show me your mass storage!

[MeduSalem]

Why do you buffer up so many ores instead of using them directly??

Well I do it because I want to get these ugly ore patches out of my face before expanding my base there, even if I'm not going to use the ore for the moment. I just hate building ontop of unmined resource patches. Maybe other people are doing it for the same reason.

[hansinator]

Ah it's not a technical reason but an aesthetical one. A good one . Actually I hate building atop ore patches, too.
I'd really like to hear from Lutz_Scheiter why he builds the big train station buffer islands. They are just impressive.

Edit: @MeduSalem & doxsroxs How do your smelting areas look like? I know it's a little OT in this thread, but maybe you've already posted it somewhere or can share a savegame? I want to study how such big robot based storage systems work. My own work just focuses on large scale belt based systems for processing from train-station to smeltery but I want to compare such systems without having to build a robot based factory from ground up.

[doxsroxs]

We only use robots for storage and in some small scale production of low volume items.
Like train stops, combinators etc.
The rest is produced on a normal belt bus. However we are now leaving that as well and moving as much as possible off the bus to use a train bus with distributed production facilities.
Throughput is insane to be honest. Remember that each 4 car train can load 64k ore in bobs mods, our T3 engines have way more power and a top speed around 400 km/h :p
Using productivity modules in combination with speed module beacons and vastly improved assembly machines it is rather easy to get 20k or more in output for any given material.
We generally aim to produce between 20 and 100k/min in the new facilities we build depending on the type of material.

My friend just completed a new template for gold smelting yesterday, just one iteration outputs around 26-28k gold plate/min. We plan on copying it a few times

When it comes to buffer storage I agree it is a purpose in itself to clean up the ore patches.
However, for us it is also needed to ensure the sorting does not clog up the system.
That in turn is an issue tied to bobs mods where we had to keep track of so many ore types and new mining stations it was becoming a full time job to just keep the flow of ore coming. Without buffers we would have catastrophic failures all over the system when mines ran dry. (Coal was a huge problem!) We still run coal though, 1,6 Giga watts available

Using mixed miners we just vacuum any ore patches and feed it all into a single new station. Setup time for new ore mining spots are drastically reduced. The second part that made this easier is level 8 productivity modules in the miners. This made ore patches last much longer.

Dont have more pictures etc, but I might add a thread later when building the next powerplant

[MeduSalem]

Edit: @MeduSalem & doxsroxs How do your smelting areas look like?

I basically always use a Smart Furnace setup... with PM3s in furnaces and SM3s in Beacons. Everything is done by robots... because at some point I just can't deal anymore with the belt mess as it really becomes a throughput bottleneck with how fast the furnaces are working.

Currently I'm using it to do Iron/Copper plates... Steel and Stone each have their seperate setups because of how 0.13 messed up the Inserter Stack sizes.

Though I'm basically still preparing to use XKnight's Smart Furnace approach (though I haven't started implementing anything yet because of lack of time and lack of motivation to play Factorio recently). Also I wish the devs would really look into the Inserter Stacksize problem so all the overengineered combinator stuff wouldn't be necessary in the first place... since it's easy to do something wrong and that may cause a cascade failure and it takes forever to figure out why it happened with all the combinator crap.

And yeah, I basically only play Vanilla... no mods whatsoever.

[Lutz_Scheiter]

I'd really like to hear from Lutz_Scheiter why he builds the big train station buffer islands. They are just impressive.

Thanks

Me was sitting on thousands of iron-plates (+green circuits) and I wanted to clear all ore on one of my captured areas to build bigger solar arrays..
Also I always wanted to have a safe backup-storage on an island.. then it got bigger and bigger (and much more complicated ), just like me conquering more ground...