Starter base: What to build and what not to build.

[Frightning]

If you don't like pollution then electric furnaces powered by steam and without efficiency modules are slightly worse then stone and steel furnaces.

If someone doesn't like pollution, why would they stick with steam and not use efficiency 1 modules?

Point is that 'upgrading' your furnaces from Steel to Electric isn't worth it until you're ready to put Efficiency modules in them (or have gotten off of steam and onto solar/nuclear).

[dood]

Point is that 'upgrading' your furnaces from Steel to Electric isn't worth it until you're ready to put Efficiency modules in them (or have gotten off of steam and onto solar/nuclear).

Well. Duh.
If you can make electric furnaces, also making 2 efficiency modules a pop is well within your ability so that's not even a thing to worry about.
Comes with the territory of producing red and green circuits.

[zOldBulldog]

Indeed, and the whole point of the starter base *is* to reach solar + bots + electric furnaces.

Once you did, the focus shifts to increasing power production through solar and scaling the smelters (as electric and hopefully with those efficiency modules).

After that is finishing the research and main mall. At which point you can deconstruct the starter base as it will no longer be needed... since your main base finally satisfies your needs.

[DerGraue]

Point is that 'upgrading' your furnaces from Steel to Electric isn't worth it until you're ready to put Efficiency modules in them (or have gotten off of steam and onto solar/nuclear).

Well. Duh.
If you can make electric furnaces, also making 2 efficiency modules a pop is well within your ability so that's not even a thing to worry about.
Comes with the territory of producing red and green circuits.

Of course efficiency modules are in building range if you already have electric furnaces and of course you have to use them. But the way the OP described his building order sounded like he was starting to setup without efficiency modules and since his thread was about min/maxing his super early starter base and he was worried about pollution I just pointed out that it is not worth it before you have both. Maybe I just misunderstood the OP.

Using efficiency modules in electric furnaces isn't anything new or unusual, I do that for all my "starter" bases.


And since zOldBulldog posted while I was writing:

Indeed, and the whole point of the starter base *is* to reach solar + bots + electric furnaces.

Once you did, the focus shifts to increasing power production through solar and scaling the smelters (as electric and hopefully with those efficiency modules).

After that is finishing the research and main mall. At which point you can deconstruct the starter base as it will no longer be needed... since your main base finally satisfies your needs.

Or maybe I didn't misunderstand. The point of the starter base should be to reach solar + bots + electric furnaces with efficiency modules, otherwise the electric furnaces are bad. But maybe we just talk past one another. Just wanted to help.

[zOldBulldog]

DerGraue, you did help.

The confusion is a matter of timing and scope:

The primary purpose of the base is achieved once you unlock and are able to produce solar, bots and electric furnaces. The starter base still gets used for some time after that moment (since by then I don't yet have sufficient power, main smelters, or the main production mall) but its main purpose is complete at that point. Building them is done using the base, but in my mind out of scope for that push.

Building the solar power and those electric smelters are of course the first step of what cames next. I have not yet fully worked out my reusable strategy for those steps, and all "how to use modules" possibilities were still open. My initial thought was to go electric furnace smelters first and add efficiency 3 modules as soon as possible. Thanks to this discussion and thinking of how many smelters are going to be needed to unlock efficiency 3 I reformulated my thoughts... start with efficiency 1 (or even 2 if they are unlocked) modules and later upgrade them to eff 3. That *would* reduce pollution even further and avoid annoying biters.

So, although the discussion was slightly out of scope for the "starter base" itself, it was quite valuable.

[Frightning]

Point is that 'upgrading' your furnaces from Steel to Electric isn't worth it until you're ready to put Efficiency modules in them (or have gotten off of steam and onto solar/nuclear).

Well. Duh.
If you can make electric furnaces, also making 2 efficiency modules a pop is well within your ability so that's not even a thing to worry about.
Comes with the territory of producing red and green circuits.

Not unless you specifically researched modules and efficiency module 1. Granted, those are Red+Green science techs, whereas Electric furnace is Red+Green+Blue science, so that is fairly likely, but technically you can research Electric furnaces without first researching module tech or specifically eff1 modules.

[Illiander42]

Going back to the main point of the OP, I tend to think of every base's purpose as to accelerate my next base's production.

So the purpose of Base1 is to build everything you need for Base2 (including researching any relevant techs), Base2's purpose is to build everything needed for Base3, and so on up the chain.

Personally, I tend to do an "all red+green science" factory, using a 12-lane (6-belt) bus, split on either side of my assembler line, with undergrounds to allow chests and long inserters to go in the right places. It gets me up to construction bots.

[Aeternus]

What you do with a starter base is generally dependant on if you want to retain it or not. For me, the starter base tends to have "A little of everything but only a little". Thus far, I've never fully deconstructed such a base even when transitioning to a megabase. The starter, for me, evolves.
- The early proto-base that does 10 red research for automation. Generally handcrafted and shoved into a temporary research structure that gets moved later.
- I start out building the initial small smelters and a very basic bus, doing red and green research. Even at this stage I plan out the bus, leaving room for expansion. I start with a single iron and copper belt. I also make some gun turrets and ammo for early defense (these will go into black research later so there's no loss of resources). To save some resources, the old burner miners get assigned to coal duty where they can self-fuel.
- With research on one side of the bus and the bus itself planned out spacewise (including a future cargo unloading railstation to supply it once the base gets an offsite smelter) I begin setting up the structure factory (or mall) on the other side. A full belt of steel, gears and green circuits and the extra copper/iron belts on the main bus are laid. The "support" factory making steel/greens/gears is located near the smelters so it doesn't need to take resources from the bus itself.
- By now oil research is done and generally an oil patch is found. First outpost. Early refineries produce too much heavy and light oil so some temporary chemical plants convert that into solid fuel (sent to the boilers). Methane gets piped back to the main base for acid and plastic production. Plastic is added to the bus, one belt.
- A small stoneworks facility for wall and rail building, and for bricks to make electric smelters. Initially I buffer these and just periodically hand-move the ones needed for early blue science or smelter production. Later this gets handled by the logistics grid. So few receptors for bricks, doesn't make sense to add it to the bus.
- The old furnaces get upgraded to electrical ones. Initially, with efficiency modules to keep power requirements down.
- A small Battery production facility supplies laser turrets. A wall around the base lined with a few early laser turrets keeps the biters out. Retire the old gun turrets and ammo to the black research. Power plant needs an expansion for this, but generally that's no problem once you have oil.
- Roboports are sprinkled around the base and construction bots start handling blueprint placing and wall repairs.
- By now resources become an issue - starter area resources are nearing depletion. Unless there's another ore field within belt range, it's time to start an early rail system. Railstations for iron ore and copper ore unloading will later become the iron and copper stations that receive raw resources from offsite smelter clusters.
- Research gets expanded to include blue and purple. Where needed, bus gets upgraded to red belts. Add acid and lubricant to the bus (a simple pipe suffices)
- After blue circuits research, add yellow research at the end of the bus. This finishes the research portion of my "starter" factory which is capable of about 150 research per minute. Add a few requestor chests here and there to be able to use this basic factory to recycle goods from logistics storage - once transitioned to a megaplant, this'll become a recycling facility more then anything.
- Expand the structure mall and create one or more "Builder" trains that can be used to carry construction stuffs to areas of your megabase. Also build some "garbage collector" trains to take unwanted stuff back to base in case you need to deconstruct something. Trust me, when you eff up something with >500k goods in the system you'll be glad to have an automatic deconstruct-and-dump system.
- Nuclear can be added if you want. It has a fairly small footprint so it makes sense to locate it with your early factory. If you go full solar it still makes sense to research nuclear to make the nuclear fuel for trains - it'll make their refueling intervals extremely long, which helps with long train routes. And playing with nukes is fun.
- Once you truly go wide, supply stations will become needed to distribute train fuel internally and repair packs/replacement turrets/walls to the defenses.

[zOldBulldog]

Aeternus,

I think that what you describe is what I am calling the Main Base (capable of launching the first rocket), which of course I also don't plan to deconstruct when I build a separate megabase.

The starter base I describe in this thread is disposable because it is Spartan and has very limited capacity, and its sole purpose is to help build the main base in the easiest, fastest and least polluting way. It includes a limited red/green science production only because some research is needed for the purpose.

Things like the real smelting, red/green/blue/military/purple/etc science, real green/red/blue circuits and mall production are scalable and I put them in the main base. But main base layout is good material for its own thread, so I'll skip discussing it here.

[Aeternus]

I tend to call it the structure factory, because by the time you're building your megabase, that's it's main function. Support and structure production.
But I tend to plan and build the "starter base" you describe as the initial part of the "Main base", and never deconstruct it entirely. As long as you can plan to expand it in multiple directions, you can just keep adding on as your production needs increase. For instance, smelter: Extend/expand down and left. Support plant: Extend down and right. Buildings and other placeables manufacturing: Up and right. Science: Up and left. Only caveat is that you need to pre-plan the width of your bus with this one. It can make the initial base wider then you would want it to be to leave room for a huge main bus. The only things I truly trash are the steel furnaces and the burner drills. Everything else gets reused.

[zOldBulldog]

My first couple bases were started as you do.

But I found myself wasting too much time manually crafting stuff and running around because I run out of supplies until the point where I finally had the full mall built and bots to deliver stuff. That is why I made this mini-starter base (to be placed in the space that is later used for 3 of my 10 copper smelter lines) to help me with supplies as I built the main base.

For my main base I use a similar approach as what you describe, and it also requires pre-planning:
- 4 quadrants, the main bus between 2 of them.
- green/red/blue circuits and science on one side of the main bus, bot storage and production mall on the other. As both of those areas expand but only up to a point I put my solar panels behind the science and Oil processing (and derivative factories) behind the bot/mall area (oil processing has an in/out station as well).
- A Passenger train station and smelter lines are across from the bot/mall, with the ore unload stations behind it.
- My 4th quadrant is for the station that unloads into the bus and I plan to put nuclear stuff there too. (in my current map I put green/red/blue circuits there but I don't like what it does to the belt flow at the center of the 4 quadrants).
- I have not decided where to put the rocket base. It will likely be an outpost so that it can be fed by both the main base and the megabase.
- I originally planned to dismantle the minimal coal steam power plant and replace it with a proper full size "backup setup" but I'm considering not replacing it and just going solar/nuclear, with a small supplemental pure-wood steam power plant just to get something out of excess wood.

The main difference is that since my main red/green science lines and main mall are so much more productive than the starter base, I have no more use for the starter base once those are built. That is when I use the bots to quickly recycle it back into the 3 copper electric smelter lines... before the time when I will start needing the extra copper.

Make sense? I think we are doing much the same, with small variations.

[dragontamer5788]

I've written about this period before. Here's my thoughts: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... game_tips/

Also, for the very early game: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... d_factory/

1. Use Steel Furnaces -- Steel Furnaces are more efficient than boilers, and nuclear/solar is infeasible for a "starter base".
2. Iron/Gear/Circuit bus -- The early game heavily revolves around Iron / Gears / Circuits. Eventually, expand your bus to include Copper / Steel. But the early game revolves primarily around Iron / Gears / Circuits.
3. Roboports -- These are the most important element to defense. It doesn't matter what you use, construction-robots automatically provide healing and last beyond the midgame.