Modular Extensible PnP Factory

[vanatteveldt]

Nice idea, very cool to really modularize the design like this.

I understand the thinking on the steel, it is a pain that each furnace stocks 100 plates, and you often need like 9 furnaces (1 steel / sec) to run something on full production, so that would be an enormous amount of steel furnaces taking up space and iron plates.

What is the thinking on including red circuits, but excluding e.g. plastic? The fact that they take so long so you will need a lot of them on each rack that can potentially consume 1/sec?

Same question for the lube. If you have heav?y oil in your pipes, why not just produce it as needed?

Finally, did you consider dropping crude? The crude is not used except in the refinery, so you might as well combine the barrel unloading with a refinery?

How do you control cracking? They only sensible way I know is to use fluid logic to activate cracking when needed, but that requires hooking up your cracking to the storage (?). Without any control, I'm not sure how you can ever guarantee that heavy/light/petro are all full?

[dee-]

Nice idea, very cool to really modularize the design like this.

I understand the thinking on the steel, it is a pain that each furnace stocks 100 plates, and you often need like 9 furnaces (1 steel / sec) to run something on full production, so that would be an enormous amount of steel furnaces taking up space and iron plates.

Yeah, the steel furnaces do stock quite an amount of steel bars. I don't think it's bad enough to try to circumvent this, e.g. by decreasing the number of furnaces and using buffer chests to get the speed back (at least until the chests run empty). As steel is used quite often I can use it for "manual" crafting in case I raze the furnaces and the stored steel bars come out.

What is the thinking on including red circuits, but excluding e.g. plastic? The fact that they take so long so you will need a lot of them on each rack that can potentially consume 1/sec?

Red Circuits are used in quite a lot of recipes and they use a long time to make so they get on the belt.
Plastics are currently used in only two (?) recipes: Red Circuits and Lightweight Structure. At least AFAICR.
Also Plastic can be produced very very quickly and in huge amounts because the needed production area is quite small.
(In the redesign (see below) I have an unused belt, maybe I'll put Plastics on it, but that is currently undecided, let's see how my Plastic usage evolves)

Same question for the lube. If you have heav?y oil in your pipes, why not just produce it as needed?

It's used in more than a few recipes (motors, blue belts and stuff) so it would bet on the bus.
Additionally I currently separate fluid from item production so e.g. the item production goes to the north and the fluid production, which does not need items from the belt bus, goes south. Still you can mix and match. Aaand feel free to create your own racks, I'm interested in more specialized and/or optimized (speed/compactness) layouts

Finally, did you consider dropping crude? The crude is not used except in the refinery, so you might as well combine the barrel unloading with a refinery?

Unloading barrels is very very quick. I usually have only one unbarreling facility but maybe tens of refineries. Thus you'll become inefficient and it'd be more difficult scale barrels<->refineries.
I usually have a rack that converts water+oil into solid fuel (with all the intermediate steps in the facility) to be used as ingredient for rocket fuel, because it needs much solid fuel. So it's convenient for me to tap oil whereever I need it.

How do you control cracking? They only sensible way I know is to use fluid logic to activate cracking when needed, but that requires hooking up your cracking to the storage (?). Without any control, I'm not sure how you can ever guarantee that heavy/light/petro are all full?

Currently it is not controlled, other than manually disconnecting pipes to the cracking racks.
It would be easily possible to add a small control valve layer into the cracking racks, between the bus and the facility, and control it by hooking it up with the fluid storage rack.
The amazing thing here is you'd only need that small additional pice inside the rack to control all the cracking done.





On a sidenote - I am currently redesigning the bus layout to a mixed belt/pipe layout like MeduSalem has shown. It's a little bit messier to the eye but I wanted more belts for the plate throughput and for future extensibility.

I however keep the rack-height of 13 to be able to reuse my previous blueprints and because it is less space consuming than higher rack sizes. Now I also carry power though electric poles along the bus so it's easier to bridge power between racks.


New Layout is as follows (blue = blue belts):

Iron Plate | Iron Plate | Water | Crude Oil | Copper Plate | Copper Plate | Petroleum | Light Oil | Electronic Circuits | Electronic Circuits | Heavy Oil | Sulfuric Acid | Advanced Circuits | (empty belt, maybe later Processing Units) | Lubricant | (empty pipe) | Steel | (empty belt)

[RoddyVR]

Do you ever find that 13 tiles high is too short? its enough for two rows of assemblers feeding a central belt only if each needs just 1 input belt. what do you do when you need 3 or 4 inputs plus the output? red circuits for example, you cant build on both sides of the output belt casue it doesnt fit the 13 tiles rule (iirc 15 would be enough already, though i like the 21 idea for roboports)
Also the larger scale pictures show that you have sort of a side bus of other items (blue circuits i think) to the right of the pipes, why not just add another line or two to the bus?
I tend to agree with vanatteveldt that some of the liquid bussing is unneccessary.. oil cause it wont get used by anthing but refineries, and i like his idea of making lube in the racks.

I agree that a steel line is needed on a bus. but the "too much storage of steel in furnaces"reason can be easily overcome. the reason to make a steel line is that otherwise you need 5 iron lines to carry the same amount of matterials.
Making it so that there's no steal stored in the furnaces is easy.
in the racks, put a smart inserter on the input to the furnaces and only feed them iron when theres' a need for steel in the rack. If your steel production is close to balanced with the other production in the rack, your reserves in the smelters will be very small.
in central steel smelting give the same start inserters a condition tied to buffer chests between the smelters and the bus.

have you built and ran a factory with your design? i would hazzard a guess that if you turn on your module production, your iron line will run dry very quickly. (assuming that your module rack has atleast one of each module 3 assembler running full speed). have you ever felt you need another iron line?

[dee-]

Do you ever find that 13 tiles high is too short?

No, never.

The height of 13 is very compact, still convenient and gives me a small challenge to squeeze everything inside

its enough for two rows of assemblers feeding a central belt only if each needs just 1 input belt. what do you do when you need 3 or 4 inputs plus the output?

Then I get creative No, really, it always was enough without becoming ugly.

red circuits for example, you cant build on both sides of the output belt casue it doesnt fit the 13 tiles rule (iirc 15 would be enough already, though i like the 21 idea for roboports)

True, the layout I use for red circuits (it's rather old) puts the circuits only on one side of the belt.
That's not really an issue; you could add a lane balancer inside the design or be a bit lazy like me
Look at the connector part: In the place where the circuits are loaded on the bus you'll notice a splitter. This splitter has a red belt on it's left output, which then fills the bus with red circuits on both lanes.
If you need even more red circuits per second than a single-lane can transport, just plop another rack above/below it, so they fill the bus in parallel (= 2x single lane = full belt)

Also the larger scale pictures show that you have sort of a side bus of other items (blue circuits i think) to the right of the pipes, why not just add another line or two to the bus?

I am currently redesigning the bus (see bottom of post above) with 2x blue instead of 1x red for Iron, Copper and Electric Circuits. It also adds two currently unused belts for later usage (thinking about one belt for Processing Units, as these get used in quantities by quite some late-tech stuff)

I tend to agree with vanatteveldt that some of the liquid bussing is unneccessary.. oil cause it wont get used by anthing but refineries, and i like his idea of making lube in the racks.

I'm glad oil is on a pipe as I use it in more than one instance: refine it into the other oils and directly produce Solid Fuel for Rocket Fuel.

I agree that a steel line is needed on a bus. but the "too much storage of steel in furnaces"reason can be easily overcome. the reason to make a steel line is that otherwise you need 5 iron lines to carry the same amount of matterials.
Making it so that there's no steal stored in the furnaces is easy.
in the racks, put a smart inserter on the input to the furnaces and only feed them iron when theres' a need for steel in the rack. If your steel production is close to balanced with the other production in the rack, your reserves in the smelters will be very small.
in central steel smelting give the same start inserters a condition tied to buffer chests between the smelters and the bus.

Nice idea about conditionally filling the furnaces

have you built and ran a factory with your design? i would hazzard a guess that if you turn on your module production, your iron line will run dry very quickly. (assuming that your module rack has atleast one of each module 3 assembler running full speed). have you ever felt you need another iron line?

Later on the single red belt was not enough. In the base shots you can see how I upgraded the belts to blue for green/red circuits and even parallelized their production. That was a bit messy so I redesign the bus, adding some supply racks to re-stock the Iron and Copper belts from the storage, etc. So far I'm quite confident it'll work much better because of the broader bus and the additional side-suppliers that refill the Iron/Copper belts after the circuits racks razed them.

[vanatteveldt]

Let me share some of my screenshots. I'm still quite early game (only just got roboports), but it might be nice for discussion.

I like the 13 width rule, as it is very compact and gives nice design challenges while allowing for simply modules to not take too much room.

I allow mixing production modules in one rack, provided that they are still modular and output to the logistic system. E.g. I have a rack with a single central iron+circuit belt which makes belts, repair packs, lights and pipes. At the moment it is not quite modular, as you can't "copy/paste" the new yellow belt module without also copying the repair pack, so I need to change that:



My current bus has 5 belts (iron / coal / copper / steel / circuits), interleaved with 4 pipes (water, petro, light, heavy). I think interleaving belts and pipes makes it easier to branch off belts as you have a mostly empty row/column to work with. For example, here is my capsule and ammunition factory:



I make lube and sulphur gas as needed, e.g. in my robot frame factory:



As you can see, I need to rework most designs to make sure they are "infinitely repeatable", e.g. the copper/iron belt in the frame factory is problematic, maybe I can add it to the left and branch off as needed. Petrochemical processing does not go in the normal rack system, rather the bus starts/ends at the refining, cracking, and storage facility which can be extended north/south as needed. The pumps to/from the cracking plants is to make sure there is a supply of each material available:



At the other end of the bus is my main station, which feeds into the steel and circuit racks to complete the bus. Coal is still available locally as I put the power plant in my (first) coal outpost. Outposts are also responsible for smelting, so the iron/copper arrives as plates. I also played with circuits the first time, the lights next to the storage area show the supply of copper, iron, coal and crude at their station buffer chests / storage tanks (so copper is low (around 20k), the rest is OK but not full. Especially the coal one is important as I fell into the coal death trap earlier (no coal - no energy - no mines - no coal, and five minutes later no laser turrets - no base). I play without solar since I want to see how bad the natural evolution can get



What should go on the bus?

I think the argument about lube, that it is needed in multiple recipes, doesn't make a lot of sense. Otherwise, you might as well add gears to the bus as well. I think the argument should be "it is needed a lot, and takes a lot of space to produce locally, and is cheap enough to waste a couple thousand units on a long belt". This holds for steel and green modules, but imho not for red/blue modules or plastics, batteries etc. Note btw that I use the science cost tweaker, which also needs plastics, batteries, and heavy/light oil for intermediate recipes for blue science. I'm also tempted to throw coal off the bus now that I have roboports, since the few recipes that need it generally don't need a lot of it

I'm still struggling with some issues:

* Roboports: Adding roboports in the rack is tricky, since it breaks the modularity assuming you want the whole rack to be covered. You can also add a "roboport strip" at the start of the rack, and mandate that all logistic chests are outside the rack proper, but that makes it more complicated and you do want builder coverage of the whole rack. I consider adding a "roboport path" after every three racks. This breaks the standard look, but it might actually make it nicer. I think it is probably best to do it every two racks, that "wastes" roboports but allows me to include a road as well, making it easier to move up and down the adjoining racks?

* Materials not on the bus: some rare materials are occassionally needed. Iron ore (for concrete) and possibly coal can go on the logistic network, but especially for stone you do need quite a lot for rails, concrete, walls and brick paving. I am tempted to simply route stone to a single rack that makes these materials, but it doesn't really fit the modularity requirement.

* Branching and throughput. I was not planning to have a single linear factory. Rather, I will probably have one "main bus", branching of normal buses, and the racks are tied to the branch buses. This allows the main bus to have more capacity and makes for a more compact design (but less "infinite" since a rack will eventually hit the next branch. Was the original idea to have a strictly linear factory?

[dee-]

Let me share some of my screenshots. I'm still quite early game (only just got roboports), but it might be nice for discussion.

I like the 13 width rule, as it is very compact and gives nice design challenges while allowing for simply modules to not take too much room.

I agree

I allow mixing production modules in one rack, provided that they are still modular and output to the logistic system. E.g. I have a rack with a single central iron+circuit belt which makes belts, repair packs, lights and pipes. At the moment it is not quite modular, as you can't "copy/paste" the new yellow belt module without also copying the repair pack, so I need to change that:



My current bus has 5 belts (iron / coal / copper / steel / circuits), interleaved with 4 pipes (water, petro, light, heavy). I think interleaving belts and pipes makes it easier to branch off belts as you have a mostly empty row/column to work with. For example, here is my capsule and ammunition factory:



I make lube and sulphur gas as needed, e.g. in my robot frame factory:



As you can see, I need to rework most designs to make sure they are "infinitely repeatable", e.g. the copper/iron belt in the frame factory is problematic, maybe I can add it to the left and branch off as needed. Petrochemical processing does not go in the normal rack system, rather the bus starts/ends at the refining, cracking, and storage facility which can be extended north/south as needed. The pumps to/from the cracking plants is to make sure there is a supply of each material available:



At the other end of the bus is my main station, which feeds into the steel and circuit racks to complete the bus. Coal is still available locally as I put the power plant in my (first) coal outpost. Outposts are also responsible for smelting, so the iron/copper arrives as plates. I also played with circuits the first time, the lights next to the storage area show the supply of copper, iron, coal and crude at their station buffer chests / storage tanks (so copper is low (around 20k), the rest is OK but not full. Especially the coal one is important as I fell into the coal death trap earlier (no coal - no energy - no mines - no coal, and five minutes later no laser turrets - no base). I play without solar since I want to see how bad the natural evolution can get

From what I see you currently have different design rules and systems throughout your factory and are just about to think about how you layout your factory in a coherent way. So think about how you want to layout the main bus, if you want any at all, that is.

What should go on the bus?

I think the argument about lube, that it is needed in multiple recipes, doesn't make a lot of sense. Otherwise, you might as well add gears to the bus as well. I think the argument should be "it is needed a lot, and takes a lot of space to produce locally, and is cheap enough to waste a couple thousand units on a long belt". This holds for steel and green modules, but imho not for red/blue modules or plastics, batteries etc. Note btw that I use the science cost tweaker, which also needs plastics, batteries, and heavy/light oil for intermediate recipes for blue science. I'm also tempted to throw coal off the bus now that I have roboports, since the few recipes that need it generally don't need a lot of it

Red and blue circuits are needed in large quantities, therefore I put them (or plan to with the blue) on the bus.
Lube is on the bus because fluids propagate quickly along pipes and I want to cut AM3s from the facility blueprints. Yes, gears are also a candidate for the main bus but as they are consumed in large quantities and produced easily from iron plates, which are already on the belt, gears are not on my bus.

I'm still struggling with some issues:

* Roboports: Adding roboports in the rack is tricky, since it breaks the modularity assuming you want the whole rack to be covered. You can also add a "roboport strip" at the start of the rack, and mandate that all logistic chests are outside the rack proper, but that makes it more complicated and you do want builder coverage of the whole rack. I consider adding a "roboport path" after every three racks. This breaks the standard look, but it might actually make it nicer. I think it is probably best to do it every two racks, that "wastes" roboports but allows me to include a road as well, making it easier to move up and down the adjoining racks?

I haven't made up my mind on placing roboports and I currently place them whereever needed, without a fixed grid or ruleset.

* Materials not on the bus: some rare materials are occassionally needed. Iron ore (for concrete) and possibly coal can go on the logistic network, but especially for stone you do need quite a lot for rails, concrete, walls and brick paving. I am tempted to simply route stone to a single rack that makes these materials, but it doesn't really fit the modularity requirement.

When items are not on the bus but needed in large quantities, e.g. Speed Modules 1 or stone, they get side-fed. Logistics network is IMHO only successful for items that are not needed in large quantities as the longer the distance the more bots are bound just for transporting the items and belts then have a much larger throughput without all the overhead of the bots.

* Branching and throughput. I was not planning to have a single linear factory. Rather, I will probably have one "main bus", branching of normal buses, and the racks are tied to the branch buses. This allows the main bus to have more capacity and makes for a more compact design (but less "infinite" since a rack will eventually hit the next branch. Was the original idea to have a strictly linear factory?

My factory initially was not planned as being a single linear one and I allowed branching in itself and also parallel factories.
The main problems were depleted iron and copper plates because the circuits needed much of these, leaving facilities higher up the chain starved for resources.
I did two workarounds: 1) change 1x red belt to 2x blue belts, so 4x the amount of plates/s, 2) allow joining another fresh supply of plates to be fed into the bus, usually after very consuming facilities like for the circuits. Unused plates continue to run through to the top while consumed plates are replaced by fresh ones from the main supply, filling the plate belts again for later facilities.

New bus layout

Having one row of blue belts on top of the rack is convenient, as you can just easily add a splitter here to balance both belts again, for example when you split of plates from one of the belts.


Base with the new bus layout:

Base with new bus layout

It's possible to have belts and pipes in the same column to conserve even more space, but things might become too messy for the small space advantage, however interesting

Belts over pipes

[vanatteveldt]

From what I see you currently have different design rules and systems throughout your factory and are just about to think about how you layout your factory in a coherent way. So think about how you want to layout the main bus, if you want any at all, that is.

Well, I had a preliminary idea of what rules I would follow, but as (a) it is bolted onto a working factory in a normal game and (b) I run into issues while designing things, I am still searching for the final shape.

Lube is on the bus because fluids propagate quickly along pipes and I want to cut AM3s from the facility blueprints. Yes, gears are also a candidate for the main bus but as they are consumed in large quantities and produced easily from iron plates, which are already on the belt, gears are not on my bus.

What are AM3's?

I still don't follow this: lube can be easily produced from heavy oil, which is on the belt. So I really don't see the difference between lube and gears.

Red circuits I can see, since they are messy to produce (need plastics) and take much more time to produce than some of the recipes that consume them.

Blue circuits I'm less sure about: they are produced directly from bussed items, and are used only by recipes which take even more time than the blue circuits themselves.

Base with the new bus layout:

[...]
It's possible to have belts and pipes in the same column to conserve even more space, but things might become too messy for the small space advantage, however interesting
[/quote]

I like the layout with underground by default, that makes it much easier to branch off things. "Braiding" the pipes and belts is interesting, I need to play with that to see if it causes trouble. I would think that most racks don't need a lot of fluid, so it should probably be ok. Did you play with it?

Essentially, having extra blue iron belts running alongside the bus really means that you are increasing the bus with an extra plate, no?

Maybe it makes sense to change the 'macro layout': suppose your bus is S->N, if you put the railway between the normal racks and the steel/circuit/refining, you don't have the steel and circuit production draining the iron/copper supply, and the bus above the station is always "complete" and in the right direction, while below iron/copper flow in opposite direction from steel/circuits and crude is also on the bus :


(ugly image! . black/red = iron/cooper plates, green=circuits (including red), blue=steel, purple=refined products, darkblue=crude oil)


If you double most belts, did you consider making a symmetric bus? e.g. copper - iron - steel - coal - coal - steel - iron -copper? That way, you can place modules on both sides that take only from their "side" of the bus, and have an occasional balancing unit to connect the belts (maybe combined with a roboport - road (mini)rack?). That would waste some bus space since you really don't need double coal, but it does remove (or at least alleviate) the need for branching since at least you now use both sides of the bus?

Edit: Actually, what about this macro-layout:




Station is at the center, from which the raw materials are put on a "minibus" in a circle around the station. From this bus the raw materials are processed to the actual bus materials (including steel, circuits, and refined oil products), which branches to the left and right in a symmetric double bus (ie iron-copper-steel-...-steel-copper-iron). Normal production racks go left and right of the station on both sides of the bus. This essentially creates four single "buses", two to each direction. Moreover, circuits and steel does not draw from these buses, so essentially you have the carrying capacity of 5 or 6 normal buses. Optionally, one or some of these buses can be limited, i.e. removing coal, light/heavy oil, and/or red circuits, although that might just create extra fuss without too much gain.

[dee-]

New red circuit rack, inspired by Smoothbandit:

[Westrum]

Shameless bump. I use this setup in my games now, and it's so awesome and easy to plan. Could you post some more of your "racks" (no pun intended.) ? I would love to see some clever ideas!

[dee-]

Awww, thank you
I'm glad you found it useful!

As this thread is in a kind of messy state I'll refresh it a little bit in the following posts --->

[dee-]

Currently Version 3.1 is the current version of the bus and rack layout for the Modular Extensible PnP Factory System.

The main characterstics and philosophy are still unchanged through the versions and they can be looked up in the introductionary first post of this thread.

Also notice the history and changelog at the bottom of this post.


Layout:


Annotated:

Changelog and history

Version 3.1
Based on v3.0

Only change is this layout now also puts blue circuits on the bus for the more advanced end-game products, which leaves the bus with one unused belt and one unused pipe.

Layout:


Annotated:



Version 3.0
Entirely new bus layout! Inspired by MeduSalem.

- Belts and pipes now interleave, which results in a more compact bus footprint. Still, the belts and pipes are as accessible as before because of the wiggle-room the interleaving creates
- It carries power now, too. The pole has to be placed in the column of the iron plates, as low as possible, and can only differ in extreme situations from this rule
- Instead of red belts the faster blue belts are used to increase throughput of the bus
- Iron/copper plates and green circuits now use two instead of one belt each, which doubles their already increased thoughput to help quench even higher demands
- Due to the symmetry of the layout, two belts and one pipe are unused. If and for what they will be used is as of yet undecided

Layout:


Annotated:



Version 2.0
Based on v1.2

This layout adds pipes to the bus, which helps bringing all kinds of fluids to further away racks in a tidy matter.
The order of liquids is the same as given in this wiki entry.

It also increases the rack height to 13 tiles, which helps in some rack designs so it is now possible to have insertes pick up items from the first row and the last row of the rack, put those into a factory each and have a central belt with inserters getting the stuff out of both factories and laying it onto the central belt.

This is the layout which is used in the introducionary first post.

The free space between the belts and the pipes can be used for belt/pipe routing of the rack facilites.

Layout:


Annotated:



Version 1.2
Based on v1.1

This layout adds steel onto the bus as it turned out it is in higher demand and is inefficient to be produced locally: needs a long time and a large amount of steel is buffered in smelters.

Layout:


Annotated:



Version 1.1
Based on v1.0

This layout increases its height from 11 to 12 tiles, which leaves a bit more room for implementing facilities in the rack.

Layout:


Annotated:



Version 1.0
First more-or-less stable and usable bus layout, using a 4-wide and 11-high footprint.

The width of 4 makes it possible to have underground belt run easily across them.

Previous Iterations either only had copper and iron plates on them, which made feeding green circuits for later stages difficult und unnecessary messy, or had some other downfalls like inconsistent belt item types, etc. I consider them prototypes, version 0.x-es

This layout still uses the red belts from those earlier designs as their thoughput was sufficient for my early bases.

Layout:


Annotated:

[vanatteveldt]

Did you consider making the duplicate parts of the belts symmetric, e.g. something like

iron - copper - || - green - steel - || - blue - red - || - steel - green - | | - copper - iron

That would allow you to more easily put racks to the left or the right, since the copper/iron/green/steel connectors would be easily mirrored? (it's a shame you can't automatically mirror a blueprint though, so maybe it's not very useful...)

I'm inspired again to reorganize my newest factory along your lines (but of course with some adjustments - I'll probably put plastics and sulphur on the belt, and only carry lube in pipes), will post screenshots when I have some!

[dee-]

Blueprints

And lots of. However this list is not complete to give you a chance to invent your own racks for your own production needs

Also the designs are of varying quality: some are awesomely great (IMHO ), most are good/okay and some are quite old and/or not overly optimized.

These don't use modules and are designed for Factorio 0.12. Who knows what 0.13 will bring upon us?


"NOP" v3.0, v3.1

Takes up a rack slot and just forwards items and fluids to the next rack.
Very useful to reserve some space between racks for later use or to group racks.




Bus Plate-Feeder v3.0, v3.1

Joins the current iron and copper plate belts on the bus with new plates coming in from the right side (upper: copper plates, lower: iron plates).
As the side-feed continues to the left, it is possible to replenish several independent busses running in parallel with the same feed.
This joiner can be used at whatever place inside the bus as the other items and fluids are forwarded.




Steel Smeltery and Pipe Production v3.0, v3.1

Takes iron from the bus and produces steel bars.
Inserters need a sufficient large space on the belt to put their held items. Thus the produces steel bars are not inserted directly onto the output belt but first onto a separate belt, which then gets joined into the output belt, to make sure the inserters find a place to put the steel bar. This increases the number of items on the belt.
These are then lane-balanced and fed into the steel belt on the bus.

Additionally in this blueprint is the pipe production, as it uses iron plates from the same row.
It's a quite old design which still uses red belts so put it last.

While this blueprint consists of two facilities, they are however independent.




Green Circuits v3.0, v3.1

Produces green circuits and feeds them into the bus, while making sure both belts are evenly feeded and if one is full the other gets the whole load, all the while also lane-balancing them.
Can feed up to one blue belt of green circuits; so to fill both belts on the bus, just place two racks of these.
Speciality of this blueprint is they are placed a bit overlapping, conserving some space and filling the vertical belt from both sides.




Red Circuits v3.0, v3.1

Produces red circuits. It is inspired by a design from Smoothbandit.
The red circuits are lane-balanced and the whole rack can produce up to blue belt speed.




Blue Circuits v3.0, v3.1

Produces blue circuits, lane balances them and feeds the bus. One rack should come up to red belt speed.




Underground Belts, Belts and Splitters v3.0, v3.1

Produces all of these in yellow, red, blue and green types. They are put into a logistics chests so adjust the smart inserter to how many you'd like to have as spare.
These designs are not overly superquick but small and compact and remmeber you can repeat them horizontally and have more than one rack of these around.

There are two designs for the belt production, one of them is a bit faster but also needs a bit more space.




Inserters v3.0, v3.1

Produces all varieties of inserters and, like belts, are stuffed into chests.
As a single module not very fast but compact.




Plastics v3.0, v3.1

Takes side-fed coal and ejects lane-balanced plastic waste.




Ammo and Poles v3.0, v3.1

Makes medium and large poles (I don't like the small ones) and best shotgun/rifle ammo.
The layouts can intersect to conserve space.
Everthing is put into logistics chests, so adjust the inserters.




Modules, Level 1 v3.0, v3.1

One needs quite many of these so repeat often. One rack produces up to red belt speed and lane-balances the output.
All sorts use the same ingredients so pick your color.




Motors v3.0, v3.1

Produces yellow and red motors and feeds both out to the side. Red motors grab from yellow motors.
Not lane balanced and quite slow.




Batteries v3.0, v3.1

For your Tesla Model 3. Lane balanced.




Accumulators v3.0, v3.1

Produces accumulators and lane-balances the output.
Intermediate batteries are produced in place as they're in high demand.

Not the optimal battery:accumulator ratio but not bad either.




Oil unbarreling v3.0, v3.1

This is where the oil flow begins.

Takes side-loaded oil barrels (lower belt), opens them and pours the oil into the pipe system, then ejects empty barrels to the side (upper belt) for storage and later reuse.




Lube v3.0, v3.1

Converts heavy oil to lube.




Sulphur v3.0, v3.1

Produces Sulphur from Water, Petroleum Gas and Electricity




Acid v3.0, v3.1

Produces LSD. Sulphur is to be side-fed for maximum effect.

The power poles are supposed to be put on-top of each other.




Solid Fuel (from water and oil) v3.0, v3.1

Very compact. Creates solid fuel cubes from water and oil alone, in case you don't want to disbalance your fluid production. Lane-balanced.

For getting rid of overproduced fluids other methods exist.




Rocket Fuel (from Petroleum Gas) v3.0, v3.1

Takes petroleum and produces rocket fuel.

Other blueprints use different fluids, this is an example.




and many many more... (see some other, old ones here)

[dee-]

Did you consider making the duplicate parts of the belts symmetric, e.g. something like

iron - copper - || - green - steel - || - blue - red - || - steel - green - | | - copper - iron

That would allow you to more easily put racks to the left or the right, since the copper/iron/green/steel connectors would be easily mirrored? (it's a shame you can't automatically mirror a blueprint though, so maybe it's not very useful...)

Well, no, because I think in this design there is not enough space left to feed both right and left side with full 2x blue belt speed or equally if both sides are populated.

I'm inspired again to reorganize my newest factory along your lines (but of course with some adjustments - I'll probably put plastics and sulphur on the belt, and only carry lube in pipes), will post screenshots when I have some!

"Let's see you clever builds"

[Westrum]

Oh wow, this is like christmas! I got that Factorio itch again! 1 more hour at work, and I'm home for a weekend of marathon gaming! Thanks

Edit: Why does your lane balancers use yellow belts which points in the wrong direction? Am I missing something clever?

[dee-]

Edit: Why does your lane balancers use yellow belts which points in the wrong direction? Am I missing something clever?

They don't transport items but make the blue belts, right after the first splitter, not to make left/right turns but to be straight, so the items are side-fed onto the belt, with only one lane used:



The balancer balances lanes (uneven demand on the consumption-belts lanes on the right gets balanced backwards to evenly balanced demand on the supply-belts lanes on the left) and is able to operate at full blue speed without loss of throughput or compression.

Yellow belts are the cheapest, so...

[Westrum]

They don't transport items but make the blue belts, right after the first splitter, not to make left/right turns but to be straight, so the items are side-fed onto the belt, with only one lane used:



The balancer balances lanes (uneven demand on the consumption-belts lanes on the right gets balanced backwards to evenly balanced demand on the supply-belts lanes on the left) and is able to operate at full blue speed without loss of throughput or compression.

Yellow belts are the cheapest, so...

Now THAT'S engineering for ya!
Got any more amazing tricks? You're spoiling me here
Would love some efficient smelting setups

[dee-]

Well I don't consider myself that clever with Factorio but thanks

Also keep in mind the bus system I show here is not very efficient per se.
- The demand is unbalanced as the facilities are always on the left side, thus the inserters often taking from the same lane. A mirrored (not rotated!) approach would be better for lane-balance, which I try to maintain with the lane-balancers.
- All the splitters along the bus make the items prone to trickle out at the end so there's a limit how long your bus can be. A tree-like structure would even the item-sinks out more equally but also has a limit.

The design "worked for me" (tm) because I wanted to try something new, more structured, and it also should be flexible and pain-free and bring inherent small challences (rack height, make sure it's repeatable, etc.) so I somehow got stuck with this

If you're aiming for a more efficient and professional factory with more "of a purpose", get inspired by THIS and my feeble attempts turn to dust

[vanatteveldt]

Did you consider making the duplicate parts of the belts symmetric [..]

Well, no, because I think in this design there is not enough space left to feed both right and left side with full 2x blue belt speed or equally if both sides are populated.

Well, I guess most racks only take 1x blue of 1-4 resources right? I could imagine e.g. a ammo factory to the right (copper+steel), and a belt factory to the left (iron+green), without interfering with each other.
That said, balancing the lanes from opposite ends will be messy, and you can't mirror blueprints anyway, so maybe it's a stupid idea to begin with.

What do you do? Just leave everything empty on one side of the bus?

I guess I can also do the "proper racks" to the left, and the "preprocessing" (smelting, making circuits, etc) to the right.

I'm inspired again to reorganize my newest factory along your lines (but of course with some adjustments - I'll probably put plastics and sulphur on the belt, and only carry lube in pipes), will post screenshots when I have some!

"Let's see you clever builds" [/quote]



I will *not* show my current setup, which is the "temporary get my research done till robotics" setup, which was of course just too small to do everything so half the lines are duct-taped on in weird places. I'll hopefully have the first proper screenshots this weekend, but those will be 0.1 compared to your 3.1 Anyway, I'll post in my own thread to not hijack yours.

[dee-]

Did you consider making the duplicate parts of the belts symmetric [..]

Well, no, because I think in this design there is not enough space left to feed both right and left side with full 2x blue belt speed or equally if both sides are populated.

Well, I guess most racks only take 1x blue of 1-4 resources right? I could imagine e.g. a ammo factory to the right (copper+steel), and a belt factory to the left (iron+green), without interfering with each other.
That said, balancing the lanes from opposite ends will be messy, and you can't mirror blueprints anyway, so maybe it's a stupid idea to begin with.

Well then: Blueprint Flipper
There are more, some deprectaed, some for 0.11.x...

What do you do? Just leave everything empty on one side of the bus?

As I have a straight edge on the right I can be pretty sure my factory won't extend into this area so I use it for other permanent stuff like stations, logistic storage, etc.

I guess I can also do the "proper racks" to the left, and the "preprocessing" (smelting, making circuits, etc) to the right.

Hm, that's actually an idea. Have the "basics" on the right side, the more interesting things on the left.
I just don't think this will conserve vertical space as you still have to add them above each other:

Code: Select all

advanced ---+
            +--- basic
advanced ---+
            +--- basic
            +--- basic

or you have to make complex connectors so you can always feed in new basic items...

Code: Select all

advanced ---*--- basic
advanced ---*
advanced ---*--- basic
            *--- basic

I'm inspired again to reorganize my newest factory along your lines (but of course with some adjustments - I'll probably put plastics and sulphur on the belt, and only carry lube in pipes), will post screenshots when I have some!

I will *not* show my current setup, which is the "temporary get my research done till robotics" setup, which was of course just too small to do everything so half the lines are duct-taped on in weird places.

I know exactly what you mean