Any production spreadsheet

[syneris]

Has anyone put together any sort of production spreadsheet for planning your factory setup? While it seems the cost ratios aren't perfect (which I like), I want to try a factory where I get as close to optimal resource usage as I can.

For instance:
1 furnace output (iron/copper) is almost exactly 1 burning mining drill. While electric drills are close to a 2:3 ratio.
1 regular magazine factory uses between 3 and 4 furnaces producing iron.
about 6 iron furnaces for a gear factory
1 gear factory and 3-4 furnaces for conveyor belts. This one is more troublesome as it can maintain 4 furnaces however it needs slightly more than 1 gear factory's output to not have a gear shortage.

I haven't gotten to further testing yet, but this makes me rethink how I am going to design my layouts. These very slight differences in usage can have a huge impact on the right factories getting all the resources it needs to operate at peek efficiency. This probably won't matter much if you enjoy overproducing and letting your belts back up.

[kovarex]

I would like to make it clear, that at some phase, we will certainly do some rebalancing of the game, so these ratios can change in the future.

[MF-]

Hmm.. I have never though about such well-planned & perfect approach.

Maybe because that would prevent me from easy upgrading on the factory. (Just everything would be a bottleneck)

[kovarex]

It depends,
I think that one of the possible fun stuff might be to do speedruns, and in that case you need to plan everything very well.

[Pinkishu]

Hmm I dunno, imo half the fun part of making/using such a spreadsheet is figuring it out on your own ^^

[syneris]

Hmm.. I have never though about such well-planned & perfect approach.

Maybe because that would prevent me from easy upgrading on the factory. (Just everything would be a bottleneck)

I think it would make it easier to expand as the point would be to have little to no bottlenecks or overproduction. If you need to add another factory, you'll know how many miners and other buildings to construct without risking a shutdown due to shortage. It might also scale well if you take a sectioning approach, allowing you to run at 25 or 50 percent the max production rate. Imagine the benefits if blueprints are added, design compact subsections and link them up as needed. I haven't gotten to more advanced items, but it seems like some items don't need to run at 100%. I produced over 3k belts during my experimenting, but I could throttle it by adjusting how much iron and gears get sent.

As for rebalancing, that's pretty much a given. I just hope you don't end up at too many exact ratios. Anno 2070 is like that where you need exactly X of one building to supply Y of another. It lacks variance and funnels the player in to doing this only one way. This spreadsheet may seems like it conflict with that; however, Factorio has only a few resources (right now?) used in many different way. In contrast, Anno 2070 has many resources, but most the production chains are very short and extremely linear. The complexity and interconnectivity of Factorio's recipes are why a spreadsheet wouldn't hinder gameplay. The player is able to choose how to implement their factory network instead of being restricted to just one way.

I'm not asking the devs to provide this information as 1) it isn't set in stone (except furnaces) and 2) I think this is something the community would enjoy doing themselves (at least some).

edit:

Hmm I dunno, imo half the fun part of making/using such a spreadsheet is figuring it out on your own ^^

Yes, but a collaborative effort is always helpful

[Dakkanor]

Yes, but a collaborative effort is always helpful

and it would be good for the wiki too, it really needs some love

[macdjord]

I second this notion. I'd really like to see some hard numbers on things, like how much water can one pump supply? How much can one boiler heat? How long does one unit of steal take to forge?

[FreeER]

Well for most of these answers all you have to do is open up the code in your text editor of choice (hint, factorio install location/data/prototype-definitions/recipe)

[Toma]

I second this notion. I'd really like to see some hard numbers on things, like how much water can one pump supply? How much can one boiler heat? How long does one unit of steal take to forge?

People should just start measuring it. Once the community gets bigger, the Wiki will fill up with that information.