Factorio Forums

Hey guys!
I just wanted to start a post for people to show their clever and creative ideas. Images are preferred but if you want to explain it some more video's never hurt anyone!

Here's an example by FireSerpent of the stuff I am hoping to see on this topic! http://imgur.com/a/ERVhg?gallery

I for one can't wait to see you're amazing ideas everyone and keep on building those factories!

nice designs! Keep them coming!

Wow all those are really cool, and I especially love that transport belt network. I haven't been playing long enough to need such massive throughput so it would be amazing to see a video of that thing being fully utilized

Hmm that gave me idea how to build my next thing.

here are some compact and easy designs:

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=5050

Wow! Those are amazing keep up the good work and I hope to see more!

Really jammin' on some of these, great work all.

After a bit of experimentation, this seems to be the smallest/cheapest pollution free standalone radar station I could come up with that operates day and night. If you don't mind half a minute of degraded service you can lose 1 solar panel.

The lights are optional (they don't affect the power requirements enough to matter)

Haggoid wrote:pollution free standalone radar station

Does that mean it won't be attacked?

Anything will get attacked if biters perceive it as 'standing in their way', even if it's a belt, railway track or powerpole. Radars have a bit of a special position, because they do seem to attract some more attention than other pollution-free entities. I think the wiki still states that radars will strongly attract biters. I don't believe that to be true, but they do at times appear to go out of their way to chew on a radar post.

Boogieman14 wrote:Anything will get attacked if biters perceive it as 'standing in their way', even if it's a belt, railway track or powerpole. Radars have a bit of a special position, because they do seem to attract some more attention than other pollution-free entities. I think the wiki still states that radars will strongly attract biters. I don't believe that to be true, but they do at times appear to go out of their way to chew on a radar post.

I never had my distant radar stations attacked (I have ~15), even those surrounded by biters from all sides (and denying further biter expansion). Seen groups of biters ran past it to found new nest, ignoring it completely.
I even ran game at x100 speed to observe biter expansion - zero radar stations were destroyed.

The ones that sit in the pollution cloud or close to it were attacked though.

I use design by micomico from "Perfectly optimal solar network" thread

I would wonder how far away the biters were passing and ignoring the outposts, as that seems relevant to the relevance of the observation.
However, I'm more curious how the pollution coverage alone has any effect on how radars affect biters.

I did quick test and yes, biters have antipathy towards radars when they are really close.

This pattern of belts and radars was placed in between two large nests, in range of both.
Radars were destroyed immediately, belts were left intact.
Pollution cloud make biters attack things they normally don't, like rails and conveyer belts (if they can't find better target)

Improvised solar farm peacefully co-exists with two biter nests: Uh... sorry for thread hijack.

I've been watching Arumba's playthrough and built a test base first to get the hang of things before playing seriously. I got tired of the huge mess conveyors could create, how you could often get boxed in and be unable to expand a certain production line, so I designed this for my second base (somewhat old screenshots, I'm much further already). Each individual product has its own belt going north, each line of machines can be expanded eastward to increase capacity for as far as the belts' speed will allow (past that, just add more rows). The petrochemistry is built on the same idea, but the pipes go east and machine lines go north. It's also a bit messier because the pipes are harder to work with, I might not have thought that part out too completely. The only difficulty is the relative size and cost that goes with the size, and the fact that the only way to efficiently transfer materials between north and south is by using robots (which I now finally have). I'm going to add train stations tomorrow to make the base products more available.

The forum crops the images, the links may be better.

http://puu.sh/d5cII/5f45a4dbe5.jpg


http://puu.sh/d5cLb/25463a67fe.jpg


How does it look?

Clean lines, very expandable, that's a good thing

You could think about handling things that don't have a very high throughput (basically most that is high-tech, except circuits) with your logistics. Most people build a very cramped first base, a "stretched" second or third and after that, you start to "compress" it a bit, again. Maybe try to decide which things you don't really need on a belt, and build it more compact.
This is a good basic design for your logistics:

X : X

X are assemblers, the : are a requester and a provider chest. You need some inserters, too, of course. Let your bots fill the requester with some of what those assemblers need, and put the finished product in provider chests for the network to grab.
Some people prefer to handle EVERYTHING with bots, for some, that is too easy; they do everything without. I myself use both: belts where I got steady and high throughput, logistics where they don't need to bring too much, or where you only need material once in a while.

GewaltSam wrote:Clean lines, very expandable, that's a good thing

You could think about handling things that don't have a very high throughput (basically most that is high-tech, except circuits) with your logistics. Most people build a very cramped first base, a "stretched" second or third and after that, you start to "compress" it a bit, again. Maybe try to decide which things you don't really need on a belt, and build it more compact.
This is a good basic design for your logistics:

X : X

X are assemblers, the : are a requester and a provider chest. You need some inserters, too, of course. Let your bots fill the requester with some of what those assemblers need, and put the finished product in provider chests for the network to grab.
Some people prefer to handle EVERYTHING with bots, for some, that is too easy; they do everything without. I myself use both: belts where I got steady and high throughput, logistics where they don't need to bring too much, or where you only need material once in a while.

Yeah, that's what my base currently has (the screenshots are a bit old): robots lugging things like engines, batteries, etc around. Mostly stuff that needs to move between north and south. It still feeds into belts to allow for future mass production, but those belts lead to a provider chest mostly.

The one thing I'd really like to have but can't find is a dependency tree. I had to build like this because any resource could be useful for anything, but in reality every resource is only used for specific other resources. If I knew exactly which resources will ever be used for which other ones, I wouldn't mind going back to a more compressed style where machines feed each other more directly. Future updates could then change that tree of course, the curse of playing beta games.

After playing some more and even getting train batch importation ( \o/ ), I don't think I'll be making the mistake of single-filing my factories again. The belts are constantly being clogged up on one side instead of both, even if I install balancers. Putting input and output belts next to each other with machines grabbing from and placing on both using long and short inserters is much more efficient.

Marnes wrote:The one thing I'd really like to have but can't find is a dependency tree.

I saw something like what you're looking for here on the forum once. It's late now, but I'll look it up one of those next few days.
Maybe check the "show your creations" forum, if you wanna look for yourself (should be on the newest 2-4 pages). I think it was there somewhere, although I'm not completely sure.


To the balancing problem: There are some techniques to help you with that (if I understand you correctly). Is your problem that all factories simply load their stuff on the same side of the belt? You could put factories on the other side of the belt(s), too; and if that isn't possible, there are things you can do to direct one side of the belt on the other on very little room.

GewaltSam wrote:

Marnes wrote:The one thing I'd really like to have but can't find is a dependency tree.

I saw something like what you're looking for here on the forum once. It's late now, but I'll look it up one of those next few days.
Maybe check the "show your creations" forum, if you wanna look for yourself (should be on the newest 2-4 pages). I think it was there somewhere, although I'm not completely sure.


To the balancing problem: There are some techniques to help you with that (if I understand you correctly). Is your problem that all factories simply load their stuff on the same side of the belt? You could put factories on the other side of the belt(s), too; and if that isn't possible, there are things you can do to direct one side of the belt on the other on very little room.

Yeah, if I add a splitter to take half of the production and put it on the other side of the belt, the next splitter down the line (which taps it off to the next production) undoes the balancing. It doesn't happen as much if you load both sides at the source.

Foreman looks really interesting, thanks