Factorio Forums

...Of my main processing facility
Bonus points for figuring out belt pattern and reason

Woo long trains. They remind me of long industry trains that transports materials around the world(very cool!).

Base design look very cool and i am guessing by the design that you are going with a main bus idea?

Well "main bus idea" is something i've been using for a year and a half playing this game. Secondly at throughput like these (i expect 3 express lines to be at maximum density which is ~7500 items/minute) it is impossible to use anything else as roboports start to lag the game down at such numbers.

I wont use mainbus for every single item thats silly, but most of the intermediate products, and stuff i need a lot of will be there.

Edit: The belts you see aren't the main bus - this is just junction between train terminal and intermediate storage buffer. I will form main bus lines way later.

Garm wrote:Well "main bus idea" is something i've been using for a year and a half playing this game. Secondly at throughput like these (i expect 3 express lines to be at maximum density which is ~7500 items/minute) it is impossible to use anything else as roboports start to lag the game down at such numbers.

I wont use mainbus for every single item thats silly, but most of the intermediate products, and stuff i need a lot of will be there.

Edit: The belts you see aren't the main bus - this is just junction between train terminal and intermediate storage buffer. I will form main bus lines way later.

Not sure what the number 7500 items/minute represents(is it for your overall production, or is it for some specific items?), but either way i have seen designs that achieve more than that and they use robots as their main source of transportation without any lag.

Glad to see that you aren't going full scale with the bus. Like explained here: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... t=main+bus then that's a very bad idea. I am sure that you can get very good throughput with the bus, some clever optimizations and a plan from the beginning(like you have) and i look forward to see another way of making a factory.

Garm wrote:...Of my main processing facility

Love it!!!

7500 for main metals (iron, copper) and their ore equivalents for unloading purposes only. I might go for 10k+ at the main factory but i think that would be overkill.


I haven't seen any decent roboport factories that can continuously consume such numbers. Due to robot recharge rate you would need ludicrous amount of roboports and for some reason at least for me it kills my fps after 200 or so roboports.

Not to mention roboport overkill looks ugly to me - overlay is a mess and clouds or robots making everything impossible to see.

Well Zisteau bus design strives for visual look its no wonder it is not efficient.

Edit: usually my mainbuses have only 2 metals, gears, green\red circuits, steel and batteries.

Wow this great! as someone else said, it really reminds me of a real world industrial area, where trains deliver coal and such to the plants. That is a lot of throughput, I bet you mine out ore patches pretty damn quick! Hehe

Problem with having 5+24 freight trains (5 engines, 24 wagons) is that railroad needs to be scaled accordingly...

is a 5+24 really more efficient than a smaller train more often? How do you load 24 wagons evenly, and how often do you have to build new remote mining operations if you have enough mining drills to fill 24 wagons per train?

Of course, if it is just done to be overkill, than it definitely succeeded!

starxplor wrote:is a 5+24 really more efficient than a smaller train more often? How do you load 24 wagons evenly, and how often do you have to build new remote mining operations if you have enough mining drills to fill 24 wagons per train?

Depends mainly of the distance the train have to go. To be the most efficient you don't want your mining outpost to fill up and stop running, so you need to have trains constantly going back and forth transporting the goods. The longer the distance gets, the more individual trains you have to run at the same time to keep the outpost going.

So you now have lots of small trains on your track and a very complicated rail system made for small trains so what's the problem?
The problem is that the trains wil eventually start to bump into eachother. A train has to stop at a crossway and is now blocking the block. The train behind sees the block is blocked and chooses to take a longer and more complicated way to reach it's destination. Soon your whole system will be in total chaos with trains going everywhere blocking trains that they weren't even supposed to interact with and creating chaos in the otherwise well thought our rail system.

One of the solutions to this problem is to have fewer and longer trains driving on a rail system made for long trains. this will decrease the number of trains required to keep the efficieny high and thus prevent a train chaos. Atleast that's the theory i think

i am building two bases. with significant distance between them. (assuming 1 block is 1mx1m then bases are approximately 5km apart)

1st base will produce no pollution at all and will house long term storage, solar power generation as train depot.

2nd base will produce all the pollution at extreme volumes (assembly, processing and boilers)

Freight trains will be used only to move stuff between main bases. Ore will be moved by "normal" trains (1+4) from ore fields into preliminary storage of the clean base. From there freight trains will be loaded and head straight down to the location pictured above.


It is fairly effective, not as good as smaller trains, but I will get much less traffic (lesser chances of getting a jam) and I end up with awesome looking trainyard as a result =)