Here's a nice little red circuit production layout for marathon mode that I've thrown together. It hits all the standard boxes - involves full blue belts, full prod3 + beacons, stackability, no circuit network drama, etc. Consumes 1 blue belt of green circuits, 2 blue belts of plastic, and about 1.5...

Factorio - contiguous side loading underground belts - howto.JPG First, plonk the underground belt "entrance" on the left. Then plonk exit I labelled 1 Then rotate twice, plonk exit I labelled 2 Rince and repeat until number 5 Then delete the entrance, and build one a little on the left A...

Actually, I would argue that you should flip the southwest/southeast corners, to make for a direct, short path between the incoming ores/train station and the initial ore smelting. Diagonal and cross-routing is more expensive in both materials and space, and increases opportunity for belt spaghetti....

I'd probably suggest 8 wagon trains, taking 2 belts off each. With the shorter balancer space, you'd definitely have room for it at this end of your operation.

Just for clarification, what exactly are the bots able to do that can't be done manually in the photo?

Just be careful, 4000 is actually a big number and will take awhile. You might actually want to use +/-1000 or 2000 to start with.

Try this console command:

/c game.forces.player.chart(game.player.surface, {{x = -4000, y = -4000}, {x = 4000, y = 4000}})

Mine looks similar for 0.15 but without different belt types. I try to always use 1 belt type because upgrading such a setup gives a mess I suppose, but I can't see myself ever bothering with such an expensive setup with anything less than top-end belts, so upgrading is largely moot. Regardless, th...

I used this in my old 0.14 megafactory. I wanted a tile-able design that didn't put the copper wires on belts, so this was the result. It takes in an entire belt of green circuits and plastic each, plus 2/3 of a belt of copper, outputs 1.6-1.7k/min of red circuits. http://i.imgur.com/37Vzo8i.jpg?1 0...

You're water starved. Heat exchangers need ~100 water/second apiece, and as a basic rule of thumb, you generally need to start thinking about pump assistance once you go beyond 1000/second through a single piece of pipe, so there's no way you're getting enough water for all 56 heat exchangers.

No, my point is that the game gives us too much water, BUT since we can't recycle water/steam like we do in real life, things balance out.

The rocket side of things hasn't changed too much, and is arguably just a little easier, thanks to the cheaper plastic recipe + the ability to use 3 production modules in each refinery/chem plant. The 0.15 pumps are monsters and will single-handedly leave a fivepack from 0.14 in the dust - running t...

Your way should work fine, as long as the process downstream uses both lanes evenly. If it takes from mostly one lane (i.e. inserters always prefer to pull from the closest lane), you'll have half the boxes run out before the other. If you think that will be an issue, the setup below will allow each...

Infinite water isn't realistic, but neither is consuming water without condensing/recirculating it like power plants and refineries do in the real world. So it balances out.

Are all of the steam turbines and exchangers maintaining their steam levels? That's usually the first indication that you're drawing more power from the assembly then you're making. Once the excess steam disappears, you should finally start to see the heat pipes/exchangers/reactors begin to lose the...

I've experimented with deliberately using heatpipes as buffers (although I hadn't realized how effective they are!), but I found that it tended to work against reactor control schemes, because it takes that much longer for all the exchangers to heat up again once you finally add fuel, thus requirin...

Pollution concerns regarding large-scale stockpiling aren't completely unfounded. In a balanced game, you create pollution as you expand and improve, with the goal of being capable enough to deal with the consequences of that pollution. But stuff sitting in a warehouse represents pollution that DIDN...

I've experimented with deliberately using heatpipes as buffers (although I hadn't realized how effective they are!), but I found that it tended to work against reactor control schemes, because it takes that much longer for all the exchangers to heat up again once you finally add fuel, thus requiring...

Meant to comment on this earlier - I had to smack myself for not thinking of that combination of trigger conditions! But they work beautifully, and can even be adapted for belt-only use as well. This just made my reactor designing a whole lot simpler.

Part of the reason, although not a complete answer, is that there are exploits to be had by using productivity modules on certain end-products. Barrelled fluids are an obvious one - if you could get 140% of your input on both the barrelling and/or un-barrelling, you would never need to pump a drop o...

Did the pumps ever move anything else? Perhaps while you were settings things up? I've had issues with pumps unloading rail cars before, where I first used the unloading pumps with one liquid, then changed my mind and had them unload something else instead. Even though the pump was showing completel...