Here is my current factory. I'm fairly pleased with it, but I know I haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible. I'm playing with peaceful mode on so I can experiment and learn the game mechanics better.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/Svkv4Tt.jpg[/img] EDIT: Image tag doesn't seem to work? Oh well, copy paste I guess.
Down the bottom you can see my huge iron mine/foundry that has been my main source of iron for quite a while now. Up at the top left is my even more ridiculous copper mine that I just built after a smaller seam that I was using for science packs ran dry. My main iron mine, the small one by the water next to my sulphur/acid operation plus all my power is running off fuel from two oil wells - quite surprised how much fuel you can get out of a couple of little puddles.
The aforementioned copper facility is running off fuel from my main oil source because I got sick of light/heavy oil buggering up my petroleum flow. I also just started cracking light oil and noticed my sulphur production increasing quite a bit. The only thing still running on coal is the steel mill to the right below my advanced chip factories. To the far right you can see a defunct stone operation; haven't bothered to upgrade it because I don't need walls, and have all the bricks I need for furnaces and other buildings. Science is roughly in the middle.
The round belts you can see dotted about the place are mostly from the early game, I found it surprisingly efficient early on to keep furnaces and mines REALLY close to one another, and had the inside track reserved for coal. It didn't hold up too well once I started making packs though; the iron to the right of my labs started becoming scarce shortly after I got my greens up and running, which hampered my research a bit; I often found myself switching my inserter between my iron chest and my science belt off so I could get enough iron together to make more belts and inserters - not great. The circular design worked well for copper though, and still does, but I thought I might as well take advantage of the massive copper seam at the top right so I built the monster you can see up there, mostly for fun.
The small copper "ring" to the right of my coal has been running my blues production for as long as I have had it up, and the belt has been full pretty much the whole time, but when it runs out, I'll run my main copper source down there instead.I was quite surprised how naturally I was able to progress into blue science after getting most of my petrochemical operations off the ground, as I expected it to be a massive pain in the hole. I'm glad I discovered linear assemblies, I think I owe my success to their modularity; I used to have these ridiculous spaghetti belts with splitters and tunnels all over the place, with massive pileups of copper wire, chips and cogs because I was trying to keep each ingredient in its own area. It always resulted in overproduction and not having what I needed where I needed it. Yeech. I'm liking the look of my factory at the moment. It's not SUPER neat or all that efficient, but everything seems to make sense. Looking forward to playing with bots and stuff; currently researching robotics as you can see.
Your feedback, thoughts, criticism etc are most welcome. Thanks to the devs for making a thoroughly addictive game! I look forward to seeing what's in store in the next few alphas/beta/release.
