Theoretically Ideal Factory Layout

[WarpZone]

I've started a few new worlds recently, trying my hand at a Mainbus/modular rack build using the cool blueprints other, better players were kind enough to leave floating around out there. But for some reason, there's always a problem late in the game that makes me wish I could just move the whole damn thing two tiles to the left or something.

So this morning, I spent a few minutes planning my moves one pixel at a time in a paint program. Well, a couple of minutes turned into about five hours, and I'm very excited about what I ended up with.

I decided to get community feedback before I commit to it. What do you think? How could it be improved?

(Oh, also, even though it says "1 pixel = 1 tile," I blew it up 2x for better display on modern devices, so it should actually be 2 pixels = 1 tile.)

[Mehve]

Actually, I would argue that you should flip the southwest/southeast corners, to make for a direct, short path between the incoming ores/train station and the initial ore smelting. Diagonal and cross-routing is more expensive in both materials and space, and increases opportunity for belt spaghetti.

In fact, there's a case to be made for doing all the base smelting up in the northwest corner, because otherwise you're just sending all the base ore through the entire base before you do anything with it, and then sending it back the other way afterwards.

[Leveller]

One thing. Scrap belts.

For big/huge/mega. Bots always is more cpu-friendly. And also a lot higher throuput.


IF you now wanna use belts. Put a tank on it. In a circle and you have 16 items / sec instead of 40 items /sec. Also tank inventory can be filtered.

[Frightning]

For a belt-bus, your layout has a critical problem: The bus cannot be widened indefinitely because it is hemmed in by racks on both sides. A proper, infinitely extensible main bus only has racks on one side, so that the bus can be expanded into the other side as needed. To be honest though, bots completely outclass belts for large scale moving of items over short distances, especially when a variety of items must be handled (as is the case when making components for higher tier items). Trains outclass belts for longer distances, which is why so many experienced base builders consider bots+trains superior to using belts+trains.

[Xtrafresh]

What I usually end up doing is building a small "minibus" with QoL items that flow from the first smeltery. an 8-belt bus can easily build all the items you commonly nee for building and the first three or four science packs. With yellow and purple science and modules after that, things escalate quickly, and I "side-load" the bus with trains bringing in resources from an offsite megasmelter. My module-builder makes four modules per minute, yet consumes about six blue belts worth of raw material. A bus to support that quickly becomes unmanageable.

Less fundamental upgrades to your design would be to move the QoL stuff to where the solar array is currently. The Solar Array can be pretty much anywhere, so it doesn't need to be close to the action. I'd say place it to the right of the Bricks, or pretty much anywhere where your map has open space.
You'll also need to build extra Iron dedicated to making steel. Steel uses it's own footprint in Iron. Plastic uses relatively little footprint, same for batteries. Combine them, it will help with the plumbing too

One last thing: No matter what you do, you will not escape this fundamental law of Factorio: the perfect version of your factory is described as N+1, where N is the current version. Keep refactoring!