Noob Blue Science Development

[Nitt]

Hi All,

I thought I would post this as a new player wanting to develop blue science.

As a newcomer to the game I had no problem researching & developing red and green science for research, however I found myself stuck at setting up effective blue science. After having researched all I could re: green/blue tech, I found myself in a bit of a quandary. There are a lot of designs available but many of them rely on the use of mods to make them efficient or already have some sort of blue science developed.

I ended up finding a design which I thought I could adapt here (kudos to the original author). My design assumes no mods and no blue science development previously. As such it has been tweaked to make it work with the game knowledge I have. For me it seems a long-term solution to science development. I'm sure it can be modified to be more efficient but for me it works:



Image here.

A few things to note:

• - All belts are red (except some of the blue science feeders which are yellow). Inserters are blue. Red inserters speak for themselves. All stations are blue.
  - No mods.
  - Resources have been dragged from elsewhere (iron/copper plates, steel, coal, liquids). This has resulted in some very long belts/pipes.
  - Purple science has been included for future upgrade (power outage symbol).
  - No robotics/logistics.
  - Upgradeable.
  - Map: Peaceful, large, rich.
  - The tangle of power poles is driving me nuts

It's not perfect - I am still having issues around petroleum production. A lot of flamethrower fuel and solid fuel from LO production are going into storage to maintain gas production. Aquiring cracking should take care of a lot of this.

I learned a lot from this exercise, the biggest being troubleshooting. It's easy to adjust a system to improve efficiency but to work out why something doesn't work is a different matter.

Hope it helps others. My next goal is to improve gas production through cracking. This is what is holding my efficiencies back atm.

Regards,

Nitt.

[Juggla]

Blue tends to be a hard one the first time around. This is really excellent for a new player!
Few notes -
If your OCD (like the majority of Factorio players) you can get rid of the tangle of belts in the middle by simply moving the bottom 2 red circuit machines to the top. That will save you a few underground belts and a splitter and make it look much cleaner. Also by doing this you can slide the whole red circuit line left one tile and use 1 long handed and 1 fast insterter per machine, once again just cleaning up the look a bit.
If you have access to substations you can get rid of the tangle of power lines as well
1 Copper cable machine should be just fine to run 8 red circuit machines. It is almost exactly perfect ration 1:8. You wont have a full "pretty" belt of cables, as a matter of fact it should always be almost empty, but that will save some space.
You have 2 uneeded splitters feeding your green circuits into the red circuit line. 3 pieces of belt will do there