Pics of my ongoing 0.12 factory...

[GopherAtl]

TRIGGER WARNING! The following post contains images of rail networks that include both loops and roundabouts.

if you're hoping for amazing combinator stuff, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. I've been puttering very slowly through this game since 0.12 came out, tho I keep getting distracted playing with ideas in my cheaty test world or making mods, and even when I've been playing, I've been plodding along with a staggering lack of efficiency.

I made a deliberate decision starting this game to go for a distributed base, with lots of separate, specialized outposts, rather than one massive megafacility with my only remote outposts being short-lived mining operations. I also decided to try and cram most of my rail traffic into a sparse main backbone of tracks, with outposts build off from there, as an experiment to find out just how much rail traffic one pair of tracks with proper signaling can handle. It's cause my already lethargic play speed to slow down to a crawl, what with all the traveling, but it's been fun, and I'll get to the top of the tech tree eventually!

The known world so far:


A keen observer will notice the lack of polution around several outposts; almost everybody is backstuffed at the moment. Here's everything except the two southern-most mines zoomed in a bit, so the train stop labels show up...


(pics from here on will be in spoilers)

The top-left-most outpost is oil processing; barreled oil is hauled in by train, along with coal and iron, and made into plastic, sulfuric acid, lubricant, and solid fuel. Here's that outpost closer-in:

Oil Processing outpost

I'm... not pleased with this outpost, really, but it's been getting the job done and too many other tasks waiting before I can think about rebuilding it. Oil and coal are delivered at the top station, the middle pushes solid fuel and lubricant, and the bottom, plastic and sulfuric acid. At the moment only the plastic and acid are being consumed, at the circuit outpost (Circuit City). Due to an oversight, iron is delivered to a secondary train stop at the top - you'll note the stop next to the carriage containing barrels.

The one nice thing here is that all three stops, where they load/unload barrels, have a combinator setup that ensures the carriages stay full. It calculates the number of full stacks it has to load and only unloads that amount, so, ex, if there are only 35 barrels of lubricant ready to ship from the middle station, it would only take 30 empty barrels off the train, replacing them with the 30 barrels of lubricant. This prevents barrels from drifting around between stations without requiring me to reserve slots or use separate cars for full and empty barrels. I might go into that system in detail later, but that'll be a different post. Moving on!

North-west Oil

not much to say here; it's an oil outpost. There happened to be coal nearby, so it gets to multi-task, since the refinery needed both. This is fairly typical of my resource loading stations; I know faster loading is possible, but this tends to get the job done for me, and I like it aesthetically. Has the same barrel setup as oil processing and circuit city.

Circuit City

I felt like being different and set up this odd "butterfly" layout on my circuit factory. The track layout is odd but it actually works quite well. Other than my derpy placement of the sulfuric acid de-barreling and storage, which is easily fixable, this was laid out with a bit more thought than oil processing, and could be expanded to the right a fair bit without too much hassle. It's been sitting idle for a long time, though, as I still haven't gotten around to building any outposts that consume circuits, or dismantling the "temporary" circuit production in Hellbase (the historic district, my original spawn area). Soon as I finish my current wave of mining outpost expansions, so I've got an assured supply of iron, copper, and oil coming in, I'll be getting on that. In the mean time, he's got an entire train car full of processing units just waiting to go. I may have to expand the station to support 3 carriages, to give red and green their own, though - 2/1 for blue:red and blue:green doesn't, in hindsight, make a lot of sense. Not that 1:1:1 is perfect, either, but... :shrug:

Hellbase

This is where it all started, my "temporary" spawn outpost. Amazingly, I've still not depleted the starting copper patch, which was pretty massive (the vertical belt leading to the smelteries had 2 rows of miners to the left of it, originally, and the smelteries were directly above the patch) I need to do another major expansion on the solar fields, too; if everything were actually running at full load right now, I'd probably be consuming almost twice as much power as I can make at present, something I'm reminded of whenever another coal mine there dries up. The snarled mess of my original oil processing setup is still operating, fed by 6 dry wells with only a handful of speed 1 modules.

If you're wondering, that is, in fact, the entirity of my science facilities. 5 labs, and 2 each of red, green, and blue science factories. I've probably spent less than 1/5 of my total play time with research even active. I'm almost never in a hurry to do anything in this game XD

The soon-to-be-demolished smelting outpost

This thing is a mess. Well, the rail parts, anyway.Complete and total. Going to be doing a complete tear-down and re-build very soon, moving the whole thing a bit west and changing the layout so things are running east-west instead of north-south. It has, miraculously, continued to get the job done until now, though at the moment most of the trains have been shut down pending the tear-down and rebuild.

That's it, except for frontier walls and mining outposts, which are undefended and uninteresting, respectively. This whole distributed outpost approach isn't terribly efficient, and I spend an appalling amount of time traveling from place to place, but it's been great fun for all that, and I've enjoyed it for the variety of not doing another of the same megabase deals I've always done before.

[Boogieman14]

8/10, nice loops, shame about the vertical stations

I'd be interested in reading more about your barreling setup, sounds interesting. In my previous games (pre-0.12), I tended to just reserve a bunch of slots in the cargo wagons for full and empty barrels and push empty barrels into the system until it could take no more

[GopherAtl]

8/10, nice loops, shame about the vertical stations

I'd be interested in reading more about your barreling setup, sounds interesting. In my previous games (pre-0.12), I tended to just reserve a bunch of slots in the cargo wagons for full and empty barrels and push empty barrels into the system until it could take no more

I generally go with 4 inserters to a side so I can use blueprints for unloading/loading that can be rotated and always work, vertically or horizontally, for any carriage.

I'll do a breakdown of how the barreling set-up works when I get a chance; expecting to be busy on and off today, so it might take me a while.

[Boogieman14]

I generally go with 4 inserters to a side so I can use blueprints for unloading/loading that can be rotated and always work, vertically or horizontally, for any carriage.

I guess I'm more of a minmaxer in that respect, I prefer to have all my wagons serviced by 7 inserters (or even 14 if I'm using a mod that increases stacksize beyond the default 50). For some reason, in most of my games I do place the first station vertically.. Then when I'm placing inserters I remember that isn't a good idea, make a blueprint for a loading base and use that the rest of the game

[Tashen]

I generally go with 4 inserters to a side so I can use blueprints for unloading/loading that can be rotated and always work, vertically or horizontally, for any carriage.

I guess I'm more of a minmaxer in that respect, I prefer to have all my wagons serviced by 7 inserters (or even 14 if I'm using a mod that increases stacksize beyond the default 50). For some reason, in most of my games I do place the first station vertically.. Then when I'm placing inserters I remember that isn't a good idea, make a blueprint for a loading base and use that the rest of the game

I haven't used rails much, so I am curious why is that a bad idea to use the same blueprint for loading the rest of the game?

[GopherAtl]

I haven't used rails much, so I am curious why is that a bad idea to use the same blueprint for loading the rest of the game?

Think you misunderstood, he meant vertical stations were a bad idea, he sets up his station horizontally instead then makes a blueprint to use forever.

I use blueprints too, I just use a per-carriage blueprint that can be placed for each carriage in any length of train.

[Boogieman14]

Think you misunderstood, he meant vertical stations were a bad idea, he sets up his station horizontally instead then makes a blueprint to use forever.

Understanding is a two-way street, perhaps I could've written it a bit more clearly

Anyway, in this post is a screenshot of the type of base I used in the 0.11 era. Just plop the entire thing down, manually build a roboport, feed the robots and the goods to the system and walk away

[Tashen]

I guess I just didn't understand why something can work horizontally but not vertically. Do things not line up the same?

[ratchetfreak]

I guess I just didn't understand why something can work horizontally but not vertically. Do things not line up the same?

trains are shorter when they are vertical vs. when they are horizontal

This leads to less optimal vertical stations.

[Boogieman14]

A train wagon on horizontal rail can have 7 inserters servicing it (used to be that every third wagon could have 8, not sure if anything's changed about that lately). A vertical wagon can only handle 5 max, i believe.

[Tashen]

Ok, so that makes more sense now.

[GopherAtl]

After spending last week with the modding api, got back into playing this weekend. Progress was made, though going continues to be slow. But everything is back online again, which is a start!

All The Things

Map view of the layout as it is now; the little operation to the right of circuit city's "butterfly" outpost is the new module outpost, churning out speed, productivity, and efficiency modules for me at all three tiers. A couple of dried-up mines have been shut down and dismantled, some new ones have been put up. I'm overproducing all metals for my current consumption rate, but I want to scale it up even more so it's ready to absorb a major increase in consumption soon.

Ok, the changes/improvements:

First, I caught a flaw in my barrel loading stations, and had to come up with a fix and run around applying it everywhere. Glad I caught it early, when there were only 4 of them; there are 6 now, and a lot more coming down the road.

The new and improved barrel managers

This is one of the new ones. Without going through the wiring and configuration, it looks, well, almost exactly like the old ones. I still haven't cleaned it up into something blueprint-ready, just keep cobbling them together on the fly, but I'll be polishing up a version and doing a whole gallery explaining how they work in another thread - maybe with a video, actually - as several people have expressed an interest in them. In principle the approach could be used on things besides barrels, but it's uniquely suited to them because of the small stack size and relatively low output per outpost, at least once wells have started running down.

Oh, one improvement here I will go into directly - they always depended on the engine sensor, inspired by freetambo's design, but I wanted to implement automated fueling for all my trains, and pumping in solid fuel while the train sensor was constantly pulling out and reinserting fuel wasn't going to work. The solution is so simple it's brilliant. Or stupid, but it's worked flawlessly so far. The sensors now use coal. The trains still run on solid fuel - having 2 stacks in their first 2 slots. So on one side, solid fuel is just crammed in until it can't hold any more. The sensor on the other side proceeds to pull out and reinsert 5 coal at a time, and the two don't notice or care. So long as my solid fuel supply isn't allowed to run down, it should carry on flawlessly - and I set up a tank overflow pump for when my petroleum gas supply backs up, to prevent the whole refinery shutting down and ensure the solid fuel keeps flowing even when i let half the factory grind to a halt while I poke at something XD

Furnacetown Redux

Tore down the old smelting outpost and built a new one in it's place. Once more consumers are running, planning to double the capacity across the board, using a different configuration for steel at the bottom, replacing the steel row with all iron, and adding a second row for copper. Also planning on setting up my mines, starting with iron, to fill 2 cars instead of 1. The three pick-up stations on the left are, from right to left, "iron, copper", "steel, copper" (for the solar power factory, at least) and last just iron for the moment.

To be honest, I was pleased at the time, but the more time goes by the more dissatisfied I am with this layout still, so it may end up being torn down and replaced again. Or maybe I'll build in a new location this time, so I don't have to shut down all the things while I work. Meh. It'll serve for a while, too much else to do.

Circuit city finally has a customer

The first new manufacturing outpost, this guy is making modules. I improvised my way through the design, with no clear idea beyond wanting to do it differently than I'd done it before. Well, it is different, but I'm not terribly happy. Probably going to rip it down and replace with a full-on passive logistic belt approach, and scale up a bit at the same time. I really don't know why I keep doing this whole "track loops around the outpost" pattern; I regret it every time, and yet I keep doing it. Yeesh.

There's also several new copper and iron mines and a new oil well providing the smeltery and refinery with raw materials, and more of all of those to come. Next big project is a rebuild of the refinery - will almost certainly build a new one in another location and then cut off the crude oil supply to the first, rather than waste waste, or try to move, all the fluid products out of the old one. I can tear the old one down later, when the new, bigger and better one is up and running. Rebuilds will have to wait, though, first order of business is gonna be setting up a turret and ammo factory. No laser turrets for now - the biter evolution is getting pretty high.

Have something really strange going on to the north, the only direction I haven't walled off outside my current pollution bubble - I swept through and pushed all the biters out, to make room for a bit of possible expansion and to clear the way for the northern defense wall, but the biter expansion candidate chunks didn't clear when the bases did. Is this some new thing I am unaware of, or a bug? pushing them back to the south and west pushed their expansion candidate chunks back too, but I cleared several large bases and searched back and forth to make sure I wasn't missing any, and nothing, the expansion chunks are still there, complete with the holes where the bigger bases used to be. pic of that area on the map. Very strange.

Anyway, will continue to update this thread as the base evolves, ever so slowly, over the coming weeks. I plan on mixing up the styles and approaches in the individual manufacturing outposts - redoing modules, and possibly some others, with passive logistics belts; others, like the all-things-belt outpost, will use logistics robots; others will carry on with my usual belt-and-inserter style. Just to keep things interesting!