My First Megabase

[Ranakastrasz]

Me and my friend, Lorieslater, have finally managed what is almost, but not quite, a megabase. It isn't quite finished, in the sense that it only managed around 900/minute, but that turns out to have been because of a lack of stone, which would have been a trivial fix, but we were getting sick of the map and wanted to try a new one, and because their computer lagged out every time the robot swarm attempted to change anything.

Tried quite a few new things this game, aside from the actual attempt at making a megabase.

Something vaugely like cityblocks. Pretty sure I screwed the alignment up, because this was before the new perfect allignment tools. Mainly used to ensure power redundancy, walking space, and roboport coverage. It absolutely helps keep things organized, because you can just setup things and plug in their inputs and outputs, which keeps things way simplier once you get the original design, While you can do that elsewhere, this way it is all grid aligned.

Distributors. Way better than balancers for what I actually used balancers for: Making sure any combination of inputs always result in full possible output is the whole point, and distributors don't hide the problem, as the middle lanes end up with trickles, or outright empty. Also attempted some left-right balancers as inline.

Reactors. Still in the "Copy someone else's Blueprint" stage, and it really, really shows.

Circuit indicators. Sadly, megamap visible indicators aren't particularly mutable, nor are alerts, but if you are nearby or zoom in, you can see power status, or liquid-capacity status. Got those from somewhere, no idea where, because honestly, it is beyond me. Not particularly useful since lights don't change color in the megamap or something.

Pre-planning everything. Well, mostly. I kinda sorta hate beacons, and even after discovering how stupidly powerful they are, in how they cut resource and power consumption by around an order of magnitude for a megabase, I still despise the boring straight line designs they force you into. Well, that, or the radial donut layout like science uses here. Used the Factorio Calculator website tool to know what I needed, although I failed to take into account things like Fuel or Modules or whatever, and ended up tweaking it every so often.

Pipes. Oh god the pipes. I used to treat pipe networks as though so long as they were connected, throughput would be infinite and it would all work. Learned in this game that while pipes have a relatively large throughput compared to belts, it isn't enough once you build a megabase, so the whole thing got revamped and pipes got rerouted a ton.

I am not really sure if there was anything else notable, but we felt accomplished afterwards.

https://imgur.com/a/VEhuZev
http://www.filedropper.com/coop1

[theolderbeholder]

The green water looks so peaceful. It probably is, as everthing it is is very, very dead.