Factorio Forums

Hi All,

Fairly new to Factorio, been messing with Marathon mode in the new release. This highlighted to me the importance of proper planning.

I was wondering what tools or methods do you use to properly space out the major sections of your factory?

This comes after mentally allocating a space for steel smelting and immediately impeding that area with the constructing on my science production.

Later in the same factory I expanded my copper and iron smelting to find I had miss calculated by one tile and had to shift everything up to output of the main bus line by 1.

Thanks in advance for any tips.

In my experience it pretty much has to be done in two phases. Phase one, you build a base capable of completing a good amount of the science. Enough to give you access to Electric Furnaces, most of the oil products, and Robots if you want them. Phase two, restart "the real base", supplying it's construction from the first.

I'm not big on the planning part of the game. I don't want to spend my play time in a spreadsheet.

I just guesstimate how much room I'll need, and then try to give myself about twice that room.

Lately I've been enjoying making separate bases for things and training stuff around. Much easier to grow a factory section when it's hundreds of blocks away from its nearest neighbor.

I make first a simple base around linear bus. When I get bots, I begin to make "official" base with clear structure. There are production cells, bus areas, walkways, railyards etc. It takes more room and is much more difficult to expand but it looks more like real factory and is fun to build. You have to play couple of times to learn how much room everything need. It depends how large factory you want and do you prefer bots or belts. It depends also on do you want to pack everything as small as possible or make clear production cells.

Hi All,

Thanks for the feedback.

I think I'll try out the initial base with dubious scalability into a well structured monster base.

When asked the question: "if you prefer bots", is this any bots or specifically logistics bots?

Also @Hannu I very much prefer the clear production cells, packing everything as small as possible seems slightly masochistic to me.

Pothrekr wrote:When asked the question: "if you prefer bots", is this any bots or specifically logistics bots?

Logistic bots. Buses takes significant part of the area, if you use belts as the main transport method. With bots you need just walkway between production cells.

This is my current base. It is railworld, uses mods and is quite large but cell structure of main base works well with vanilla game too. I would make it somewhat smaller if I did not intend to make a very large base (>1M iron plates per hour).

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