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Self-Contained 0.17 1K SPM Base

Posted: Tue May 28, 2019 3:15 pm
by ilbJanissary
Self-Contained 0.17 1K SPM Base
This post is heavily based on ultramn's Self-contained 1000 SPM base. However, there were a few tweaks I wanted to make.
  • 0.17 Formulas: I started this design in an old 0.16 base, but decided to restart in 0.17 before the base was 100% finished
  • Minimize bots: Use pipes rather than barrels for fluids, put related assemblers together
  • Simple train network: Use consistently sized, one-headed trains with stackers
  • Reduce base footprint: Integrate labs and silos into the factory, smelt steel offsite
  • All sciences: Since military science is more relevant in 0.17, include military science
I heavily use Kirk McDonald's Factorio calculator, and here is the link for this base. I used 1025 to ensure there is enough capacity to be sure the labs stay busy. The extra rocket fuel is intended to fuel trains, although I have so far been using wood collected from my solar farm.

The end result is a self-contained, bot-based 1K SPM factory, including military. Iron plate, Copper plate, Steel plate, Coal, Stone, Brick, and Oil are delivered via trains. It is easy to adapt this base to have water delivered by train as well (add two water train stops to the bottom row of train stops), but I found it simpler to just locate the factory near a body of water. It's also fairly simple to do brick smelting on-site and deliver more stone instead, but part of my intent was to reduce the number of trains.

This is a completely vanilla map, with some tweaks to resources, and biters/pollution/cliffs disabled. The design of the base is intended to scale upwards so I wanted to avoid any UPS issues. At 1KSPM, I've never hovered from 60UPS on my laptop.
Factory tour
The complete map consists of a bootstrap main-bus base that produces ~200 SPM, a similar mall megabase for modules and other factory components, a large solar field, and the 1K SPM base.
Map
KPM Block
KPM Factory Only
Production
Electric Network
My plan is to scale up by 1K SPM at a time, simply placing new copies of this factory in remote sections of the map with discrete resource collection for each 1K SPM. In my second copy, I plan to eliminate military science since I don't actually plan to use it in this map. When I do that, I also plan to eliminate brick delivery, smelt bricks on-site, and move the Steel train stop to the top row.

The KPM base blueprint can be found here.

Re: Self-Contained 0.17 1K SPM Base

Posted: Thu May 30, 2019 5:10 pm
by phi Seeker
So far I have never bothered to use concrete except for walking paths, but I always kind of admire people who do bother with that, because at least the pictures look much cooler then :)

Also your solar blueprint is quite cool and interesting as well as it looks pretty nice, fills all the space without empty spaces and it is almost perfect ratio, since per thousand solar panels you have not even one entire accumulator extra. I was thinking about my own solar blueprint as well, but it was too much experimenting for me.

So if I understand this concept of self-contained factory, it means it basically one huge block of producing everything right? I have a thought of such or very similar factory, but I think it is quite challenging to organize the production to minimize the number of robots to the point they actually keep up. Also I was thinking to do the smelting in the same block as assemblers, but I am not very sure it can actually work with the smelting as well, since it is maybe too much of distant deliveries for bots.

Re: Self-Contained 0.17 1K SPM Base

Posted: Mon Jun 03, 2019 4:42 pm
by ilbJanissary
I don't typically bother with concrete either, at least until late game like this. It's nice, but not usually work the trouble.

Glad you like the solar blueprint! There are a lot out there but feels good to make your own blueprints sometimes! 😀

I don't think the term self-contained factory has a very specific meaning at this point, for me I think of it as an alternative to modular rail based factories, where you have distinct factories for intermediate products. Self-contained factories mean fewer trains, basically, because you aren't shipping intermediate products around.

This factory keeps about 4-5k logistics bots busy, by the way.

Doing smelting on-site creates a few issues.
  • Cargo wagons can only hold half as much ore as plates, which means more train traffic
  • This problem is expounded by steel. One wagon of steel is ten wagons of ore (ignoring productivity bonuses)
  • If you look at the calculator I linked, you need to almost double the size of the factory to smelt onsite
I've frequently considered setting up a dedicated smelting factory, but then you still have the problems of transporting wagons of ore while you also have to transport finished plates to the rest of the factory.

My first attempt at 1KSPM was using 1-1 trains and smelting onsite, once I started to see how terrible traffic could be I went to the opposite extreme.

Re: Self-Contained 0.17 1K SPM Base

Posted: Wed Jun 05, 2019 4:37 pm
by phi Seeker
When I built 1K spm factory, I had problems with the ore train traffic as well, but I managed to deal with this problem with more train lines in place between iron ore mining and iron and steel processing, so in the end it worked anyway.
However processing ore at mining site would seem to reduce the train traffic a lot, so I will most probably try it out next time I will be building a megabase.

Ironically I first time tried to build 1k spm by building everything in one mega outpost factory, including smelting, this didnt work very well for me, so next time I tried it out with outposting and it worked very well. However I didnt give up on this idea and set my mind to try it some other time and just do it better. So this self-contained factory provides me with a hope that I can possibly build this way too :D And having the ore processing at mining site is maybe integral part of the trick actually.

Edit: Also I wanted to add that processing at mining site requires quite a large enough ore patches, so I imagine one has to count this in even on map generation screen or probably play railworld settings. Or am I wrong and you can do it even on default?

Re: Self-Contained 0.17 1K SPM Base

Posted: Tue Jun 11, 2019 7:46 pm
by ilbJanissary
You can do it on default settings if you go far enough away from your starting point (resource patches continue to get richer as you get further away), but I did tweak the resource settings in this map to be more favorable.