Factorio Forums

I love playing with combinators, but one of my biggest gripes is the large amount of space they consume. The game has you building nuclear reactors, portable fusion reactors and flying construction robots, so why should a device which functions as a basic logic gate take up 1x2 space?

But imagine you can shrink the footprint of your combinator setups, making them more useful when space savings is important. Its basically taking the concept of Factorissimo and specializing it for circuits. You have a 1x1 or 2x2 grid 'breadboard' which can look like a utility box, which has 4 circuit connections like any combinator red/green in, and red/green out. Clicking on it opens up a new surface that only accepts combinators to be placed; power is supplied everywhere. At different ends of the breadboard surface (top and bottom, left or right, whatever) you have your input and output red and green wires which can be visualized as permanent connectors on the board. Anyone using it takes the input signals from the wires, applies whatever logic to it, and passes it out to the output wires.

This gives a rough idea of how the surface can look (minus the components pictured):



So basically, you get a nice roomy space to build whatever circuit network goodness you want, and its confined to a much smaller footprint, just as how electronic circuits are IRL.

Higher tier breadboards can boast larger sizes. Power needs of the combinators placed inside is passed to the entity on Nauvis.

Let me know what you think.

I haven't tried it myself, but does https://mods.factorio.com/mod/compaktcircuit resemble what you are thinking?

Its implemented differently in a bunch of ways, but it functionally does the same thing, using a smaller combinator-only surface to compact circuit network logic builds. I think their approach makes it a bit more convoluted than it needs to be.

If you want a tool with less bells and whistles you can try

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/circuitissimo