How long will it be allright?

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momitor04
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How long will it be allright?

Post by momitor04 »

Hello Guys,
I am relatively new to Factorio (about 30h) and I recently built my main smelting setup. I have got 4 smelting arrays á 24 furnaces for iron plates, 4 smelting arrays á 24 furnaces for copper plates, 2 smelting arrays á 24 furnaces for steel plates and one smelting array á 24 furnaces for stone bricks.

My question now to you is: How long will this setup be enough for my main bus needs (cause I have got one) ? Maybe to midgame or even lategame?

I hope for good answers and if you think my english is not good, sorry, you are right, it is not my main language.

So long,
momitor04

Koub
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Re: How long will it be allright?

Post by Koub »

[Koub] Moved to Gameplay help
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

theolderbeholder
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Re: How long will it be allright?

Post by theolderbeholder »

Too much is never enough.

Do you feed the steel array from the iron one or does it have its own iron smelting in front of it? It does seem a bit small either way, especially the iron and copper. Quadruple it, maybe more. YMMV, I don´t know your factory.
otoh, as long as the bus is full, who am I to judge it? Is anything in between starved for ressources?

astroshak
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Re: How long will it be allright?

Post by astroshak »

I like to have 8 belts of Iron Plate, 4 belts of Copper Plate, and 2 belts of Steel.

This means, 12 smelting columns (of 48 Stone/Steel Furnaces each) for the Iron/Copper, and 10 smelting columns (96 Stone/Steel furnaces each) for the Steel.

1 Steel takes 5 Iron to produce. Smelt the 5 Iron Ore into 5 Iron Plates, and then smelt those 5 Iron Plates into 1 Steel. This means that a column that takes Iron Ore into one Furnace, and then hands the Plate into the next Furnace, will turn one belt of Iron Ore into 1/5 a belt of Steel. So, 5 of these columns per output belt.

As far as how long your system will last, it will last as long as you want it to. It won’t be optimal for the long haul, but then, no setup is. You’ll know that your setup has become insufficient when you find that something “upstream” is taking all of the resources, starving the “downstream” assemblies.

Serenity
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Re: How long will it be allright?

Post by Serenity »

Depends on how much you expand really. You don't need a lot of copper at the beginning, but demand for it will go up dramatically once you get into producing larger amount of circuits. For 2 yellow or red belts of green circuits you need 3 belts of copper and 2 belts of iron. Red circuits consume another belt of copper together with a full belt of green for less than half a belt of output. And then blue circuits just eat greens like they're nothing (20 GC for one processing unit).
In practice this means you need to a lot of smelting for circuits. This is very noticeable as you get into module production

Military science eats a lot of iron. So does blue science for the mining drills

Belt production also eats up quite a bit of iron for the gears. Very easy to underestimate. You'll want dedicated iron lines for producing lots of red and blue belt.

Just keep in mind that you need a lot and leave enough room to expand your smelters with time. You can use blueprints to plan them and then build them as needed.


Also 24 furnaces for an array is not a good design. Make your arrays larger! You need 48 stone furnaces to consume a full yellow belt of ore while outputting a full yellow belt of iron or copper. (technically 47, but we can't have asymmetry). 24 per side. Then later you can use steel furnaces as a drop in replacement and just upgrade the belt from yellow to red. Steel furnaces are twice as fast and so is red belt.

Stone has a different smelting time and needs a different design if it's supposed to be optimal. You can still output a full belt with 48 furnaces, but it will consume two belts of ore instead of one. But at the beginning you can eyeball it.

To get a full belt of steel requires a huge amount of furnaces because it takes a long time to smelt. Here direct insertion from iron to steel smelters works well because steel needs 5 iron plates, but also takes 5 times as long

Here is a good design for iron and copper:

Input the ore belts at the bottom and run a coal belt inside the loop like this:
Clipboard01.jpg
Clipboard01.jpg (119.24 KiB) Viewed 2606 times
Last edited by Serenity on Thu Dec 27, 2018 2:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

momitor04
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Re: How long will it be allright?

Post by momitor04 »

Thank you all for answering, you really helped me out well!

So long,
momitor04

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