I like to play Factorio quite differently than most people - I chose very slow, eco-friendly strategy and built quite a small base around the concept of "Three Belts". I don't like many belts for different products, so I manage many different things on a single belt. I decided to post the picture of the base and explanation of the system; although you may disagree with my gameplay choice, I think perhaps someone will take inspiration in my way of producing things, which uses circuit network to produce things according to demand and let's you build a very reconfigurable factory (similar to what logistic system will give you, but you can do that from the start). I think also the fact that the base is small (it fits in 3x4 chunks, including solar power and railway stations) can be interesting to people. I also like things circulating around, not be stuck in queues indefinitely, which is a more aesthetic than rational choice.
The main factory area, towards the top, uses 3 belts:
1. Belt which circulates iron plates on one side and copper plates on the other side around the factory.
2. Belt which circulates steel/circuits on one side and gears/wires on the other side around the factory (these are most common subproducts).
3. Belt which circulates everything else on one side, and the output products go on the other side, around the factory.
The balance of things on the belts 2 and 3 is maintained by the splitter trees (in the proper ratio), and before going into that, I filter each item into a smart chest, creating a bottleneck, so that the output filter inserter at each factory can be set only to produce up to certain limit of items. So everything is driven by demand, which causes the amount of items in the smart chests to decrease, and the production of the required item starts. This resolves the problem that we don't need to control every input of every possible item, we just watch the amount of items we have in stock as it continually flows through the system.
There are also 3 auxiliary belts:
4. Belt which circulates coal on one side and stone on other side around the factory.
5. Belt which brings some products (plastic, stone, batteries, explosives, solid fuel) from the chemical plant to the third product belt.
6. Belt which circulates all the science packs around labs.
You can potentially reconfigure the system to produce different things by setting up factories differently, or by setting different conditions on the output inserters (to keep different amount in smart chests), or even by setting different ratio of the splitter trees. Although I haven't done that very much in the game.
As it is now, the system has some problems, sometimes the pipelining is not very good and things get starved. But it will balance itself out eventually. I think it could be improved and scaled up, and least for certain things. The use of express belts is not needed, it works fine with normal belts too, but it helps with the throughput. Anyway, I just thought that it's interesting concept, people seemed to have struggled with this idea but I have never seen anybody to do same thing as I do.
I attached some pictures and the save.
- Top half of the base
- compact-base-2.png (3.57 MiB) Viewed 13413 times
- Bottom half of the base
- compact-base-3.png (3.69 MiB) Viewed 13413 times
