My guide to "There is no spoon" (14.X version)

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D0SBoots
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My guide to "There is no spoon" (14.X version)

Post by D0SBoots »

This guide is for 14.X versions and below; for the 15.X version see My guide to "There is no spoon" (15.X version).

After I got this achievement (beat the game in under 8 hours), I looked around and was a bit surprised that I couldn't find an in-depth guide to getting it. (Aside from YouTube tutorials, but personally I hate those.) This seems like the proper place for such a guide, so here goes. This will be a long post, but I'll try to use spoilers so it's not too obnoxious.

My build is designed to be "low stress," but this does not mean "no stress" ;). I calculated it to finish research in around 5.5 hours, and launch the rocket at the 6 hour mark, giving 2 hours of slop. In the run where I got the achievement, I actually launched the rocket at 6:57, so I was glad I had that padding. It proceeds in two phases, roughly: 3 hours of frantic constant building, with lots of pausing to consult screenshots, followed by 4 hours where you kill some spawners, make concrete, and do other small tasks but mostly sit around and wait.

You can beat the game faster, of course, but my build is pollution-limited so that you shouldn't ever have any alien attacks, assuming you're playing with a "very big" starting area. Note that it's pretty finely tuned - everything is designed to finish at about the same time. Thus, although it might be tempting to try and speed things up by adding an extra assembler, or upgrading things to yellow assemblers, this won't actually help the launch of the rocket, and in many cases will slow things down by causing a resource shortage. If you want to go faster, you'll need more than the 1600 plates/min that a single basic transport belt can provide, which means you'll have to run the numbers and come up with a full design yourself.

If you want a roughly step-by-step guide, use the following map exchange string, so you can follow my screenshots exactly. (I'm not sharing blueprint strings because they would be useless - this build never researches blueprints or any kind of robotics.) If you want a more spontaneous approach, then I recommend very rich resources of all types, a very big starting area, and high frequency stone/coal, with the rest very high frequency. And you'll want to re-roll until you get a good initial clustering.

>>>AAAOABMAAAABAAYAAAAEAAAAY29hbAQCBQoAAABjb3BwZXItb3Jl
BQUFCQAAAGNydWRlLW9pbAUFBQoAAABlbmVteS1iYXNlAwUBCAAAAGl
yb24tb3JlBQUFBQAAAHN0b25lBAIFwTqVR4CEHgCAhB4ABQAwqojk<<<
Initial start and base overview
Iron and copper mining
Basic Research
Oil production
Blue research
Dealing with bottlenecks and miscellaneous tasks
The rocket
Please let me know if this works for you, or (especially) if any parts are missing or hard to follow!
Last edited by D0SBoots on Sat Jul 15, 2017 9:38 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by D0SBoots »

Reserved for errata and updates.
Coal production

Mehve
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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by Mehve »

Nice writeup, always interesting to see these sort of walkthroughs. There are a lot of instincts and learned behaviours that you pick up while getting good at Factorio, but you need to toss a few of them away when going for the eight hour run. I always find it amusing to see how small the bases tend to be, against all intuition. Nevermind the fact that even red belts are completely unnecessary. It really does come down to prioritizing your research, building the base right the first time, and getting an early head start on the final build ingredients.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by Daid »

I did mine in 7:30, with just the tip "very big starting area, so the natives never notice your pollution."

Worked fine, but I did end up building a car and a tank to seek&destroy some natives.

Didn't do solar power, nor modules (they are quite a resource sink), and best thing I did was setting up red circuit production as soon as I could, and the same for blues. This gave me a head start in the rocket production.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by D0SBoots »

Thanks for the confirmation that you can go full steam without attracting the baddies. I suspected that might be the case, but I don't like alien attacks (even in normal games), preferring to always engage them on my terms.

The solar panels and modules are a resource sink, but not as much as you might think. The solar costs 750 steel, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what you need for the rocket. And if that's too much, you need 6MW of solar to create the satellite anyway - you mind as well use it instead of letting it sit in a chest.

The modules are a much bigger sink, but since you naturally need 300 more processing units than modules, and they build at the same speed, I used that extra budget to cover my base with efficiency modules.

Edit: I had the wrong number of steel.
Last edited by D0SBoots on Tue Nov 08, 2016 5:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by hi_impact »

The fact that this runs on a single yellow belt is impressive. You got it planned out very well and I'll probably be using this when I go for my Spoon run.

I plan my 'regular' bases out on a 3/3/6 as well as trying to bus only one blue of iron/copper, so this build really speaks to me. I appreciate the effort in the guide.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by D0SBoots »

Sorry, I'm not a regular (yet) on this forum so some of your terms went over my head. What's a 3/3/6? And I think I get what you mean by bus, but what do you mean by "bus only one blue?"

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by hi_impact »

3/3/6 is a rough abbrev for 3 red science, 3 green, and 6 blue science assemblers. It's based off the shorthand 5/6/12 that people often talk about.

Blue belt is express belt, the highest tier one.

I actually used your map seed for my spoon achievement yesterday btw :D

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by D0SBoots »

Yay! I'm glad that my guide was able to help someone!

Thanks for the explanation. I get why I was confused now - my build doesn't even research red or blue belts, but you were just saying that *your* bases try to have a single express belt bus.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by Markavian »

Thanks for the guide D0SBoots - I just got the achievement. I adapted your guide into a checklist with some rough timings that I could stick to: https://goo.gl/mfykLU

I decided that this would be easier then trying to stick to a fixed factory plan, but meant I was slower than your estimates in getting everything set up, and I ended up buffing my power generation and spreading things out much further.

But I nailed it in just shy of 7 hours, so I was pretty happy. Room for improvement I guess :)

I think I was a bit behind towards the end, I got a little bit short on petroleum for plastic, and ended up making 4 L3 productivity modules for the Rocket SIlo instead of L2 like you recommended.
I should do my own maths on that to work out a less panic inducing way to end the game.

Anyhow, thanks again for the guide, and hope my checklist is useful to the next.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by Grimakar »

Markavian wrote:Thanks for the guide D0SBoots - I just got the achievement. I adapted your guide into a checklist with some rough timings that I could stick to: https://goo.gl/mfykLU

I decided that this would be easier then trying to stick to a fixed factory plan, but meant I was slower than your estimates in getting everything set up, and I ended up buffing my power generation and spreading things out much further.

But I nailed it in just shy of 7 hours, so I was pretty happy. Room for improvement I guess :)

I think I was a bit behind towards the end, I got a little bit short on petroleum for plastic, and ended up making 4 L3 productivity modules for the Rocket SIlo instead of L2 like you recommended.
I should do my own maths on that to work out a less panic inducing way to end the game.

Anyhow, thanks again for the guide, and hope my checklist is useful to the next.
I just took a short look, but came to my mind was, that you build only one furnace and burning driller for iron. I am building 5 and I get out of early phase in about 15-20min, which is almost half the time. So maybe you could win there some time. After/before every phase, I made a savegame and so I could practice this particular phase to get a better time out of it.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by constantino »

good guide, got it around 7 hours without much fuss. needed a leash to not overbuild one thing before the next.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by Nich »

So I am at 6:13 minutes and I just unlocked the missile silo. I made a mistake and somehow I have not unlocked the electric engines yet. (I have 100 regualr engines banked but that doesn't really help me) I think I can get my rocket parts/fuel running while I research/bank materials for the silo. Think I will be able to make 8 hours? If not that is fine as this is only my second play through. I swear I had Red/Green science done before I even had Blue set up it just goes so quick.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by D0SBoots »

Check through the tech list - do you have the concrete and other stuff? If all you're missing is the electric engines, I'd say you have a shot - it'll take you ~54 minutes to make 200 electric engines with a yellow assembler, or 1:29 with a blue. Make sure that you get all the productivity modules in your newly-built silo before you hook up the inserters to the crates.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by yousai »

Thanks for your guides, I got the achievement yesterday with around 3 minutes (!) to spare.
It was extremely close but that moment I heard the silo's alarm was so relieving! :D :lol:
The Logistic Network Embargo achievement is a nice extra, too :P

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by Nich »

Well things did not go well. I was not set up nearly as well as I thought. I shut down science production ASAP after building the missile silo (7:10) and diverted all resources to missile production but it took me almost an hour just to get avionic units up and running nicely and I was plagued by diminishing resources/bandwidth in my starting area the entire time. I ended up taking 11:17. Not bad for my second try. Third time is the charm

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by chooski »

Well, it took me two tries, but I managed it in 7:40:25. Thanks for the guide!

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by nevjmac »

Just wanted to say thanks to the both of you DosBoots for the screenshots of your layout and Markavian for the build checklist.

I managed to finish this in 6 hours following your guides, and making a bit up along the way! Top work

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by Blazku »

I just want to say thank you D0SBoots for the guide. It gave me the motivation i needed to do the achievement and a general idea of how the game should be played for such a feat.
And thank you Markavian for the doc which helped me a great deal in the first two hours of the game when speed was crucial.

My typical games last between 50 and 100+ hours, and with the help of you two i started the game at 10PM and went to sleep at 6:38 AM. Time to rocket launch was 6:55 min and i coudn't be happier when i got all those achievements.

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Re: My guide to "There is no spoon"

Post by Zaka »

Awesome Guide!!!

Launched Rocket in 6:32.

I did not manage to get all of the productivity, speed and efficiency modules in place, but it worked out well with out them.

Thanks again!
Zaka

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