There is no spoon .. general plan

[vanatteveldt]

(Note: I'm using this as a scratch pad to create my plan for a fast rocket launch, so I will edit and update sections as I go along. Feel free to contribute to the planning/discussion phase, or feel free to wait until I'm done )

I am trying to get a good 'there is no spoon' time, so I was wondering what good targets are to aim for. I guess there are two things to produce in bulk, science and rocket parts; and beside that you need to make sure that you are not attacked and get enough artifacts.

Skipping the first "get out of the stone age" phase (which is well documented elsewhere), I think you can divide the run in five broad phases

0) Red science and basic automation
1) Green science and basic automation
2) Blue science
3) Finish Science
4) Build rocket

0 Red science and basic automation

The goal to get red science automated and to start on a basic "store" for most needs. The order of development is

1) Iron mines + smelting
2) Copper mines + smelting
3) Red circuits
4) Basic automation
5) Red science + labs

Note: I'm assuming 10 miners feeding 2x10 furnaces on a combined coal+ore belt. This can later be upgraded to 2x10 minerse feeding 2x10 steel furnaces from a red belt. Using rows of 10 rather than 12 prevents problems with compressing the belt. A single coal mine can supply 20 furnaces (stone or steel). I'm not using the pattern of looping a side of coal through the mines because it is difficult to upgrade to red belts + steel, and 20 mines in a row is difficult to fit on most ore fields. I like upgrading smelters because we need a lot and they take a lot of ingame time to set up...

1 Green science

Order of development:
1) Basic green science (5 red, 6 green)
2) Research steel, build 20 stone furnaces producing steel
3) Make some bricks and upgrade furnaces to steel with red ore+coal belts
4) Research oil techs

2 Blue science

For blue science, my target is 1.5/s of each science pack, aiming for 10/12/24 assemblers. For red and green this is quite easy (viewtopic.php?f=202&t=42718). For blue, that means maximizing a blue smart inserter assembler, but since that is hard work I'm currently aiming for only 75/min (viewtopic.php?f=202&t=42633). This requires 14 red circuits, 5 battery plants, and 22 stone furnaces producing steel. Besides the steel, this consumes about 1200/min each of iron and copper, so about 2 full yellow belts of each including the red+green science. To produce the sulphur and plastic requires 10 refineries with normal oil processing.



In my experience so far, you can get all 'basic' (ie non-alien) research done while setting up the facilities (but maybe I'm just slow ). The final spurt is to get the lvl3 modules, rocket speed boosts, and the silo, which cost 2600 purple and 2150 blue. Almost all techs are 60 second per unit, but with 50% speed bonus that's 40s. So, to consume 90 units per minute, I would need 90 * 40 / 60 = 60 labs, and that should get the final research done in about half an hour. The alien science can be provided by 2 blue assemblers with prod3 modules and sp1 beacons (which I will need anyway for the rocket silo).

4 Build the rocket

For rocket parts, I want to aim at 3 rocket parts per minute, which means I will be done in about half an hour. Assuming 4prod3 modules in the silo, that means 25 LDS and fuel per minute (to get some extra for the sattelite) and 22 RCU.

For the LDS, you need 17 blue assemblers, which consume very limited copper and plastic, but 37 steel furnaces worth of steel.

For the RCU, you need 15 assemblers fed by 8 each of blue circuit and sp1 module. This in turn requires 28 red circuit plants, and on top of that 7 green circuits. This requires 2 full belts of copper and 1 of iron

For fuel, you need 16 assemblers, which together consume the output of 5 refineries on advanced processing. This is a lot less than the 10 refineries needed to feed 3 plastic plants, so we will either have to flare off some light oil or install cracking.



Of course, you also need to find 200 each blue circuits and electric engines and 1000 each steel and concrete for the silo (plus the 4 prod3 modules), but these can be produced while you are collecting artifacts and/or waiting for the science.

Questions:
- Do these targets look reasonable?
- How do you retool the factory to move from science to rocket production? I guess you can at least divert the steel, red circuits, and green circuits (from the filter inserter stack), and maybe you can repurpose the assembly lines as well, i.e. use the blue line for RCU (since the circuits are nearcy) and the green+red line for LDS ("just add steel"). Does that make sense, or is it better to create a whole new line while researching so you can start building rocket parts immediately as soon as the silo is researched? I doubt I can even set all of that up in half an hour, so maybe retooling it is .

[greep]

If you are going for bots, or you've really planned out your rocket assembly without bots, you really don't need to worry so much about sceince. Get 10+ of each rocket assemblers full blast at 6 hours in and you're more than ready, you only will need about 8 blue science assemblers at most, you can get away with 6 even, assuming they're ramped up by about 4 hours.

[vanatteveldt]

Right, thanks. Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of the spoon achievement, or getting plain OCD

How would the answer change if the question is not how to get the achievement, but how to get the best possible time?

There is still an optimal amount of science / rocket assemblers to feed, i.e. a tradeoff between time constructing the setup and running the setup. I'm not an exceedingly quick builder and I have trouble making everything come together (I forget to hand craft things, and often run out of something while I'm busy), so maybe I am trying too much . I suppose the ideal would be to come back from biter hunting right when the blue science is finished, but so far that is more the point where I'm ready to start hunting aliens (after 2.5 hours or so)...

[tobycar]

i think its more important to get your stuff build quickly then worrying about correct ratio's and stuff

you still have time to use a main bus , 4 copper, 4 iron (real 4 with 4 rows of 48 smelters! not noob 1 lane going into 4 ) , 1 steel, 1 red, 2 green , 1 plastic and 1 battery bus, 1 acid pipe and 1 lubricant pipe .. it takes a little longer to set up but it make everything so much easier.. until you do blue science you can use 2 rows of 48 iron and 1 row of copper furnaces

you should aim for blue science done by 2 hours... just takes time to get quick at doing your builds.. try it a few times if you have to

your aim is to try and have 10k steel, 5k plastic, 1k blue chips, 1k speed modules (2k reds chips ) 10k solid fuel by the time your rocket research is done... that way its you just build as many factory's as you can to use all your stuff .. if you have time to squeeze in construction bots and a few logistic bots (you need to chest 200 electric engines anyway) .. it makes doubling production a lot quicker!

you can make LDS off belt from your bus Easy
can make control units next to speed/blue chips or carry in your pocket to a box which unloads onto a belt to feed the machines which make them ..
rocket fuel you need soild fuel so u can either stop creaking and use light or just turn light/heavy into solid fuel all game and fill 4 steel chests run via a belt to wherever your rocket silo is!

i find everything is also quicker if you build a basic make everything factory using 1 mix belt of gears/iron plate and 1 mix belt of steel, green.. on that you want to make pipes, underground pipes, long-fast-basic inserters , chem plants, pumpjacks, assembler 2, basic belt, underground belt and splitters .. just cap at 1 stack each !! may take 30mins to kick in, and u can use a full belt of iron and long hand gears !

just get quick at making stuff and don't worry about efficiency but i highly recommend starting with a main bus even if it turns into a big mess late game . your have everything there to get a great start!!

[vanatteveldt]

Thanks for your feedback!

i think its more important to get your stuff build quickly then worrying about correct ratio's and stuff

I agree, but I need to have a plan so I know approximately how much of everything I will need. Aiming to get final research and rocket construction done in half an hour each at least gives a ballpark esimate...

you still have time to use a main bus , 4 copper, 4 iron (real 4 with 4 rows of 48 smelters! not noob 1 lane going into 4 ) , 1 steel, 1 red, 2 green , 1 plastic and 1 battery bus, 1 acid pipe and 1 lubricant pipe .. it takes a little longer to set up but it make everything so much easier.. until you do blue science you can use 2 rows of 48 iron and 1 row of copper furnaces

If my assumptions and calculations above are correct, this is quite a lot more than you need: 2 copper and 2 iron belts should suffice (I'm assuming steel production from ore here, otherwise you need more, obviously). Maybe add 1 each to ensure no shortages and allow for construction and silo/sattelite, but 4 seems overkill... For steel you need 22 stone furnaces for research, 37 for the rocket, so probably make 24 stone first, upgrade to steel, and then double to 48 to consume a full belt of ore.

(note: I like upgrading steel production to steel furnaces because the setup is quite tedious)

I'm not a fan of putting all these other things on the bus. Green can be made on site for most recipes (although it might be easier to bus it), red is only used for blue science and then for RCU, plastic is only used for red circuits and a little bit for LDS, batteries are only used for blue science (plus a bit for the sattelite), acid is only used for making batteries, and lube is only used for electric engines.

i find everything is also quicker if you build a basic make everything factory using 1 mix belt of gears/iron plate and 1 mix belt of steel, green.. on that you want to make pipes, underground pipes, long-fast-basic inserters , chem plants, pumpjacks, assembler 2, basic belt, underground belt and splitters .. just cap at 1 stack each !! may take 30mins to kick in, and u can use a full belt of iron and long hand gears !

Totally agree here, except maybe for chemplants, UG belts, and splitters, as you need only very limited amount of these.

I tend to build a iron line with plants outputting to chests as soon as I can and use it for all these basics, starting from gears and belts and adding circuits asap.

[Durentis]

Just in case you haven't seen these:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=35803
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... ingle=true

This is actually one of the easier achievements, given such a helpful checklist and base layout suggestions.

[vanatteveldt]

I had seen the forum post, it seemed to complicated to my taste (with cracking, solar, efficiency modules etc). Maybe I should use his map string to be able to directly compare results

[iceman_1212]

i did a lazy bastard + there is no spoon run a few weeks ago - here's the post i made on reddit, which includes a link to images of my base: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... h=fcb8236f

my general approach was to quickly put together a baby base that lets me get through the red + green science whilst producing equipment to put together my (relatively) large rocket-launching base. the design of my rocket-launching base was the conventional main-bus.

the plan: i defined my production goal (measured in # of constantly producing blue assemblers) at two stages of the game: research phase and rocket-building phase. in research phase, i planned for 10/12/24 for science (and 60 labs) and 10/10 for speed module and processing unit. this works out to a little over 2 red belts of iron, just under 3 red belts of copper and a negligible amount of steel (for blue science). in rocket-building phase, i planned for 22/23/24 for RCU/rocket fuel/low-density structure (with the assumption that science is cut off) which requires less than one red belt of iron, roughly one and a half red belts of copper and roughly half a yellow belt of steel (i.e., ~120 stone furnaces, ~60 steel furnaces outputting steel, with the same # making plates). ~15 refineries on advanced cracking are needed to support the targeted production.

buffers are important - assuming we can put up the planned production (for the most part) in a timely manner, buffers essentially become our margin of error. there are times when we produce certain items well in excess of demand - namely, steel, solid fuel, speed modules and processing units.

[*] steel: i had all of my steel-smelting in place at roughly the 2 hour mark so I could have assemblers start working on pumpjacks/chemical plants. once i had the necessary equipment for oil, i had WAY more steel smelting than was necessary to support blue science (24 blue assemblers making blue science requires only 1.5 steel per second), so i put in a simple non-throughput limiting buffer. this let me get away with only having 48 stone furnaces outputting steel as you can see in the imgur album. this was my only intended deviation from the planned production. i think i had ~15k steel stockpiled (6 full steel chests) well before i started making low-density structures.

[*] solid fuel: i had ~9-10k solid fuel buffered (need just over 7k solid fuel to make the necessary amount of rocket fuel assuming prod3 modules in rocket silo) before advanced processing was done. (since i was doing lazy bastard achievement as well, i had to prioritize automation 3 before advanced processing because i needed assembler 3 to make more refineries - if you do advanced processing as your first research, you may not have all of the solid fuel you need before switching.)

[*] speed modules & processing units - these are available quite early in the tech tree and i started stock-piling them before going to collect artifacts (btw i'd get 300 artifacts to be on the safe side).

i also chose to buffer excess plastic.

when sizing your rocket-launching base, the key tradeoff to keep in mind is that a smaller base will let you get through science faster but a bigger base will give you bigger buffers of rocket-ingredients by the time you finish researching rocket silo. in retrospect, i probably chose a base size that was bigger than necessary which resulted in a somewhat stressful/rushed game for the first 4 hours - but the payoff was that by the time rocket silo research was done, i had all of the steel/plastic/speed modules and 50% of the processing units that i needed for launch.

as reference, i finished rocket silo research with ~1:45 left on the clock and i launched with 35 minutes. all this despite forgetting to upgrade one of my copper smelting lines from stone to steel AND accidentally setting up my light oil chem plants backwards prior to advanced processing (i reversed the light oil / water intakes ).

ofc, don't forget about starting electric engines early on - those are the most time consuming of the rocket silo / satellite ingredients. the solar panels / accumulators / concrete are fairly quick to make.

sorry for rambling. lmk if you have any questions.

p.s. it took me a number of tries to get the combo achievements and the majority of my failures were due to brown-outs because i underestimated how quickly my base would grow. for my successful run, i chose to play it safe with power and took my steam engine count up in virtually 2 steps: from 10 to 40 (after adding additional smelting, setting up final red/green science but before oil) and then from 40 to 160 (after setting up initial oil/blue science).

p.p.s. regarding alien artifact hunt - i had a car (two actually ) that i made in early game to help with inventory + mobility, which was extremely useful for going from base to base. i'd also automated hand grenades very early on because i needed to clear out some trees near my spawn point - these grenades came in very handy for clearing trees during alien hunt as well. my first green science research is always military 2 followed by grenade damage 1 for two-shotting trees. weapons-wise, i used gun turret with +4/+4/+4 upgrades (damage and shooting speed upgrades) piercing ammo. i didn't take any armor but that was dumb and i wouldn't recommend cutting this corner. i ran into two big worms which needed a bit of micro but which are killable with regular gun turrets whilst taking zero damage if you abuse their targeting AI (lmk if you want clarification on this point). i found car + gun turret to be the fastest option by far - if you want to play it safe, take some poison capsules too. i experimented with combat shotgun and flamethrower also - lack of upgraded shotgun shells makes it a no-go (those require alien science), and i was having a hard time not hurting myself with flamethrower if any biters got close (with heavy armor). once you place and load a gun turret, they'll protect a decent perimeter around you with no manual control required, and. with piercing ammo and upgrades, small/medium biters and small spitters will get shredded.

[Grubsnik]

To get the spoon achievement "easily" I found that it was easier to just downgrade your aspirations. I did 5 red/4 green science, since that meant I only needed a single coal power plant 1/14/10 to get it up and running and then only upgraded to 6 blue science packs. that allowed me to do my bus with just a single belt of copper and iron being transferred around on normal yellow belts. I didn't even buffer the outputs, like I should have, but still I managed with time to spare. I only needed a single Iron and copper patch and then had to connect a 15 patch oil field.

I did mess up on multiple occasions, where I missed that my oil pipeline had been ruptured by a biter attack, and when I got distracted and therefore was missing inserters for 3 out of 5 assembly plants for speed modules.

[Nich]

Don't forget you will need to add a second Iron mine if you play on standard settings as you will probably start running thin around the time you are half way through blue science.