Factorio Forums

Big Miners are useful everywhere.

The only use for Foundries I've found off Vulcanus is in making belts.

Electromagnetic plants can be used for beacons, solar panels, accumulators, and circuitry... but my factory on Nauvis has full belts and chests of circuitry, so I don't see a use case for putting in the time to do this. Maybe on Aquilo.

I'm not far enough along to try biolabs on Nauvis, but since we apparently have to do captive biter spawners for fusion (??) I'll probably get there.

Am I missing anything out of where I've been so far? I've been disappointed by how few use cases I've found for the new specialized buildings.

You might like the built in 50% productivity of the new production buildings.
Crafting speed as well, even before quality

You can ship Calcite or farm it in orbit after you've done Gleba, so Foundries give you an enormous productivity increase on Nauvis, Fulgora and some parts of Gleba too. The extra modules available for EMP/Foundry are also huge bonuses for Quality and some of the Foundry-specific recipes like LDS have great properties for Quality.

That being said, you're right that most buildings just give you the same stuff as before, but way more of it, so if you don't want to hugely expand your base, they're not that necessary.

Foundries are actually very good. It gives you better productivity (as said in previous comment) and also more effecient recipes. Looks closely to melting recipes https://wiki.factorio.com/Foundry. If you check cable or gear smelting, it requires only half a copper. On top of that, you get +50% productivity in two foundries during the process. This amounts to a +350% productivity increase without using a single productivity module! Additionally, steel has a better recipe, requiring just 3 iron instead of 5.

Another significant advantage is the much simpler logistics. You only need to melt copper and iron and then transport everything using pipes to the desired location. You don’t even have to put a single iron or copper plate on a belt—at least not for things like green circuits, for example. Only a few plates on belts are needed for minor tasks, such as red science production.

All these benefits are available if you have both Vulcanus and Gleba. To make the foundry work properly everywhere, you need calcite, which becomes freely available by throwing it from the space platform once you’ve researched advanced crushing recipes on Gleba.

In short:
Vulcanus = 50 percent less resources drain thanks to miners, better belts
Gleba = 50 percent less everything leading to research thanks to biolabs, better inserters
Synergy of Vulcanus and Gleba = Foundries on Navius which gives you huge +125% -- +250% productivity based on smelting recipe

Ohhhhh.... I didn't realize I could be melting ores on Nauvis to pipe them around with the Foundry!

Thanks.

You can literally transport around liquid iron & copper using trains to where it's needed - it's absolutely fantastic!

You can easily ship in calcite from vulcanus. You'll want an automatic transport setup anyway for the foundries, mining drills and probably Tungsten to produce belts locally (because they are denser than shipping finished belts), and throwing in a bit of calcite is cheap. 1 rocket carries enough calcite for 25 000 iron ore processing into space. And then theres the foundry productivity on top.