Productivity or Speed

[Terukio]

Hey guys,

Quick question for you all.

My base is being starved for blue circuits and so I was going to increase green circuit production and basically every intermediate material, copper wire etc.

What is the best way to produce more, (Keep in mind no belts all robots) a lvl 3 assembler with 4 lvl 3 productivity and speed beacons around the building? I am not concerned with power cause solar things...

Anyone have a design they are willing to share or create? Should I feed the copper wire directly in or let the robots take care of it?

Any suggestions or comments are welcome. Here at work and can't currently test anything, help keep my mind stimulated!

[wahming]

Situational. What's your status on raw materials? If you've got excess iron and copper plates, then speed. Else productivity.

[Xterminator]

Typically I find it works well to put Productivity in the machines like you mentioned, and speed beacons around it. You could go all Speed, but I think you would then have throughput issues for your main resources to keep up.

[BlakeMW]

Alternating rows of speed beacons and productivity assemblers. Each beacon effects 8 assemblers, and each assembler is effected by 8 beacons. Pretty much can't be beat. Do not use direct feed because it messes up the layout, instead just use lots of requester and provider chests, bots love this kind of task of moving things short distances.

Here is a small scale example with logistic-based green circuit assemblers on the right:


Note that for fast recipes (0.5s crafting time) you need to pay careful attention to the ratio of provider to requester chests (and thus the inserters feeding to/from them). For example copper cable in an assembler 3 with 4x Prod3 modules will consume 1 copper plate and create 2.8 copper cables. This means you need 1 copper cable requester to 2.8 copper cable providers, ratios which work are for example 1:3 and 2:4. Electronic Circuits consume 3 copper wire + 1 iron plate and produce 1.4 electronic circuit, this is a 4:1.4 ratio which means you need 2.85 requester chests for every 1 provider chest, again ratios which work are 3:1 or 4:2. You only have 6 slots on each side, but this is usually (just) enough to max out the assembler on a fast recipe.
You need to accommodate the odd substation, one effective place to put substations is next to assemblers performing a slow recipe like red circuits because you only need 2 or 3 chests to max out the assembler.
For blue circuits just run a sulfuric acid pipe down one side and on the other side put 1-2 requesters and 1 provider per assembler.

[Terukio]

Alternating rows of speed beacons and productivity assemblers. Each beacon effects 8 assemblers, and each assembler is effected by 8 beacons. Pretty much can't be beat. Do not use direct feed because it messes up the layout, instead just use lots of requester and provider chests, bots love this kind of task of moving things short distances.

Here is a small scale example with logistic-based green circuit assemblers on the right:


Note that for fast recipes (0.5s crafting time) you need to pay careful attention to the ratio of provider to requester chests (and thus the inserters feeding to/from them). For example copper cable in an assembler 3 with 4x Prod3 modules will consume 1 copper plate and create 2.8 copper cables. This means you need 1 copper cable requester to 2.8 copper cable providers, ratios which work are for example 1:3 and 2:4. Electronic Circuits consume 3 copper wire + 1 iron plate and produce 1.4 electronic circuit, this is a 4:1.4 ratio which means you need 2.85 requester chests for every 1 provider chest, again ratios which work are 3:1 or 4:2. You only have 6 slots on each side, but this is usually (just) enough to max out the assembler on a fast recipe.
You need to accommodate the odd substation, one effective place to put substations is next to assemblers performing a slow recipe like red circuits because you only need 2 or 3 chests to max out the assembler.
For blue circuits just run a sulfuric acid pipe down one side and on the other side put 1-2 requesters and 1 provider per assembler.

Thanks for your detailed explanation! I will try this out when I get home

[Tnarg]

I fined building more assemblers is better than speed.

[BlakeMW]

I fined building more assemblers is better than speed.

This is only true until productivity modules are in play, the speed bonus of the speed module counteracts the speed penalty of the productivity module in such a way as to dramatically improve the overall efficiency, when applied to assemblers with productivity modules, a speed beacon saves more energy than it costs. A good exposition on this is the post Productivity Module Math

Arguably unless you care about pollution and sometimes even then, you should use productivity modules. Heck, even AntiElitz uses productivity modules in his world record speed runs - granted only in the highest yielding recipe the Rocket Silo, but the point is they're worth using when trying to optimize the overall efficiency with which your factory gets things done.