything else. This worked well until my systems got more complex and there were diverse, low-throughput needs/outputs for trains serviced by 1-4-1 trains. Like the many stone byproducts or other planets that would transmit processed byproducts like plastic or whatever. This ended up causing goofy lockups in my trains where they'd overservice a station or wait indefinitely or whatever. This is all solvable through clever usage of circuits and appropriate LTN train station settings, but since I have hundreds of train stations, lockups are inevitable.

Lockups are especially harmful in SE because you are unable to easily interact with trains remotely (I usually solve overloading of stations by directing them to another station that needs a resource).

Train discussion and theorycrafting on Factorio is highly influenced by the people who are creating highly efficient megabases in lightly modded Factorio, or are interested in creating absolutely massive iron/copper farms (for whatever reason). In those cases very large cargo trains are highly desirable (like, 4-32-4). reading all of that before designing my trains motivated me to go bigger than I needed to.

If I did it all again I'd change two things about my railway network:

• I'd have 6 spaces between my rails so I could add more belts / pipe spaghetti between city blocks
• I'd only use 1-1 trains, even if I had multiple stops for a highly used mining station that took one cargo

Conversely, in my space base I only use 1-1 trains. They zip around so fast they can handle huge throughput from generating scrap or transmitting material packs.

For block size I've been extremely happy with what I chose, which is uhm, 32 * 5? It matches the grids in Factorio which I usually have turned on for placement and pollution reasons. You can see a full block below and a quarter block factory. I like this size because I can make a quadrant factory that can be built around a single wide area beacon with enough room for eleven 1-1 train stations. I've looked at dozens of block designs over the years and I've only ever seen one other person who builds them like this. Most people have smaller, more spaced out blocks that they rarely combine into multi-blocks.



In the below build the corner factories juuuuuuust barely touch the wide area beacon.

Gravel said:

Are you using blocks in space? Same size?

And with my 100x100's, I definitely combine them. Like I've got several 200x100 blocks.

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Yes I use the same blocks in space. There's a built in tool in the SE mod to convert between space/surface trains which makes it easier. A key limitation in space is that you start with space belts that as fast as blue belts but have short underground lengths, so some of my very compact train stations (enabled by Bob's Inserters mod) are incompatible. But otherwise it works well.

another planet down... and my beam emitters in orbit around the planet near the star