My Bus+Modular 120h+ base inludes techs from this forum

[KAA]

Hi there! So I read a lot of topics and played Factorio a lot and I decided to share my current base with you to:
Listen to your comments and possible future steps ideas.
Sharing my ideas hoping someone finds useful things here

This is 120+ hours base which I will post in parts and in general view. You will see some info about all significant parts of the factory in the posts below.

Main strategy while played this map:

Right! This relates to all types of the resources including fuel, and main thing - pollution.
So, almost no pollution efficient designs, economy modules, steam engines in the forest and stuff like that.

Second rule - Energy challenge. I have experience with fully solar base and that’s just too boring )))) So I decided to do splitting: cause biters and their attacks are UNlimited - I decided to power my defence perimeter with solar as UNlimited energy source. And all rest - mines, base, production, everything - have to be steam powered from .

Third rule is - there is no perfect solution. Meaning if I can create simplest production with speed X spending on constructing about 5 min - good. If I can spend 10 minutes more and get X*2 items per minute more - that’s better. But spend an hour of experimenting with performance to get 5% raise in production - no. So you probably will be able to make my creations better. However I try to do them simple enough to understand and as repeatable as possible.

I posted full screenshot of the valuable part of the map, feel free to view. And, if you need any details about why I did this or that - see separate explanation about this particular part.

So, here we go
Whole base - HIRES WARNING
Preview

Link1 (reduced size)
Link2 (size 1:2) biggest.

Minimap





This is most zoomed out view. You can see that I've choosen quite challenging map options. Resources are high but not very high and they are rare. I have weak oil mining. It depletes quite fast. A lot of water and forests.
This makes the map interesting and water gives also defense and steam opportunities.
I have to have a developed trains network and it’s one of the things a like the most. Trains are my fetish, in real life and in game. I spend time with passion when creating new routes, making crossroads, testing them riding trains by myself.
When all system is up and running I can watch it for hours ))


The only issue with territory is I’m afraid that if map will be too big and also if map will contain a lot of monsters I will lose fps and that will end this map.
Quite slow PC so… That’s why I have not much discovered territory outside the base. And that’s why I don’t have a single radar - to avoid uncontrolled enlarging of map.

So, talking of performance and pollution, below are diagrams showing production rates - they are probably not maximum, just while the base is running and doing a lot of stuff at the same time in a usual way. This is not something I’m proud of, numbers are not that big but this is more for you to understand the scale of the base and that’s it.



All steams I have now will not cover the need if base will will run on 100%.
This is of course because of modules and (less important) roboports as you can see.

And this would be total about maximum consumption of the base.



Production rates are not maximal but typical.



Pollution

And talking about payback for all speed modules you will see and all steams I have and all thousands of robots I use - here is pollution diagram.



Looking on it you can imagine I’m getting attacked constantly. Sometimes it is so. And you know… I like it! It makes me feel the base is alive. And the game is alive )) somebody is near me. I can get my battle armor, go outside the perimeter and say hi to them with a shotgun. Or I can leave them for my turrets. Democracy in its best reincarnation!
Also, as you can see from my battle section (when I will post it) all these defenses almost took no resources, runs on free energy and have fully automatic repair system. So I can just totally ignore even constant major attacks all the time. Until I want to move the perimeter, of course.

In the following posts I will try to highlight some key point of the factory and will answer questions if any.

[KAA]

To admins: Not sure this topic is for the "Medium/Big/Gigantic Sized Structrctures" section so posted it in upper level. Feel free to move if necessary.

[KAA]

So I'd like to visualize a little bit production part of the factory. Will start from

Iron and copper plates

Iron and copper plates

It’s quite simple design but I will tell a few words about it:
- I know that most people here don’t like the speed modules in furnace cause this takes huge amount of energy. That’s correct and I will try to avoid doing this on another maps. However here I wanted to experiment so here it is. And also to save some space to avoid necessity to move half of the base after about 80h of game.
- Every 4 lines of furnaces in such kind of setup give me 1 express belt of iron/copper, ALWAYS FULLY compressed (if source is ok, of course). It looks great as I believe. Actually, with 2 speed modules you can use 4x9 Furnaces to get the complete belt, 4x10 not necessary.
- 2x4 Request chest on 1 input line of ore also enough for 4x9 (10) setup

One interesting thing is that I like such kind of designs, simple and plain, and I always struggle to keep things as linear as possible.
However, during enlarging production amounts of my factory I realized I heed quite complicate labyrinth for balancing my iron/copper plates belts. You’ll see it below.
If you know how to make it simpler - advices here are highly appreciated.


Circuits

Green circuits design is quite trivial and is present on this forum. I only added modules proportionally to maximize production rate.

Green circuits

Red circuits design is also from this forum, modules only added.
Still with 3 production lines of red circuits I’m not getting complete express belt of them.

Red and blue circuits

Blue circuits - best and simplest way I could do it is just linear production so here it is. The only thing is after speed modules were added green circuits consumption became more than 1 compressed express belt so I did this workaround with splitters and will probably later fix it.
Now it consumes 3 (!!!) express belts of green circuits when at full production speed.


Engines

This is engines setup. Not perfect but simple. Both types of engines are places in a passive chests so they are available for those productions who need them. Basic engines I use for loco, electric engines - for robots.

Engines

Express Belts

Express belts

I have no separate fast belts production because I never use fast belts. Never at all. I don’t see any sense using them unless you are limited in resources dramatically or you experimenting with production rates.
There is almost no need for them in game till the moment you can craft express belts.
And since I don’t know where will the transport bottleneck appear, I always place express belts anywhere except steam generators.

Yes, for the earlier stages it requires a lot of oil and iron to make all these thousands of belts and to replace existing ones, but it’s also an opportunity to make your oil and iron/gear processing factories performing good and to obtain advanced oil processing as soon as you can. And after necessity to produce belts gone, you would need solars, accums, modules, robots, all these things that require oil and iron. So it’s good you already have these oil and iron production circuits tuned up and tested with express belts.


Modules

Modules

This design is based on the one example from forum but done according to my primitive vision.
Not sure rates are correct.
I like that It’s more compact and productive and also perfectly scalable, comparing the design I had before I read forum.
Passive provider chests that receive modules are limited by mini circuit networks to exact amount because leave one STACK in the chest (as a minimum) is too much waste of resources even for me.


Stone processing

Stone processing

I had some stone processing in the early game but in the late stage I figured out that I want to cover all the base and territory near it with concrete.
Plan was the following:
- fill a loooot of chests with concrete,
- place roboports all over the base,
- put 2-3K of construction robots inside them
- give them an order with a blueprint to cover all the base.

I gave them command after all this production line you see filled all chests completely.
It took about 1h for robots to accomplish the mission and cover all with concrete, I watched periodically but mostly was out of base (it became messy because robots were everywhere) maintaining rail stations, remote mines and perimeter. It was interesting experience.

Later I added to concrete production line all other lines (for walls etc.) except the rails. Was just too lazy to move it. Maybe in future.


Automate everything!

Railroad and steams

Nothing unusual, just a region for production of railroad and steam equipment.
Till late stages of the game steam and all railroad things expect rails I made by hands.

But when I started to do big rail network and 500 mW power station I understand that it was my mistake. So - AUTOMATE EVERYTHING!

Now when I need several more sections of the steams - robots are glad to build it from a blueprint because they have all items in chests available.
And in every moment I can add several trains to my railways with no need to get a rush for materials via all the base.

[KAA]

So, continue to dig into production and storing of things in the base.


Battle equipment

Battle equipment

This is how I see it. I know it could be better but it’s enough for me. And it produces all types of robots I need.
Will post also my power armor setups if somebody will be interested.


Oil Processing

Well this is one the crazies things which happening on my base. This is such a mess that it’s even hard to choose where to start form.
So... crude oil is extracted and delivered to refinery (vertical line on a picture)

OIL1

Refineries are placed so that they cover need of the factory running on full production and that’s it. Tested empirically.
I convert all oil components to petroleum leaving small amount of heavy oil for express belts and engines lubricant.

All components and crude travel by vertical so-called pipe-bus. One or two pipe - depends on the flow. And small pumps are also depend on how it works in real production. No any calculations, empirically only.

I have circuit network here so I can monitor remotely how things are going. Now it’s ideal situation shown.


Please note that my oil processing circuit is separated completely from oil factory which produces solid fuel.
And after such intrigue words we are moving away from the base and production lines itself and starting to observe mining and storing.

Logistics of the resources
Resources are transported to base by trains.
Trains can cover several mines but one resource type only.
Every resource have their separate unload station.

This algorithm which is quite trivial worked good until production rates become extremely big. I realized that trains are moving quite long and delays can happen.
So I needed a buffer, 12 chests for wagon is not enough. I tried solution from this forum. A storage.
My choice was a storage with roboports


Storages
The storage works pretty easy - robots unload active provider chests near the trains into storage chest arrays which are 10x10 (it’s comfortable for me).
All points that require particular type of ore have request chests.

Storage

Ore/copper/stone/oil storage arrays are separated from each other from logistic network point of view and are independent.
This is to simplify robots logistics and avoid logistic robots inadequate splitting between storages.

Also I have separate storage for coal and solid fuel. These two guys are stored together.

Solid and coal

The reasons I use such massive storages are:
- Long and complicate railroad makes time of train travel unpredictable. So buffer needed to compensate long travels.
- Some safety option against base starving from lack of resources. However now I want to make mine depleting indicator like the guy here.
- Experimenting. Having big buffers allows to make great load to roboports and railroad and test it’s performance well.
- High ore consumption periods. If your typical train supply approximately equal or a little bit bigger than your typical consumption, then, when base is performing a lot of stuff, consumption might be bigger than supply and that’s when you need such kind of storage.
For almost all types of the resources it works just great.


But for oil there is an issue. It should store in barrels. So I need a lot of barrels and I don’t know how much exactly because some will be stored on the remote oil train stations.
One option was to fill storage with barrels completely and let train take barrels from the storage.
But I have more flexible system.


I have a factory which produces empty barrels quick.
I count how much barrels approximately all my remote oil mines can contain. Let it be 10k.
Count total oil storage capacity (let it be 80K barrels)
Make circuit network so enable empty barrel factory only if number of barrels in oil storage < storage capacity - barrels in remote mines. So it will be 80-10=70K. So barrels are manufacturing until base storage have 70K.
For math to be correct “number of barrels in oil storage” includes both empty and full barrels, otherwise it will be useless formula.


Looking at this factory you can probably ask a question - how it all works without calculations?
All balancing is done empirically during high load on the base production modules. This sometimes leads to strange creations like the one below.
Maybe I should learn to do some math before building.


To be continued... )

[Smarty]

moved to a more appropriate place