Blue Science pack advice

[Hardison]

Hey there!

Bought Factorio a couple weeks ago and i am having a blast. Great game, you guys are doing awesome.
Now to the point of my opening this topic, I am having a very.. very hard time with blue science packs. The problem I'm having is designing a factory to make them. they take some high tier inserts which take a factory to make by themselves. I have looked around the creations that people have made and...well it doesn't really make any sense to me lol. I don't have a mind for this kinda stuff so that is probably why i cant figure out a factory design for my blue science packs.

If anyone could dumb it down for me, maybe a step by step on how you guys made your blue science pack factories i would be ecstatic!
Thank you very much for any help that you guys could offer!

[Lee_newsum]

for Science pack 3 (or blues) you ned 4 items

1) Steel bar from Iron plate
2) Advanced circuit from (A)Electronic circuit (B)Plastic bar (C) Copper cable
(A.1) Electronic circuit from (a)Iron plate (b)Copper cable
(b.1) Plastic bar from (a)Coal (b)Petroleum Gas {in an Oil refinery}
3) Battery from (A)Iron plate (B)Copper plate(C)Sulfuric Acid
(C.1)Sulfuric Acid from (a)Iron plate (b)Sulfur (c) Water
(b.2)Sulfur from (a) Water (b)Petroleum Gas
4)Smart inserter from (A)Fast inserter (B) Electronic circuit
(A.1) Fast inserter from (a)Iron plate (b)Electronic circuit (c)Inserter
(c.2) Inserter from (a)Iron plate (B) Electronic circuit (c) Iron gear

https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... nce_pack_3
or find on TS3 ling in sig

[xrw]

This is what I did. I produced plastic off screen. Use an oil setup like in one of the other recent threads. This machine also makes processing units for advanced armors. You're going to want to research and build MK2 armor before you get swamped with big biters.

A few more warnings.
1. Don't just copy my setup. It's just an example.
2. It uses a loony amount of metal. There's like 2 dozen furnaces for each.
3. It is impractical and unnecessary to supply as many science pack assemblers as shown. You need like half. Blue just eats to much resources.
4. I'm using express belts a lot. You'll need/want at least fast belts. Fast belts are really easy to make though. I have a setup for those.
5. The weird thing I have in the circuit assembly where I use a long handed insert to put into a wooden box... I do that because I researched the inserter stack size upgrades, and a longhanded inserter can't take the circuits out of the factory fast enough. The thing where i use 2 fast inserters to take place the circuits on belts has the added benefit of evenly distributing the circuits on both sides of the belt. Limit the box to 1 stack or you'll waste TONS of resources.
6. The robo port isn't need.

[GewaltSam]

I am not showing off my creation per se, but I'll try to give you the advice you asked for.

Some general guide first:

1. Don't try to rush T3 after you get to T2. Look at it more in the way of a benchmark: If you get everything together to craft T3 packs, you are "ready" for T3 research. You need more or less parts and byproducts of other production lines, and if you get a steady stream of all of that handled, your factory runs well enough to start into T3.
2. You don't need to build all four ingredients right where your science labs are. The production lines that lead there are pretty long, and it wouldn't be very clever to cram it all in one place. Try to leave space between different parts of your factory. Your oil industry for example will need a lot of room, so plan ahead. IMO, it's better to think of some way how to transport the different goods for a small distance than to wonder how you should put another assembly into THAT mess...
3. You don't need to supply a million human colonists who just crawled out of their ship each with his own stack of inserters. Try to avoid total overproduction. If you produce something into chests, you can click the red cross in the corner and lock some of the slots for the inserters. I don't know when someone plans on using 48 stacks of smart inserters, but I'll recommend locking all but 3-5 slots. It should last a lifetime (and your factories will always produce more if you need them).

Now on to the four ingredients of T3 science packs:

- Steel is the easiest one. You should be able to handle that, else try to do a bit more stuff with T2

- I always build green inserters in some extra corner of my factory, together with every other kind of inserter. You need lots of green circuits for the whole production, and copper cable for that. The other stuff is pretty standard. Don't go overboard by the way with the amount of assemblies you use to craft the different inserters. A T2 assembly should be able to craft nearly two inserters per second, so one assembly per kind should suffice for starters. Better see that you produce enough intermediate products for your assembly line though.

- You need to establish an oil industry for batteries, if you haven't already. They are not that hard to make; you need a few different chemical plants and operations until you get there, but it's really not a line thats too difficult to handle. 1-2 plants should be enough for the task at hand here (one sulfur plant for example should more than suffice in the beginning). Remember that oil uses some space to build!

- Now, I guess advanced circuits are the most difficult of the bunch, and you should prepare to build them in raw masses. Adv. circuits and processing units are where most of your copper goes to in later stages of the game. If you go for advanced circuits, you should already have set up a basic oil industry - you'll need it for plastic bars. Other than that, copper cable and lots of green circuits are needed (you can use them for processing units also; i try to combine building the adv. circuits and the processors at the same place most times).

Now try bringing all single parts together some way or the other Don't forget, you don't need to automate EVERYTHING from the beginning; you could gather the different ingredients in your factory manually and put it all into a few chests in front of your science pack assemblies. Or, if you already got to that, use a logistic network. If you don't know it: it's little bots flying around transferring stuff for you without the needs of belts. You could tell them to gather all four ingredients and bring them together somewhere. That should give you a much easier time setting up your T3 production.

Hope that helps a bit!
I thought a bit about writing a general beginner's guide to Factorio. If you guys like it, maybe I'll start something.

[Hardison]

You guys are awesome, thank you very much! I am sure that with this information i will be able to get something going
Thanks!!

[ssilk]

Some things to the above pic: That is ridiculous too much. With modules and a bit storage it is definitely possible to handle 20 labs with only 3 red, 3-4 green and 5-6 blue potion factories. I would built better too less than to much, cause having too much is expensive here.

I do this so: I begin from the end and end at the start.

First I build the blue-potion and look, what it needs. So I try to create the first ingredient for that. Let's say it's advanced electronic circuits. So I build an a.e.c.-assembly and look what that needs. And so on, until I come down to the base material. Once all is working I look, what can be improved. In some cases I rebuild everything from scratch again, but now in the "right" order, I try here also to make it bigger, so that it can keep up with the flow.

Building like so is useful, cause you come to ideas, which you never would imagine, if you make it the other way around.

[FishSandwich]

I have a video for blue science packs in my play through(click the pic in my sig). The video is appropriately named "Blue Science Packs"

[Hardison]

Ooh, a video. nice! thanks fish, that will help a lot.