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Main buses are common layouts, but I've found them boring (although they are great at getting large factories up-to-speed quickly). I've seen MangledPork's Factorio Towns series and loved the concept, so I tried to apply rail-based delivery system of my factory.

First of course is smelting the ores. I worked out how many furnaces it takes to fully load a blue belt (70 furnaces does the trick), and built 6 columns of these--1 for steel, 2 each for iron and copper, and 1 for stone brick. For the input, rather than using separate loading stations for each kind of ore, I designed one station that can offload all the ores and properly route them to their appropriate containers: So 2 stack inserters very nearly fills a side of a blue belt, which means I can press the 12 inserters of a 2-car train into producing 3 blue belts. With one belt for loop around (including siphoning iron plates for steel), I have 4 blue belts of input. Each of these belts fills a column of coal/stone/iron/copper/iron plate chests (8 stack inserters per item). This is actually scaled down--I originally started plopping down 12 chests per item per column, before realizing that it was probably overkill. To prevent overfilling the line, I set up the station to only unload if there were fewer than 45k items of the appropriate in chests. Since filter stack inserters can only filter one item type at a time, I use combinators to cycle through filtering only one type every 3 ticks (any fewer and the inserters don't seem to work).

The original v1 layout used a much smaller storage area, splitting the chests into two columns and having only 4 chests per item, and only pulling off half the belts at any time (with a heavy use of splitters to rebalance). I don't have an image of this because it worked so poorly I deleted it--having 12 inserters putting onto a belt and only 8 taking off is a recipe for jamming the belts (although I did find a mechanism to avoid jam, you can see it in the combinators on the input 3 belts. I disabled it for this version because I haven't needed it!). This rearrangement is also why the smelter outputs are on the same side as the input--I moved the location when I rebuilt the layout, and, in fine Factorio tradition, I failed to leave enough space, requiring some interesting routing at the input/output layer of the factory columns.

For the rest of the factory, I started building traditional solar power grids (the ones that have a roboport in the middle and a near-perfect accumulator/panel ratio extending the roboport's range). Since the smeltorium was built on the other side of the grid, I decided to use the gaps to put rails through to connect it with the rest of the factory. And then I thought about trying to put the things I request by robot in place of one of the grids, since that hooks up very nicely with the robot network.

The first one I built was the military pocket factory: ]

That builds every top-tier combat item in the game, as well as all the turrets, save for two types (guess why!). It's also by far the cleanest of the pocket factories, as I only made one mistake in figuring out which assemblers needed which inputs. I started with the destroyer capsule in one corner and then worked my around the available space, trying to pack things in tightly without breaking anything, since I didn't know how much empty space I would end up with (too much is the answer).

The second factory is the gear pocket factory, that builds every building that needs gears or stone bricks: Lines aren't fully backed up because I relocated this factory from another location, and my iron miners had run out by that point, so iron and steel is in desperately short supply. The belt and inserter assembly arrays are fairly standard grids (although it was fun trying to make sure I could squeeze everything in). I forgot about radars until after I built it, which is why that's in a weird location; I also forgot about the walls and gates, but there was ample free space in that corner. I also mixed up my belts here originally, that's why the green circuit to green circuit/iron plate splitter area is a mess.

The last factory I have is the combination module and research pocket factory: Oh boy do the mistakes abound in this one! It started with an attempt, even before I settled on the pocket factory idea, to put everything that required alien artifacts feeding off of one chest. You can see that template laid down neatly--although I mixed up which line was supposed to be combo red/purple and which one was red/green, so the neat design looks far more horrible now. I was also unsure how many science packs to put in for throughput--eventually settling on ~44/minute (the limit of the purple pack assembler), but forgot that required 16 speed module-less assemblers, not 10. Unfortunately the blue assemblers are in the middle of the lab expansion area. Obviously, this wasn't my original science design, as you can see from my use of a purple/green and red/blue assembly line. I think the green/red science packs are timed for the 10-lab throughput, not the 16-lab throughput (cheating and using speed modules to get the green throughput.

I am quite happy, though, that I managed to squeeze everything into a tight space. You can see the remnants of the main bus producing those things that aren't in pocket factories yet (I still need to build one for chests/power poles/solar panels/accumulators/rail network gizmos and one for things that need engines/electric engines). Oil, smelting, and circuits aren't in these pocket factories because they require way too much space for high throughput (if you look carefully in the minimap, you can see a high and a low set of railroad tracks--the circuits factory reaches almost the entire distance between them, the height of five of these pocket factories). The rocket factory is on a nice cape facing a biter base across a decent-sized lake to the east of my main factory--much more picturesque location than the edge of my no-longer-main bus.

I'm still not entirely sure what to do with oil. Transporting oil across rails is annoying: you can only get crude oil into barrels, and while you can export plastic and sulfur fairly easily, exporting lubricant or heavy and light oil is impossible. I could get a rail tanker mod, but I am still working on a few achievements (the tier-3 red/blue circuits should be achievable if I do enough mining, and any work I can put towards that 20M green circuits is useful). I've also been unhappy with unexpected consequences of the rail tanker mod when I tried to do an early playthrough.

Thoughts/comments/questions/concerns?

jcranmer wrote:Thoughts/comments/questions/concerns?

It is not clear, what you want us to teach. Just for the next time you want to write somehing like this: The promise and result, the essence is missing.

The concept is neat, your implementation looks excellent! I can only imagine how much thought and work went into the designs for the 'mini-factories' Well done, that's a great idea and wonderful build. And I am totally gonna steal your module-building layout - much (much!) better than the one I came up with for doing all 3 modules from a single set of feeds...

I like the concept. I think I might group things a little differently but this is pretty cool.

one tweak right off the bat, it takes 2 plates to make a gear, wouldn't it be more efficient to ship gears than plates?

A really interesting concept, and a fun one. I also have toyed with the idea of making a Bentham-esque Towns-style factory.

I really like the implementation of having each fit within a solar block, but oh my those train tracks scare me! Looks like Russian Roulette with a train if you happen to be walking North/South!

Power armor helps a lot for running on tracks. As does the factory largely shutting down once everything finally finishes accumulating.