Early Building Store

[siggboy]

I made a distributed base so I could try out my dynamic train scheduler. So I deliberately spread out everything and shipped around a lot of intermediate products on trains. I had a dedicated refinery (producing plastic, sulfur and solid fuel), dedicated smelting (copper, iron, steel), a chip factory (all chip colors and speed modules), a rocket pre-assembly (for the three rocket components), and then the rocket launcher was in the main base. Nuclear power was also far out of the way, for role-playing reasons (dangerous radiation alert).

Oil was only transported to the refinery, and I did not use the Rail Tanker at all, and no barrel mod either, so I could not ship sulfuric acid or petroleum gas (that's why I had to transport sulfur, and make plastic and solid fuel at the refinery).

In that scenario, the oil in barrels is a lot better than the Rail Tanker, because it's just faster (more oil per wagon, and much faster loading and unloading). Handling the barrels was easy as soon as I figured out the best way to do it, because my train scheduler deals with a lot of the problems already (such as sending a train only where it's needed).

Maybe a barrel mod is the next thing I'm going to try, because it's supposed to be coming to Vanilla anyway (I'm not hold my breath for the rail tanker, it's been promised for so long now and still not in the game). Then I won't have to ship sulfur, and could ship sulfuric acid instead, as well as petroleum for the plastic bars (that AC with the underground express belts that we were bickering about actually expects petroleum and not plastic bars, so it's not well suited for my current base design).

I also prefer barrels for storing fluid over tanks, because they can be moved and it's a lot more compact. In the current game it doesn't make a lot of sense that the only thing you can barrel is oil, while your tanks magically can store everything, even hot water and steam.

[Qon]

I made a distributed base so I could try out my dynamic train scheduler. So I deliberately spread out everything and shipped around a lot of intermediate products on trains. I had a dedicated refinery (producing plastic, sulfur and solid fuel), dedicated smelting (copper, iron, steel), a chip factory (all chip colors and speed modules), a rocket pre-assembly (for the three rocket components), and then the rocket launcher was in the main base. Nuclear power was also far out of the way, for role-playing reasons (dangerous radiation alert).

Maybe a barrel mod is the next thing I'm going to try, because it's supposed to be coming to Vanilla anyway (I'm not hold my breath for the rail tanker, it's been promised for so long now and still not in the game). Then I won't have to ship sulfur, and could ship sulfuric acid instead, as well as petroleum for the plastic bars (that AC with the underground express belts that we were bickering about actually expects petroleum and not plastic bars, so it's not well suited for my current base design).

Is there anywhere I can see your base? I bet it's quite nice.

I avoid barreling other liquids also because my base is 100% bots. So without barrels for everything I'm forced to pipe it all. Makes even a bot base challenging and fun to build with pipes everywhere. I kinda like pipes too. But shipping sulfuric acid barrels and so one with bots is kinda cool also.

[siggboy]

Is there anywhere I can see your base? I bet it's quite nice.

The base itself is nothing to phone home about. It's basically a huge playground for my train system.

The train system is very nice, and I'm currently reworking it for 0.13 and it will be porn.

I can send you a save for 0.12, with the mod pack for 0.12. I've got a save that I planned to upload to the train scheduler thread for demo purposes, where the base is running and producing rockets (about 1 rocket every 3 minutes), and the trains are doing their work and it's really lean and tight (only 20 trains LL-CCCC, and I could probably even take a few out and it would still run at 100%).

Maybe I'll migrate the save to 0.13 and put the reworked train stuff in place, but currently I don't have anything for 0.13. Since I have almost 50 train station in that map, and migrating the smart chests removes all the wires, and all the loaders would have to be replaced so they'd use Stack Inserters, migrating the thing will require a lot of manual work. Which is why I haven't done it yet, also right now I'm in the sandbox phase were I design circuits and don't play any real games.

But honestly, I think you'll probably be disappointed unless you care about the train stuff.

[Qon]

Is there anywhere I can see your base? I bet it's quite nice.

The base itself is nothing to phone home about. It's basically a huge playground for my train system.

But honestly, I think you'll probably be disappointed unless you care about the train stuff.

Sounds great! Yes please. Won't be able to look at it today though so no hurry.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

I mentioned earlier that I like Trains.

Let's get this clear - I LOVE trains

My Father was one of the original English Trainspotters. Trainspotters had notebooks that listed all classes of steam engines that were in the world and Trainspotters ticked them off. As an adult he became a steam engineer and spent all his spare time restoring and running the giants of old. He had a set of engineering manuals the size of an encyclopaedia. I was a precocious child and read them all. We discussed maglev and other concepts well before their time. We went with him Sundays out to this Steam train graveyard, with 14 huge black machines under corrugated iron sideless sheds. We'd play in the coal boxes and come out black, then we'd go swim in the reservoir they used to water the engines with. It was filled with frogs, tadpoles and fish.

Today I live close to a museum and each Sunday they take a steam engine out for a spin. I get to hear it's whistle blow, hear the steam valves release.... I love trains. I spend half my game-time building things, and the other half riding round on or watching the trains.

Do not feel you have nothing to offer if your thing is all about trains.

I was watching some stack inserters at upgrade 4 (of 7) yesterday. Six of them kept pace stacking the output of 40 fully loaded (had 100 plate backup each) furnaces. This was just one splitter and a red belt. The days of ridiculous spaghetti/splitter combos passing muster as train stations may be behind us.

I've removed my temp solar off the island and installed 60 steam engines - for starters. The Aliens are definitely thicker and angrier around the north end of the island where I've been killing and burning. So they are somewhat manipulable. 4 out of 5 warning flashes are now from the island area, the heat is slowly coming off the base. I've identified some more islands to use. It will be a while, this is going to be a long-game.

Nearly died had a rolling blackout the Aliens came so thick and fast at one stage the accumulators could not recharge they chewed through some walls at the island copper and then a couple of turrets I raced around with robots being very slow dropping 200 odd panels/accumulators and got enough power to back me up then went in with the flamethrower to sort it out. After that I decided I wanted steam immediately, before a coal resource was secured, so they're running on solid fuel - and doing a great job of keeping the lasers running.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

I'll probably start a new thread for "Islands".

Though the building store will certainly get a mention there - as it features heavily in the island lifestyle.

Welcome to Hell, Aliens.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

This is the end result of two large stone patches. I have a smaller patch in reserve plus a bunch of walls just in case.

Island living isn't about the copper and iron so much, it's about the coal and stone.

The building store is still under development in late game mode. A train on a siding is loaded via logistics bots with building store items. Likewise a train on a siding is loaded with military goods from a military store on the main island. Using the train network button I can call up a building or war mission (train) to arrive on demand at the nearest station when I want it.

A train wagon of land mines, cluster grenades, destroyer capsules, flamethrower ammo, etc - new lakes are mine to be had (where's the damn stone, Alien, I know you got some! )

I've some work back on so this is slowing down a bit. However, this game will be over the long haul provided the new patch doesn't self destruct. So, join me in the new thread when it kicks off.

[Qon]

On topic (wohoo!):
Trying to improve the building store further. Playing around in foreman to see how I should group things and what resources are needed where.
I'll make a proper post about this but here's some short info.

You either use steel or iron plates in one recipe, not both. Cargo wagons and storage tanks are the only exeptions, and those won't need any throughput whatsoever and barely needs automation at all.
You either use green or red circuits in one recipe, not both. Logistics chests, stack inserters, beacons and modules are the exeptions.
Modules are also the only real use for blue circuits exept personal equipment that never needs replacement in single player, and rockets, which are made with a lot of player involvement for a single launch or gets it's own separate dedicated factory if you want to launch them continously. Modules and higher level circuits are the big circuit users and all use mostly ciruits and not much else as ingredients, so these are good to produce together.

So I'm thinking that you'll want 2 lines. One with green circuits and iron plates and gears. Another line with steel and red circuits and gears. The question is which items will be a mix of both, iron+reds or steel+greens? You might need a zone of both for that reason. Greens+steel is a thing, but reds+iron isn't. So you can fairly simply make one basic building store and one advanced building store if you supply steel for the mid game basic store.

It's a bit tricker with chains of items, like splitters. Fast ones need green circuits and express ones needs red circuits so they together need both types. But if both lines are going parallel then it should be fairly easy to get solve that.

Another part is stone bricks, pipes and engines. Electric furnace needs advanced circuits and stone (mostly bricks but not all of it), but apart from that one exeption to all things you want to automate on the building store fit in the basic one. I'm assuming you will build a bot factory separately if you intend to use them heavily since you will need so many assemblers for high speed bot production. I probably won't automate cars and tanks since I don't really use them in the first place and they are easy to handcraft once you have engines. So locomotives and flamethrower turrets are the things on the building store that will use engines. The only real reason I mentioned pipes and stone together is refinery and boilers, so these can be split up for the most part. Pipes are used in enough recipes to have a single assembler supplying pipes to everything that needs it in one place, but not much more so you don't want to have it go though the whole store or something like that.

Steel is used a lot but not for early game stuff so it might be a waste to have it supplied from the beginning of the building store. But we want to keep it simple too so maybe?

If you are going for a megabase you will want a separate factory for express belts or bots, whatever you chose. Both need lubricant and lost of iron products but unless you are going to make a hybrid that requires both you can make a separate factory for the one you chose and have the other one on the building store. A building store needs very little belts compared to a mainbus, so making express belts on the building store is not a bad idea when not making a main bus or belt megabase. Then a modest supply will be more than enough, and a buiding store with express belts is very fast.

I will try to design something that is easy to build, have the early parts fairly close togother but is still quite expandable so you can use it for late game.

[siggboy]

I'm waiting for a screenshot or two of what you've come up with . I'm definitely too lazy to design this stuff myself but would be more than happy to copy somebody else's if it works well .

You haven't mentioned rails, but there needs to be an assembler or two making them (stone + steel + stick [plate]).

I think it's enough if you make engines and electric engines and then handcraft the stuff that is using them (robots are an exception). It's just not important enough to have assemblers for pumps, wagons, locomotives; I'd rather carry a stack of engines and electric engines and hand craft those when I need them.

[Qon]

You haven't mentioned rails, but there needs to be an assembler or two making them (stone + steel + stick [plate]).

Rail will be wherever stone is because steel will be everywhere, and iron will be close to stone. Sticks are basically used for lamps and rails so direct insertion works for those. It's crafted quickly and each section is 2 tiles long and even if you are going kilometers it will probably work pretty well as long as you don't try to make some wasteful 8 lane railway. Pro tip: one rail lane in each direction is good enough q:

I think it's enough if you make engines and electric engines and then handcraft the stuff that is using them (robots are an exception). It's just not important enough to have assemblers for pumps, wagons, locomotives; I'd rather carry a stack of engines and electric engines and hand craft those when I need them.

I mostly agree. But if you don't want those then they can easily just be omitted. And it's so simple to set up auto crafting with a building store that I want to eliminate hand crafting as much as possible. I want my conbots to repair all the damage in case I take a shortcut with a shotgun or tank straight through my base
I don't want a destroyed pump to be the weak link that stops my base. But yes most vehicle stuff are best crafted in hand. Some things will be omitted from the building store because you never really need more than 10 of them or something. But flamethrower turrets are worth automating if you want to use them primarily, and then with engines there locomotives can just be added on. Maybe I'll skip it and let anyone who needs hundreds of locomotives add in those by themselves. I think that the building store could really help with lazy bastard achievment and speedrunning, but I'm not going to go too far with specialising it for those if it makes it worse for a regular run.

I'm waiting for a screenshot or two of what you've come up with . I'm definitely too lazy to design this stuff myself but would be more than happy to copy somebody else's if it works well .

It's going to be fantastic when it's done. Death to the main bus! The MB is really only good for getting organised without any knowledge of anything. But it uses extreme amounts of space, resources and time to set up and it is actually pretty hard to automate all the things you want while strictly following the system. If I can get the BS (not the greatest shortening but what can I do?) simple enough even a newbie could use it easily. As long as they know that they should make separate science and circuit factories and what items should be on the belts then you just plop down whatever thing you need automated and pull the resources without any tricky branching.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

Plenty of food for thought there people.

I like BS as an acronym, I talk a lot of it.

One thing Qon - the BS doesn't have to be restricted to a single line - as mid-late game arrives you can make another line perhaps.

There is also the option of feeding in three belts and still there's room for unloading.

If we place (and reserve place for) copper plate using assemblers at the beginning of the line. Then add:

Gears/green circuits, iron/steel, red circuits? - (electric furnaces and...?) - stone? (rail, boilers, brick - furnaces, walls).

The useful stuff. On that note: robots

I automate right through to robot frames. Crafting speed is fast after this. In this manner I can choose if I want logistics or construction bots as and when I use them. Crafting from engines is too slow. Unlike trains, engines are sufficient to kickstart and continue accumulating trains.

Rail is important to automate, you don't use a refill very often but who carries round stone and iron sticks.

For me the late (ideal) BS needs to cover the following:

Those basics we always assembled - assemblers, inserters, belts etc

Power - Poles, boilers, steam engines, accumulators, panels. If going large, highly recommended to get both solar and electric.

Mining - Drills, smelters -> electric smelters. Walls, lasers.

Oil - Refineries, pumpjacks, chemical plants (plus walls, lasers...)

Rail - engines, rails, signals if you want...

Robots - Electric engines - Flying Robot Frames

Plus repair packs and I've likely forgotten a bit.

For me the late game version allows me to continue doing what I used to do early game - grab stacks and get on with building stuff. Incorporating a personal building train to ferry me round and/or remotely deliver goods is a perfect accompaniment.

The original circuits and gears should leave room for expansion of them if needed. And then iron has to be doubled up for steel as it comes into play.

That third belt - the red circuits - for smelters and...? Bringing in the batteries and red circuits can disrupt the whole shebang quite quickly, forward planning for these would help me tidy up my BS.

[Qon]

I like BS as an acronym, I talk a lot of it.

lol

One thing Qon - the BS doesn't have to be restricted to a single line - as mid-late game arrives you can make another line perhaps.

There is also the option of feeding in three belts and still there's room for unloading.

Yes, multiple lines planned. The basic BS (BBS) and advanced BS (ABS) are two fairly distinct lines. But I'm also thinking about how to handle multiple lines of BBS (multiple lines of ABS is not needed because ABS will be very short anyways) or if you should just bend it back if you want it more square. Multiple lines would increase the amount of stuff you can send, but if you can easily use blue belts and get there quickly that might be overkill anyways since you are making the 100k things elsewhere.

If possible I want to reduce the amount of belts needed on each side so that you don't need as many long inserters for input. Makes it messier if you need underground belts to fit in the chests and inserters. For the most part you 2 belts is enough for gears, greens, iron and steel. If you place assemblers between those belts you can get fast inserters to both and thus need less inserters, you can even use stack ones when you get those. If you need more lanes you can just build new ones alternating between the types. Long inserters are fast enough for output and done correctly will have a space available for the chest without any need for UG belts. Still designing.

The useful stuff. On that note: robots

I automate right through to robot frames. Crafting speed is fast after this. In this manner I can choose if I want logistics or construction bots as and when I use them. Crafting from engines is too slow. Unlike trains, engines are sufficient to kickstart and continue accumulating trains.

Yes. But in a robot factory it's nice when new robots are crafted and inserted into the network automatically so when you start using them you don't have to do that all the time when every addition is a meaningful increase to your throughput. But for the refererence design I might not have bots themselves in. Depends. But yes I'm keeping check on crafting times and how many you'll need.

Rail is important to automate, you don't use a refill very often but who carries round stone and iron sticks.

Yeah rail and boilers are the reason for stone taking part and not just bricks. Makes it a bit harder but you can have a electric furnace in the BS so you only need to supply stone and not bricks also at least. Not much throughput needed for bricks so it's not a problem. Well I don't use walls, maybe should take others preference into consideration there though. But they are fairly useless if you have enough turrets q:
Concrete needs massive amounts of brick and iron ore + water and needs mass production so it will not be made in the BS, would just be silly.

For me the late (ideal) BS needs to cover the following:

Yeah all of it and more will fit in easily. Gotta automate those lamps too you know? :]

[Dry Hairy Tree]

Waiting... for... bootstrap... analysis....

Damn those things take time. I woke to a storm so decided to work today - am trying to but mostly waiting on my computer to crunch data. So here I is, talking (about) BS.

Am looking forward to seeing what you come up with. If I like it enough I'll landfill an island and build one on it. I've been working in the islands - 470 mining drills for the rocket raw resources, 105 oil derricks... Got a bit sick of infrastructure and went on a killing spree instead, You can run right into a pack of big worms dropping cluster grenades around yourself and survive if you get out quick. Devastates bases fast and a bit more sporting than fire.

On flame turrets - they're kinda cool but am not a fan. Trees are so good defensively, and the need to add pipes for the turrets makes them limited. That said once island life has settled down again from rocket prep I'll be trying a few more out for defenses.

Yay, analysis is finished. Back to work..

[Dry Hairy Tree]

Here's the 4 belt BS I was talkin about in the Islands thread. It's incomplete, and i can see a few things to fix already but the maps a bit broken...

Anyways. Here's the gist of it.

The last ingredient for the 4th belt would have been bricks. for electric smelting, refineries (some oil building?) and perhaps walls.
Moving the inserter assembly over to join the belt assembly on the left side would give room for pipe then oil production buildings in the centre.
All the robots do is supply me when I turn up from a bunch of passive provider chests in the BS.
Module lines were made till I got power armor MKII then broken down except for supplying speed capsules to destroyers. This used minimal resources to get there I'm not big on modules, and if you are, you wouldn't make them here.

I get supplied some red/green/blue circuits and gears, steel, iron, copper... So a stack inserter becomes a stack filter inserter if i need one, a fast inserter becomes a filter, a robot frame becomes what type of robot i want - all crafted very quickly when not short on the required circuits.

There are lots of reasonably obscure items in the game it's an individual's play-style that determines demand for them. Automate all the things you use a lot first.

There are obvious missing buildings here (eg assemblers, mining drills) because this is BS 2 in this game, I got lots left from breaking down BS 1.

The roboport range shows you could get pretty much all your needs within the area if you planned it well enough. This isn't well planned, just a proof of concept to myself I could run 4 mixed belts on an assembly line without lots of complicated crap or robots.

[Ninja_Dog81]

Found this post at work, only on page 2 and want to read it all! Will have to bookmark for later when I'm home. Very interesting stuff folks.

I am always googling designs for inspiration but it is difficult to find exactly what you're looking for or enough different concepts. Would be keen to encourage people to upload sections of their factories, name it "green circuit production" and so on and make those images available in ONE easy to find place. Most of my factories are still entry level using designs from youtubers, google images and my own ideas but I would enjoy seeing what other people create.

Roughly 300 hours and I still haven't launched the rocket... just can't bring myself to do it until I have the "perfect" factory, one which deserves to launch the rocket.

Also I LOVE the trains, so I spend way too much time playing with them

Hopefully I will catch up to this post tonight! Later all.

[Case]

I took your great idea and this is what I was ending up after a bit. Its just the first try and there is plenty of room to optimise the item groups. I used the second iron patch to "refeed" the iron side of the mainline and so I could put the research at the end of the line. I have not all items on the line, only the one I needed but the line can easily more extended .. or you just use the outer side of the blocks as well - like I said, plenty of room to optimise.

Map

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Overview

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Detail

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Take Care

[Dry Hairy Tree]

That's an interesting take on a building store. I welcome all to have a go who knows what might evolve. Is that the no crafting achievement you're about to get?

I'm kinda bored with Factorio now. Probably because I've played nearly 1000 hours

Have an awful lot on, might re-enjoy it with a bit less pressure to not be muckin about gaming..

So probably see y'all soon when all my analyses are done.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

I was a GOOD boy and totally nailed my masters instead of skiving playing Factorio. Now they've offered me a doctorate but not for a while so I can indulge in games for a bit...

I used a building store and attempted to get the There is no Spoon achievement - which entails launching a rocket in 8 hours.

first run - 8 hours 1 minute 52 seconds LOOOL! Way too much superfluous research and production.

Second run just under 7 hours. Got it.

I'll attempt another run sometime soon and document the aspects of it as it makes that achievement relatively easy.

Hope everyone is well.

Oh yeah, I go away 6 months come back and there's Grey Goo. Holy smokes Batman! Over my pay grade but... awesome!

[sparr]

Thanks to everyone in this thread for putting the idea into my head to automate early game production. I've built some pretty big bases but never automated creating belts or inserters until much later in the game.

[Frightning]

I've really taken to using the approach since I learned about it from this thread (good 4-5 months ago now). It's amazing just how much of your early production runs on gears, green circuits, and iron and copper plates, which can conveniently be put onto 2 belts and ran along one side of a production block, with a little spaghetti on the bottom side, you can even automate feeding lower level materials into higher level items and hence automating things like Splitters and Red belts and such from a very early point in the game, limited the storage chests to 1 stack each to avoid excessive production of base building materials. I've build the early game this way on about 4-5 different bases now, with the longest running example now past 20h in and done with all non-purple science research, I can say that the setup is very efficient for bootstrapping from startup to at least midgame production scales. (Eventually you will want to start setting up larger factory blocks for late game scale production, but that is really only needed for the rocket. With some light use of Logistics robots, the other advanced recipes can be made to adequately large scales without much of a hassle. You can even stick to belts for quite a bit longer if you put belts on the other side of your bussed building store (BBS) line. I used Steel plates+Pipes for the 1st of those belts, and Advanced circuits+Batteries for the 2nd belt (handles all early through mid game recipes with a few exceptions).