Early Building Store

[Dry Hairy Tree]

Feel free to meander off topic - you might of noticed I've a tendency to wander off topic anyway. Relax and rant, just try be kind to each other I've no issues at all. This forum is a mix of brand newbies and seasoned pros, but we're all equal - at least in this thread.

Breith - I do admire some of the main bus builds I've seen - it's just not me - doing what everyone else is doing...

The store MKII that I posted recently is kicking ass. I can now expand in any area I wish, though supplying the island has me a bit deep in thought for now. By raising the amount of slots in specific boxes my expansion is only limited by my imagination.

I have oil patches that exceed 40 pumpjack sites! Here's a few tips for map generation. Turn down frequency of resources and simultaneously turn up size. Then you get huge patches. Turn oil up to richest setting. Aliens are either a sea of red - stupidity, or manageable at least in the start-middle. Turn down their frequency. Turn down terrain variance or whatever it's called to low.

Result is nicer maps with manageable aliens, large ore patches and plenty of oil.

I was up till 5 am landfilling. This game consumes me without my noticing. I thought it was around midnight doh. If you are planning major landfill bring it in by the trainload - and make about 10 miners to one assembler with three fast inserters. You can place strips with the train but after that it's you, running back and forth, back and forth...

Pumps are important yes! As soon as you have distance get a pump, and if you can't make a note to get one ASAP. Once the pipes are half empty the pump can't do catch-up so it is needed before wells begin to slow down. A good rule of thumb is to get engines made fast - they are used in so many things it is well worth having an assembler get on it ASAP. Then when oil arrives schlep in the lube and have both engines and electric engines on hand. Now you can make power armour, robots, trains, cars, flamethrower turrets....

[Qon]

Pumps are important yes! As soon as you have distance get a pump, and if you can't make a note to get one ASAP. Once the pipes are half empty the pump can't do catch-up so it is needed before wells begin to slow down. A good rule of thumb is to get engines made fast - they are used in so many things it is well worth having an assembler get on it ASAP. Then when oil arrives schlep in the lube and have both engines and electric engines on hand. Now you can make power armour, robots, trains, cars, flamethrower turrets....

If you use underground pipes you have higher throughput than an express belt for many kilometers. A pump has a limited flow rate and will just slow your oil down. Parallell pumps can achieve higher throughput, but you can run several pipes instead if you have megabase needs of oil. viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6066

Are you doing everything correctly?

[Dry Hairy Tree]

Of course I'm doing everything correctly!

Yeah nice one. I googled factorio - pumps and got generic wiki stuff with no answers then there was a link to that thread. So got to read it before I set up the island oil. It's a good read. Nice that google knows its way round these parts... I made a three pump setup to the island (20 pumpjacks) and a 2 pump back to base (6 pumpjacks). 26 pumpjacks averaging ~ 8ps total in the second oil patch and it's small compared to some others...). I didn't want two pipes to the island but I did want to ensure I had lots.

Had to make another stone mining area the first one's tapping out

Here's me rolling out the welcome wagon to the north entrance of the island. It's still only half filled in though there's a bit of building been happening re 8 refineries and many chemical plants. Throwing speed modules in when I remember to...


If you want to attract the right guests, create the right atmosphere.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

[Dry Hairy Tree]

There is a time and a place for flamethrowers - and places to exclude them too. Here the Aliens are annoyed at my new smelting set-up and keep trying to make a run for me - but the forest is in the way. In conjunction with some lasers the forest has created a natural slow-down capsule/killing zone combo. Burning down the forest on this side would be the wrong move.

I've seen some crazy set ups for for slowing down/confusing Aliens normally involving loads of belts and walls.... Trees will work.

See how I've made it so the Aliens can get past the copper but I still have access via underground belts/landfill tricks. I want to encourage running, rather than biting/spitting wherever I can.

I've been caught in the open by a few herds but I have my go-go-gadget legs on.

The center of the island is finally land filled. I need to shlep in some iron, coal and stone, then it's time to make death dealing gadgets.

Not sure - but the forest fire appears to have triggered a larger spawning event

[Dry Hairy Tree]

These guys, and myself, are both wanting to settle some land adjacent to a large copper patch...

We're in litigation proceedings right now.

[siggboy]

If you use underground pipes you have higher throughput than an express belt for many kilometers.

Are you talking about an express belt with barrels?

An express belt with barrels transports up to 1000 oil per SECOND. You need lot of parallel pipes to reach that amount.

[Qon]

If you use underground pipes you have higher throughput than an express belt for many kilometers.

Are you talking about an express belt with barrels?

An express belt with barrels transports up to 1000 oil per SECOND. You need lot of parallel pipes to reach that amount.

No, I'm not q:
Well yes that is a fair comparison. But when do you need that much? Most megabases don't need that much. Even if you do use that much it will come from several directions so you might not be able to transport all the oil together on one belt. And trains are usually used for oil outposts if you already have a rail network close so you avoid the extra infrastucture.

[siggboy]

I was just responding to your remark that underground pipes have higher throughput than an express belt. Which is not really the case in realistic scenarios .

It's probably best to find a balance of oil outposts and pipeline connections. So if the wells are reasonably close to each other (maybe 1000 tiles or less, give or take), I personally prefer to "group" them with underground pipes and then have one train outpost that is delivering the oil for the entire group.

Especially now that pipe laying has been made a lot easier (the old method of using a blueprint and shift-clicking it to get rid of any trees was fine, but still not as convenient as it should have been).

I would never consider to put hundreds or thousands of barrels on an express belt, a train is just easier. It was not the point behind my remark.

[Qon]

• I was just responding to your remark that underground pipes have higher throughput than an express belt. Which is not really the case in realistic scenarios .
• It's probably best to find a balance of oil outposts and pipeline connections. So if the wells are reasonably close to each other (maybe 1000 tiles or less, give or take), I personally prefer to "group" them with underground pipes and then have one train outpost that is delivering the oil for the entire group.
• I would never consider to put hundreds or thousands of barrels on an express belt, a train is just easier. It was not the point behind my remark.

• Well I do regular item comparison with fluids because the only liquid I barrel is crude oil. If a recipe uses both sulfuric acid and plates then barrels have nothing to do with it. Avoiding fluid barrel mod now for my new megabase WIP so that it can run without mods. So both are valid, depends on what alternative you are comparing with.
• Agree.
• Of course.

[siggboy]

I made a distributed base so I could try out my dynamic train scheduler. So I deliberately spread out everything and shipped around a lot of intermediate products on trains. I had a dedicated refinery (producing plastic, sulfur and solid fuel), dedicated smelting (copper, iron, steel), a chip factory (all chip colors and speed modules), a rocket pre-assembly (for the three rocket components), and then the rocket launcher was in the main base. Nuclear power was also far out of the way, for role-playing reasons (dangerous radiation alert).

Oil was only transported to the refinery, and I did not use the Rail Tanker at all, and no barrel mod either, so I could not ship sulfuric acid or petroleum gas (that's why I had to transport sulfur, and make plastic and solid fuel at the refinery).

In that scenario, the oil in barrels is a lot better than the Rail Tanker, because it's just faster (more oil per wagon, and much faster loading and unloading). Handling the barrels was easy as soon as I figured out the best way to do it, because my train scheduler deals with a lot of the problems already (such as sending a train only where it's needed).

Maybe a barrel mod is the next thing I'm going to try, because it's supposed to be coming to Vanilla anyway (I'm not hold my breath for the rail tanker, it's been promised for so long now and still not in the game). Then I won't have to ship sulfur, and could ship sulfuric acid instead, as well as petroleum for the plastic bars (that AC with the underground express belts that we were bickering about actually expects petroleum and not plastic bars, so it's not well suited for my current base design).

I also prefer barrels for storing fluid over tanks, because they can be moved and it's a lot more compact. In the current game it doesn't make a lot of sense that the only thing you can barrel is oil, while your tanks magically can store everything, even hot water and steam.

[Qon]

I made a distributed base so I could try out my dynamic train scheduler. So I deliberately spread out everything and shipped around a lot of intermediate products on trains. I had a dedicated refinery (producing plastic, sulfur and solid fuel), dedicated smelting (copper, iron, steel), a chip factory (all chip colors and speed modules), a rocket pre-assembly (for the three rocket components), and then the rocket launcher was in the main base. Nuclear power was also far out of the way, for role-playing reasons (dangerous radiation alert).

Maybe a barrel mod is the next thing I'm going to try, because it's supposed to be coming to Vanilla anyway (I'm not hold my breath for the rail tanker, it's been promised for so long now and still not in the game). Then I won't have to ship sulfur, and could ship sulfuric acid instead, as well as petroleum for the plastic bars (that AC with the underground express belts that we were bickering about actually expects petroleum and not plastic bars, so it's not well suited for my current base design).

Is there anywhere I can see your base? I bet it's quite nice.

I avoid barreling other liquids also because my base is 100% bots. So without barrels for everything I'm forced to pipe it all. Makes even a bot base challenging and fun to build with pipes everywhere. I kinda like pipes too. But shipping sulfuric acid barrels and so one with bots is kinda cool also.

[siggboy]

Is there anywhere I can see your base? I bet it's quite nice.

The base itself is nothing to phone home about. It's basically a huge playground for my train system.

The train system is very nice, and I'm currently reworking it for 0.13 and it will be porn.

I can send you a save for 0.12, with the mod pack for 0.12. I've got a save that I planned to upload to the train scheduler thread for demo purposes, where the base is running and producing rockets (about 1 rocket every 3 minutes), and the trains are doing their work and it's really lean and tight (only 20 trains LL-CCCC, and I could probably even take a few out and it would still run at 100%).

Maybe I'll migrate the save to 0.13 and put the reworked train stuff in place, but currently I don't have anything for 0.13. Since I have almost 50 train station in that map, and migrating the smart chests removes all the wires, and all the loaders would have to be replaced so they'd use Stack Inserters, migrating the thing will require a lot of manual work. Which is why I haven't done it yet, also right now I'm in the sandbox phase were I design circuits and don't play any real games.

But honestly, I think you'll probably be disappointed unless you care about the train stuff.

[Qon]

Is there anywhere I can see your base? I bet it's quite nice.

The base itself is nothing to phone home about. It's basically a huge playground for my train system.

But honestly, I think you'll probably be disappointed unless you care about the train stuff.

Sounds great! Yes please. Won't be able to look at it today though so no hurry.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

I mentioned earlier that I like Trains.

Let's get this clear - I LOVE trains

My Father was one of the original English Trainspotters. Trainspotters had notebooks that listed all classes of steam engines that were in the world and Trainspotters ticked them off. As an adult he became a steam engineer and spent all his spare time restoring and running the giants of old. He had a set of engineering manuals the size of an encyclopaedia. I was a precocious child and read them all. We discussed maglev and other concepts well before their time. We went with him Sundays out to this Steam train graveyard, with 14 huge black machines under corrugated iron sideless sheds. We'd play in the coal boxes and come out black, then we'd go swim in the reservoir they used to water the engines with. It was filled with frogs, tadpoles and fish.

Today I live close to a museum and each Sunday they take a steam engine out for a spin. I get to hear it's whistle blow, hear the steam valves release.... I love trains. I spend half my game-time building things, and the other half riding round on or watching the trains.

Do not feel you have nothing to offer if your thing is all about trains.

I was watching some stack inserters at upgrade 4 (of 7) yesterday. Six of them kept pace stacking the output of 40 fully loaded (had 100 plate backup each) furnaces. This was just one splitter and a red belt. The days of ridiculous spaghetti/splitter combos passing muster as train stations may be behind us.

I've removed my temp solar off the island and installed 60 steam engines - for starters. The Aliens are definitely thicker and angrier around the north end of the island where I've been killing and burning. So they are somewhat manipulable. 4 out of 5 warning flashes are now from the island area, the heat is slowly coming off the base. I've identified some more islands to use. It will be a while, this is going to be a long-game.

Nearly died had a rolling blackout the Aliens came so thick and fast at one stage the accumulators could not recharge they chewed through some walls at the island copper and then a couple of turrets I raced around with robots being very slow dropping 200 odd panels/accumulators and got enough power to back me up then went in with the flamethrower to sort it out. After that I decided I wanted steam immediately, before a coal resource was secured, so they're running on solid fuel - and doing a great job of keeping the lasers running.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

I'll probably start a new thread for "Islands".

Though the building store will certainly get a mention there - as it features heavily in the island lifestyle.

Welcome to Hell, Aliens.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

This is the end result of two large stone patches. I have a smaller patch in reserve plus a bunch of walls just in case.

Island living isn't about the copper and iron so much, it's about the coal and stone.

The building store is still under development in late game mode. A train on a siding is loaded via logistics bots with building store items. Likewise a train on a siding is loaded with military goods from a military store on the main island. Using the train network button I can call up a building or war mission (train) to arrive on demand at the nearest station when I want it.

A train wagon of land mines, cluster grenades, destroyer capsules, flamethrower ammo, etc - new lakes are mine to be had (where's the damn stone, Alien, I know you got some! )

I've some work back on so this is slowing down a bit. However, this game will be over the long haul provided the new patch doesn't self destruct. So, join me in the new thread when it kicks off.

[Qon]

On topic (wohoo!):
Trying to improve the building store further. Playing around in foreman to see how I should group things and what resources are needed where.
I'll make a proper post about this but here's some short info.

You either use steel or iron plates in one recipe, not both. Cargo wagons and storage tanks are the only exeptions, and those won't need any throughput whatsoever and barely needs automation at all.
You either use green or red circuits in one recipe, not both. Logistics chests, stack inserters, beacons and modules are the exeptions.
Modules are also the only real use for blue circuits exept personal equipment that never needs replacement in single player, and rockets, which are made with a lot of player involvement for a single launch or gets it's own separate dedicated factory if you want to launch them continously. Modules and higher level circuits are the big circuit users and all use mostly ciruits and not much else as ingredients, so these are good to produce together.

So I'm thinking that you'll want 2 lines. One with green circuits and iron plates and gears. Another line with steel and red circuits and gears. The question is which items will be a mix of both, iron+reds or steel+greens? You might need a zone of both for that reason. Greens+steel is a thing, but reds+iron isn't. So you can fairly simply make one basic building store and one advanced building store if you supply steel for the mid game basic store.

It's a bit tricker with chains of items, like splitters. Fast ones need green circuits and express ones needs red circuits so they together need both types. But if both lines are going parallel then it should be fairly easy to get solve that.

Another part is stone bricks, pipes and engines. Electric furnace needs advanced circuits and stone (mostly bricks but not all of it), but apart from that one exeption to all things you want to automate on the building store fit in the basic one. I'm assuming you will build a bot factory separately if you intend to use them heavily since you will need so many assemblers for high speed bot production. I probably won't automate cars and tanks since I don't really use them in the first place and they are easy to handcraft once you have engines. So locomotives and flamethrower turrets are the things on the building store that will use engines. The only real reason I mentioned pipes and stone together is refinery and boilers, so these can be split up for the most part. Pipes are used in enough recipes to have a single assembler supplying pipes to everything that needs it in one place, but not much more so you don't want to have it go though the whole store or something like that.

Steel is used a lot but not for early game stuff so it might be a waste to have it supplied from the beginning of the building store. But we want to keep it simple too so maybe?

If you are going for a megabase you will want a separate factory for express belts or bots, whatever you chose. Both need lubricant and lost of iron products but unless you are going to make a hybrid that requires both you can make a separate factory for the one you chose and have the other one on the building store. A building store needs very little belts compared to a mainbus, so making express belts on the building store is not a bad idea when not making a main bus or belt megabase. Then a modest supply will be more than enough, and a buiding store with express belts is very fast.

I will try to design something that is easy to build, have the early parts fairly close togother but is still quite expandable so you can use it for late game.

[siggboy]

I'm waiting for a screenshot or two of what you've come up with . I'm definitely too lazy to design this stuff myself but would be more than happy to copy somebody else's if it works well .

You haven't mentioned rails, but there needs to be an assembler or two making them (stone + steel + stick [plate]).

I think it's enough if you make engines and electric engines and then handcraft the stuff that is using them (robots are an exception). It's just not important enough to have assemblers for pumps, wagons, locomotives; I'd rather carry a stack of engines and electric engines and hand craft those when I need them.

[Qon]

You haven't mentioned rails, but there needs to be an assembler or two making them (stone + steel + stick [plate]).

Rail will be wherever stone is because steel will be everywhere, and iron will be close to stone. Sticks are basically used for lamps and rails so direct insertion works for those. It's crafted quickly and each section is 2 tiles long and even if you are going kilometers it will probably work pretty well as long as you don't try to make some wasteful 8 lane railway. Pro tip: one rail lane in each direction is good enough q:

I think it's enough if you make engines and electric engines and then handcraft the stuff that is using them (robots are an exception). It's just not important enough to have assemblers for pumps, wagons, locomotives; I'd rather carry a stack of engines and electric engines and hand craft those when I need them.

I mostly agree. But if you don't want those then they can easily just be omitted. And it's so simple to set up auto crafting with a building store that I want to eliminate hand crafting as much as possible. I want my conbots to repair all the damage in case I take a shortcut with a shotgun or tank straight through my base
I don't want a destroyed pump to be the weak link that stops my base. But yes most vehicle stuff are best crafted in hand. Some things will be omitted from the building store because you never really need more than 10 of them or something. But flamethrower turrets are worth automating if you want to use them primarily, and then with engines there locomotives can just be added on. Maybe I'll skip it and let anyone who needs hundreds of locomotives add in those by themselves. I think that the building store could really help with lazy bastard achievment and speedrunning, but I'm not going to go too far with specialising it for those if it makes it worse for a regular run.

I'm waiting for a screenshot or two of what you've come up with . I'm definitely too lazy to design this stuff myself but would be more than happy to copy somebody else's if it works well .

It's going to be fantastic when it's done. Death to the main bus! The MB is really only good for getting organised without any knowledge of anything. But it uses extreme amounts of space, resources and time to set up and it is actually pretty hard to automate all the things you want while strictly following the system. If I can get the BS (not the greatest shortening but what can I do?) simple enough even a newbie could use it easily. As long as they know that they should make separate science and circuit factories and what items should be on the belts then you just plop down whatever thing you need automated and pull the resources without any tricky branching.