Need Some Advice On...

[GamingDaemon]

Need Some Advice On...

• My Base looks like Spaghetti
• Peaceful Mode?
• How to Manufacture Large Quantities of Research Packs
• Mods

How to Avoid Spaghetti?

I am 83 hours in on my first Factorio game, and it's a mess. I turned on abundant resources, but they are all so far away. Now I have underground belts everywhere, no concrete (do I need it?), and electric poles strewn about as needed. It's an organic mess. Should I start over? Or try to clean it up?

https://imgur.com/anOGCRM



The videos I see have these neat and tidy flows of abundant resources. Do they just fix the mess they began with later in the game, or did they really plan that far ahead?

Peaceful Mode?

Is it ok turn on peaceful mode in this first go round?

How to Manufacture Large Quantities of Research Packs?

I am generating tons of Iron Plates, Copper Plates, Green, Red and Blue circuit boards, etc, but not able to generate large quantities of Chemical (Blue) Science Packs. They tend to take much, much longer than the other ones. I have three Assembling Machines at work on these blue packs, but they always run out during research. I have 2 Speed Modules in each of them too. Help?

QOL Mods

I have seen many recommendations for:

• Even Distribution
• Bottleneck
• Squeak Thru
• EvoGUI

Are these OK?

What other mods do people use by default?

[Durr]

I usually start with a spaghetti disaster until I get enough resources to start a rail network. After I get some smelting arrays, oil refineries, and mining outposts established I start to build modules on the rail network to assemble intermediate resources, then work on building a mall. Eventually I tear down and rework the early spaghetti mess.

There's nothing wrong with playing on peaceful, but for me it got really boring after I "finished" the game. I would recommend playing on railworld settings and increase the starting area size.

For increasing production speed on sciences, all you can do is expand the assembly line. Add more assemblers and watch for resource bottlenecks and adjust as needed.

I don't use mods so I can't comment on those.

Edit: forgot your question about concrete... You don't need it, but you walk faster on it and I think it looks better. But I suggest using your resources in more important areas in the early/mid game

[wobbycarly]

First up, I'd say play the game the way you want to play it. If you're watching others play (say on Youtube), then these player almost certainly have thousands of hours and YES, they plan ahead because they know what's coming. As corny as it sounds, enjoy the journey and the learning experience.

Peaceful mode can take some of the pressure out, but largely invalidates the whole military tech tree.

To avoid spaghetti, the common school of thought is to use a main bus (google it if you want.) which is a valid playstyle.

On the science pack question, I usually aim for either 1 pack/second or 2 packs/second in my starter base. Ignore the crafting speed of the machines as long as you maintain the same level of machine (eg, assembly machine 2 for everything.) For 1 pack/sec, you would need 5 red science machines, 7 green science, 12 blue science (2 crafts every 24 seconds), 7 each of purple and yellow (3 crafts per 21 seconds) and 5 military (2 crafts/10 sec). Scale up as required. (I use "Max Rate Calculator" mod to help calculate the raw materials necessary.)

I use Even Dist, Bottleneck and Squeak Thru - up to you whether you want to use these or not. Some of them feel a bit cheaty at times.

Hope this little contribution helps - good luck!

[Kyralessa]

You can make the starting area really huge. That area is the space in which there will be no nests. If you make it the biggest it can be (600, I think), it'll be a very long time before you get any pollution-triggered attacks.

So if you're having trouble making progress in-between biter attacks, you might consider this for your next game.

[astroshak]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with spaghetti. Make a spaghetti base. We ALL did, for our first play throughs. Its almost impossible to avoid having some spaghetti in the base, prior to the development of bots anyway. It is just part of the learning process.

Some people use a main bus, others disdain the main bus concept and go with spaghetti all the time. There’s nothing wrong with either viewpoint. Usually there is some spaghetti even with main bus designs, the spaghetti is found with the assembly machines and away from the bus, generally speaking, with main bus bases.

Peaceful is a good way of learning the game’s recipe tree and basic mechanics. Seeing as you’re struggling with Blue Science, I’d say you’re past the point of needing Peaceful to learn the basics. Either play with biters on doing their expansionary thing, or just turn the biters off entirely, I’d say.

Others have touched upon the science pack question. Basically, different recipes have different base crafting times, which are then factored in with the machine’s speed to determine the actual crafting time. For example, Inserters have a base crafting time of 0.5 seconds. Take that base crafting time, and divide it by the machine’s speed (0.5, 0.75, 1.25 for Assembly Machine 1, 2, 3 respectively) to get the actual crating time in that machine (1 second, .666667 seconds, 0.4 seconds for AM1, 2, 3 respectively). Red science takes 5 seconds to craft, Green takes 6, Grey (military) takes 10, Blue takes 24 (!!!). Red and green also only produce one flask, while Blue and Grey each produce 2. So that further complicates things.

Ideally though, you want to produce science packs at the same rate. It does not matter if it is 1 every 10 minutes, or 10,000 every second (an end game goal). Any that get produced faster than the slowest is simply a waste of energy and resources, though those packs can and will be used eventually, so you can think of them as being pre-made. The thing is though, all the pack types required for a technology must be present in a lab for the lab to work, so that is the limit : research speed is limited to the slowest science pack you are producing.

As for those mods, I’ve never used EvoGUI or Even Distribution. Squeak Through and Botteneck are very nice mods to use however. Squeak Through lets you squeeze through between things that you normally cannot (such as pipes). It dramatically increases your ability to walk around your factory. Bottleneck is a nice mod for seeing where you have, well, a bottle neck in your factory, showing you at a color coded glance whether the machine is working, starved for input, or no room in output. Sometimes that information is patently obvious (the machine is in the middle of a line, and all the belts feeding it and that it is feeding are full, so of course the machine is idle) but other times its not quite so clear. That clarity will also come with time, however.

Concrete is something you should automate, yes. Should you be putting it down all over the place? That is entirely up to you. In general, automate the production of everything. The “make everything mall” is a great concept, though they tend not to actually make everything (some things are often easier to have produced elsewhere, including stone brick, concrete, refined concrete, and hazard variants of concrete and refined concrete, to say nothing of sulfur, plastic, batteries, sulfuric acid, and the colored circuits used in tremendous quantities).

As to using concrete, that is a more complicated question. Basic land absorbs a tiny amount of pollution. Trees absorb a lot more, water does not appear to absorb any. Grass lands absorb more than sandy lands (deserts). Once you cover the land with any kind of tile, however (Stone Brick, Concrete, Refined Concrete, Hazard concretes, and any added by mods) that particular tile stops absorbing pollution. That starts to force the pollution to spread further, until it reaches places where it can be absorbed again. A larger pollution cloud means more attacks by angry natives, which means more effort (or at least, energy) needs to be expended towards defense instead of science and expanding your factory. So you have to balance defense and a combination of increased movement speed and whether you think an area covered by those tiles looks better for your factory.

[mmmPI]

How to Avoid Spaghetti?
I am 83 hours in on my first Factorio game, and it's a mess. I turned on abundant resources, but they are all so far away. Now I have underground belts everywhere, no concrete (do I need it?), and electric poles strewn about as needed. It's an organic mess. Should I start over? Or try to clean it up?

If you don't know yet how to avoid spaghetti, restarting will probably lead to another spaghetti, there's nothing wrong with that, that's how i learned. Cleaning it up is a long process but if you like it you will save some progress and it can give an overview of the later technologies and their requirement, which can help better plan the next start .

The videos I see have these neat and tidy flows of abundant resources. Do they just fix the mess they began with later in the game, or did they really plan that far ahead?

Both! They often plan to make a scrappy base designed to provide material for a cleaner base later in the same game. And sometimes part of the scrappy base is made so it can be repurposed into the larger cleaner base.

Is it ok turn on peaceful mode in this first go round?

yes. i usually play long peaceful game. Except in multiplayer.

How to Manufacture Large Quantities of Research Packs?

Math !
That is a first step toward getting rid of spaghetti or making it work .
red science pack takes 5 second to make according to the receipe, green science pack 6 second, blue/chemical : 24 second, but you have 2 of them.
If you want to produce as much blue as green, you'd need twice as much assembly machines.
The receipe is based on a speed for assembly machines of 1. But depending on the tier of assembly, and the modules you place in it, the speed can change, at a speed of 2 everything takes 1/2 times.

QOL Mods

Even distribution i'm not familiar with the hotkey that one need to use to take advantage of it, i am too messy to use
bottleneck makes more visible informations that are available in game, it is 100% QoL
Squeak thru could feel like a cheat if you like the military aspect of the game, you can walk thru your own wall for example, but apart from that it's less frustrating to move around pipes and packed miners.
EvoGUI i haven't used for a while, you can type in the ingame console /evolution and it tells you some informations, i think EvoGUI just makes those visible it's Qol.

Also about concrete, my personnal preference is to use it to make roads, then don't build on the concrete. you can use underground belt or pipe to "cross the road". It look nice, it allow you to run faster on this road while making a cool noise and it helps to align and organise things around them.

[Serenity]

I am generating tons of Iron Plates, Copper Plates, Green, Red and Blue circuit boards, etc, but not able to generate large quantities of Chemical (Blue) Science Packs. They tend to take much, much longer than the other ones. I have three Assembling Machines at work on these blue packs, but they always run out during research. I have 2 Speed Modules in each of them too. Help?

Simple. Produce more. No offense, but it doesn't look like you are actually producing that much. There are a few miners, a few machines and a few furnances. So of course things take a long time.
Which is fine. You don't have the experience to judge these things. Everyone starts that way. And you could launch a rocket this way if you just wait long enough.

To get an idea of what you need in general consider the amount of machines you need to fill a belt:
* 30 electric miners to fill a yellow belt of ore
* 48 stone furnaces to fill a yellow belt of iron/copper plate
* 1 yellow belt of iron and 1.5 belts of copper to fill a belt of green circuits

And that's the dimensions you need to think in. Belts of stuff. You just need more production. Always more You don't need to start that way. At the beginning you won't use all of that. But you need to plan for it.


This is what you need for 45 science per minute up to blue:
https://factoriolab.github.io/list#z=eJ ... zy+AH9Vj3R

Which isn't actually that much at this point. Even the number of miners isn't that big, except maybe for iron. The real hurdle for blue is the complexity of oil and then setting up plastic and red circuits, not raw production. Once you get to purple science however, you need far greater amounts of iron ore for steel.

You have plenty of iron ore in your base. Where I can see a bit of an issue is with copper. Much smaller patches of that. That's where trains come in

no concrete (do I need it?)

You need some concrete in the end game for certain items. Especially the rocket silo. Do you need to pave everything in it like you may have seen on YouTube? No. I like to make a path along my main bus with it because you walk faster on it


Also a tip for furnaces:
You don't actually need electric furnaces when you get them. They need a lot of energy and aren't any faster than steel furnaces. Steel furnaces and red belt will last you well past launching the first rocket. Steel furnaces are also a nice direct replacement for stone furnaces as they have the same size, but are twice as fast.
Electric furnaces however are bigger and require a redesign of the smelters. Where they shine is with modules and beacons.

[foamy]

The easiest way to address a spaghetti base is to build a clean one a little ways off. Use the working output of the spaghetti base to bootstrap the next one, which you can design more cleanly because now you have a better idea of what's needed and how to lay it out. I tend to think in terms of assembly lines for specific products -- basic resources in, finished product out. Basic resources are things like iron plates, copper plates, steel, green circuits, petroleum gas, water, and coal. You can assemble nearly anything in the game from just those components. Some things require odd inputs, like raw stone or bricks, or light oil, but they're not that common.

Big things that you'd probably want to break out into dedicated production areas:

1. Smelting ore into plates. Some people do it at the mines, some people prefer a more central hub. If you're shipping by train, smelting at the mines means you need half as much train traffic because plates stack twice as high as ore does. Against that is the extra hassle of having to move the smelting array around as the mines get exhausted.

2. Smelting steel. Making steel is incredibly space hungry and it's a single input to get a single output, and it is a significant reduction step in keeping your transport issues manageable, since it turns 5 things into 1 thing. For that reason it should generally be right after your iron plate production, or have ore fed directly to it and dual-smelt it into steel in one place.

3. Making green circuits. They are a gigantic resource sink, because so many of them are needed in so many things, either directly or after being converted into red or blue circuits. Green circuits and steel between them account for the majority of your demand for both iron and copper by the end of the game. Nothing else comes close. Plan transport around this. And the biggest consumers of green circuits are the next two kinds of circuits, red and blue, so it's not a bad idea to put them in reasonable proximity as well.

4. Refining crude. Because working with oil is so unique compared to nearly every other operation in the game, and because it is both space-hungry and its products absolutely necessary to nearly everything from blue science on, it's a good idea to build a dedicated complex for it. I prefer single-product refining, for simplicity, but if you're working with an all-product setup, it helps to keep everything together for that, too.

And remember to leave space when you build things! Elbow room to get things in and out, run power lines, and place roboports and radars makes life a lot easier.

[GamingDaemon]

WOW!! This are fantastic!!

I appreciate all of the feedback. The image I added is a partial view, there's messes of spaghetti to the north and to the south east, but you got the idea. I have definitely learned a lot in the first 80 to 90 hours.

But this feedback is tremendous. It's a lot to absorb, but I will start to use some of it immediately. I like the idea of a main bus of copper and iron plates, plus steel, copper wire, etc. But I have clearly been ignoring the math. So I will start figuring that part out and planning accordingly.

I think I will leave peaceful mode on for now, just to keep learning. And in my next games leave it off (or turn it off once I gain a foothold). I assume the water being green instead of blue is an indication that I have polluted the water too?

I will also try out Bottleneck and Squeak Thru. And maybe Even Distribution.

But wow, so much to think about. For this map, the Oil deposits were wayyyyy to the SE, and I didn't plan well for that. I now use trains to bring light oil, heavy oil, plastic and blue circuits from the Oil deposits. Maybe I should have just brought the crude oil?

Anyway, HUGE THANK YOU to all of you that responded. I really appreciate it.

[Serenity]

I like the idea of a main bus of copper and iron plates, plus steel, copper wire, etc.

Don't bus copper wire. One copper plate turns into two wires. So it's much better to bus plate and then turn them into wire when needed. With green circuits you have a ratio of 2 circuit assemblers to 3 wire assemblers. That can be nicely handled with direct insertion:
https://i.imgur.com/AvpHtW7.jpeg

That doesn't mean you can't ever belt wire like you may sometimes read. The perfect example of that is red circuits. They craft very slow so one wire assembler is enough for 6 circuit assemblers. Just do it locally and not over great distances

You don't need to build everything to perfect ratios by the way when you're just starting out. But it helps to get an idea of what is needed instead of wondering why something isn't running fully.

I assume the water being green instead of blue is an indication that I have polluted the water too?

Yes. It's entirely cosmetic though. Functionally it's the same

Maybe I should have just brought the crude oil?

That's easier as it's just one product. And you might need additional oil wells later on as they deplete

[foamy]

But wow, so much to think about. For this map, the Oil deposits were wayyyyy to the SE, and I didn't plan well for that. I now use trains to bring light oil, heavy oil, plastic and blue circuits from the Oil deposits. Maybe I should have just brought the crude oil?

That's my preference. Fluids are fast to load and unload from trains (or can be piped), and with oil particularly you don't really get much of a reduction in fluid volume in the processing step, so you may as well just haul all the crude to a single refinery, and then move the output products from there.

Siting a refinery is in fact one of my more finnicky choices up there with figuring out where I am going to put major steam generation, because it's generally much simpler to feed both if you park them by an extensive shoreline, so you can build a series of offshore pumps and not need to worry as much about pipe throughput limits.

Again, leave room when you build major things like this! If you can, place them in such a way that if you need more of whatever it makes, you just put down an exact copy right beside it, and hook up inputs and outputs. Make sure to leave space for transport infrastructure! Trains can move gargantuan amounts of materials, but they need space to work and have a wide turning circle, and belts can chew up surprising amounts of room as well once you start massing them. I have a belted chip farm in a 924 science/m base that looks like this:



No matter how much space you think you've got you're always going to find yourself wishing you'd left more :p

[Durr]

That is exactly why I moved away from belt busses and switched to a modular rail network. I always ran out of room to add belts to the bus. If I run into bottlenecks with the rail system all I need to do is drop down another production module. If the main line starts getting too much traffic I simply add an alternative route or move some of the modules to a less trafficked path. The new train limit feature makes this style of play a breeze, I just need to make sure I have just the right number of trains and have all the stations named the same ("[Cargo Type] Shipping" or "[Cargo Type] Receiving") and everything works itself out.

[foamy]

That is exactly why I moved away from belt busses and switched to a modular rail network. I always ran out of room to add belts to the bus. If I run into bottlenecks with the rail system all I need to do is drop down another production module. If the main line starts getting too much traffic I simply add an alternative route or move some of the modules to a less trafficked path. The new train limit feature makes this style of play a breeze, I just need to make sure I have just the right number of trains and have all the stations named the same ("[Cargo Type] Shipping" or "[Cargo Type] Receiving") and everything works itself out.

Yup! Some people even just put their machines right next to the trains and unload/load directly into them, which looks pretty cool in its own right as well as being UPS friendly.

I personally like the look of masses of belts running smoothly so that's how I prefer to design, but there's no one right way to play the game.

Incidentally, @GamingDaemon, one very useful tool is the Kirk McDonald calculator, here: https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/calc.htm

It will give you a much clearer idea of exactly how much of something you need to build in order to achieve your production targets, all the way down the chain.

[Serenity]

It's not like these things are mutually exclusive. It's easy to start with a bus base and then bring in stuff by rail later on

And suggesting some kind of pure rail base to a beginner is very silly. Not everyone starts with a megabase. And pushing that kind of min/max perfection on beginners is not good. A main bus has its limits, but it's a great way to progress in the game. And naturally experience these problems instead of just blindly doing what other people tell you.