Factorio Forums

Hey all. I'm hoping to get some inspiration on what motivates people to build huge bases, and find out what, exactly those bases are doing. As we can all see from the "There is no Spoon" achievement, the game can be completed fairly quickly, and very minimally. So how do you motivate yourself to keep going? Do you set a personal goal to launch 100 rockets or something? In my current game, I'm past blue circuit production and have already built all the efficiency/speed/production modules I need, and I don't really feel a need to launch a rocket in any big hurry (since I've already done that in other playthroughs). My base sits pretty much idle most of the time now.

*shrug*

I don't know if my base qualifies as a mega-base, but I have 800+ hours in mine and I only recently started thinking it was complete. Personally, I was mainly driven by wanting to increase capacity and efficiency. Re-did my smelting area twice, and had major rebuilds of most areas. I've been running with the "Late Upgrades" mod which allows me to give my factory things to do. The save file is up to 145m, that's with decorations removed.

My megabase (mega-ish, its at about the 100 hour mark) produces Rocket Shrines. Large compounds in biter territory dedicated to extolling the virtues of peace to the biters, by showing them what 80-ish full rocket silos looks like, next to their homes.

Actually I'm still working on the first shrine, and there has been a delay due to the discovery of Kerbal Space Program. Hope 0.15 does break my save, or I'll have to start again, when I get around to it

Just rockets. Once 0.15 comes out with it's infinite research, I suspect I'll make a serious research complex as well, but that's in the future.

For me, the appeal of a megabase is similar to things like the Spoon challenge - it forces you to abandon your comfortable patterns and methods. So many tried-and-true methods completely bottleneck when you try to scale them upwards beyond a certain point, forcing you to rethink your approach.

Prod/Speed3 modules are a good resource sink before you hit megabase levels. Getting all your assamblers/derriks beaconed and proded up is hours of work, adding smelters takes dozens of hours if you've got hundreds and are expanding to build more modules faster.

Of course, since they explode your efficiency, once you're finally done it'll only make the "what to build" situation much worse But that's dozens of hours in.

I have yet to build a mega base but I would think 1 that can support a full rate rocket will be my first goal.

I haven't hit mega-base status yet, but I've launched a rocket in my most recent game and carved out a large patch of defended land.

My primary use won't so much be to launch more rockets, but to have the freedom to improve on designs and explore aspects of the game that I haven't invested time into yet.

I've recently started designing compact blueprints that can output a compressed(-ish?) blue belt of various materials using Prod/Speed3 Modules and beacons. I have one for plastic and green circuits, with red circuits and steel pretty much done (though I'm not certain on the math and currently a bit resource starved), and I like that I can stick the green circuit and plastic builds onto the red circuit design to save beacons/modules.

Thanks to Randomical over at /r/factorio for some math and the beautiful smelter - shown last in the pics.

I'll also be looking more into the logic components, starting with simple things like cutting power to idle beacons.

There's a lot more to Factorio, for me anyway, than just launching the initial rocket or producing something in particular.

My desire to grow my base comes from my *lack* of desire to restart from scratch and basically have all that work and time go to waste. So I just keep building and improving non-stop. Same in Minecraft, I have one world that I have been building in for several years.

My very first factory went 568 hours before it got too laggy for me. Eager to see how it improves with the conveyor improvements coming in 0.15.0

At the moment i am trying to create a megabase that is capable of supplying a compressed blue belt of tier 3 modules. I do hope that i will be ready before 0.15 is out, because then i want to make a mega base that focuses on research.

1 rocket per minute for me. With vanilia version (so lot of power panel !).
Actual I'm extending the concreete to all my base (a big challenge).

I plan to do a 2 rockets per minute base (but lot of work to do) and to do infinite reach when 0.15 will start.

AcolyteOfRocket wrote:My megabase (mega-ish, its at about the 100 hour mark) produces Rocket Shrines. Large compounds in biter territory dedicated to extolling the virtues of peace to the biters, by showing them what 80-ish full rocket silos looks like, next to their homes.

This is a deeply noble goal which I endorse with enthusiasm.

My megabase just fills up my supply banks. It doesn't produce anything except barren wasteland cleared of everything. I'm only a hundred hours in, but what a productive hundred hours it's been. I'm currently working on an expansion that pushes the base longer than max map zoom. Should be fun to clear all those biter bases and trees.

Spaghetti

Are there any mods that allow you to export finished goods?

I'm thinking something that assigns a market value to each product (possibly one which decreases as the quantity goes up, to encourage product variety). Then you could attempt to become a billionaire, and compete to become the top 0.1% of megabase-product-exporters.

the problem of what to do with megabases has not been solved or even addressed by the devs.
Players want to preside over their 100s of hours of work, but have to invent minor things to preside over.

Fun. But it does consume quite a bit of time.

Gekkenwerk wrote:At the moment i am trying to create a megabase that is capable of supplying a compressed blue belt of tier 3 modules. I do hope that i will be ready before 0.15 is out, because then i want to make a mega base that focuses on research.

seeing as how a module 3 per second is about as resource intensive as a rocket per minute (slightly lower oil requirement but higher copper requirement), i'd say this is rather ambitious.

I try to make a "Megabase" with only 100MW useage ... is not so easy it sounds.
First time i use Efficiency Module
I hope i can send a Rocket all 10 min to space, but its too early to say.

Meekay wrote:Fun. But it does consume quite a bit of time.

Have you tried productivity modules to improve the ratio?