Deciding which items to re-make and which to keep on belts?

[silman]

I have re-designed my factory about twice times and i am getting to the point where i just want to go ahead and continue with the game, but one thing keeps nagging me.... how do i know which items i will need later???

My first factory was garbage... my second was okay but messy, my third was imaculate (or so i thought). I have a branching system where each item would branch off its main belt and be taken to a sub factory where it would be used in making another item and then that item would gain its own trunk belt. But I am now being told items like copper wire and iron gears should just be re-made each time you need them or else they will bog down your entire factory when you need up upgrade.

So which items are worth keeping on a main "trunk" belt and which should simply be re-made each time you make a sub-factory?

Here is a video that a local celeb, Negative Root, has done on my own latest build where you can see what i mean when i say that each item gets its own trunk belt. I have since demolished this entire factory minus the copper, iron plate, and steel sub-factories in hopes to re-build it all better.

I was watching more of negative Roots' videos and saw this factorio fixit that he did, unforunately i found it a little late (as in today...) but honestly i really liked what that player did, the idea of everything being on its own line ready to be grabbed whenever needed is really cool to me (it looks like a multiplexer from electronics class).

Can someone explain why this is a terrible idea? And when designing a sub-factory that uses direct insertion, should i leave ANY room to manually grab the items (like one line of belt), just so i can see them being produced? Or is it a waste?

[DaveMcW]

People say to insert copper wire into electronic circuits to take advantage of the inserter stack size bonus. If you don't, your belt will fill up and slow the assembler down. Putting copper wire on a belt for advanced circuits is fine.

There is no "right" way to make a factory. If it works, don't destroy it! Adding to your existing factory or building a new factory for new items are both valid strategies.

[silman]

People say to insert copper wire into electronic circuits to take advantage of the inserter stack size bonus. If you don't, your belt will fill up and slow the assembler down. Putting copper wire on a belt for advanced circuits is fine.

There is no "right" way to make a factory. If it works, don't destroy it! Adding to your existing factory or building a new factory for new items are both valid strategies.

But if the portion of my factor that makes copper wire is being inserted directly into electronic circuits, how can i pull them off a belt for advanced circuits, they never get to a belt

[n9103]

A) Build more wire factories (Build more is generally always an option, and usually the best one in the long term).
b) Pull the wire from the back with long inserters, and place on a 2nd belt behind your electronic circuits belt (Assuming you're putting the circuits on a belt on the back side of where you're pulling your plates and wires from).

[silman]

Can i get an idea of a good order to build things in so that the things that rely on each other are closest together?

[ssilk]

List of productions, that make sense to put close together

This is a list of items belonging close together, which - cause of their dependencies or due to logical reasons - make sense to be built close together and which are easy enough to built up with belt transports only and need only one to three ingredients from outside. It targets to use always a good mix between belt transport (for the big amounts of (raw) items) and logistic bots.

This is also about the order, in which I built it normally.

- Belts. All types need basically iron plates only, I produce the needed wheels locally only. But the blue needs lubricant, and the splitters needs circuits, which complicates the production a bit. The rest of the wheel-production I use normally for the potion production and other things.
- Inserters. Well it's like the belts, but uses electric circuits. It's a design question, if you produce them locally or (see down) get them from somewhere. In my opinion it makes sense to put the first part of the circuit production also inside of the inserter production and use the overflow for other things.
- Chests. You need a lot, especially the logistic chests, but no wooden chest. You'll need steel, electric- and advanced circuits.
- Engine units, robot frames and bots. The electric engine unit needs lubricant later, so it makes sense to built the belts section (for the blue belt) and engine units together.
- eventually assembly machine production. Quite questionable - you nearly never need more than one line.
- The circuit production. It makes a big sense to build that somehow close together, cause advanced circuits and processing units eats the green circuits like nothing, and there should be some left to built other things. It should also be near to oil, cause you need plastics and sulfur acid (do that stuff also only where you really need it, cause it is a waste to put all that through pipes)
- Oil refinement. Concentrate on getting petroleum gas only. You need a bit of lubricant, the rest should be all be processed into petroleum gas. Don't do other stuff, process the other materials, where you need them.
- Battery production. Needs sulfur, which is needed for the processing units, too. It is quite useful to think about the sulfur circle too, but in the end it makes not much difference, cause the sulfur production is quite efficient and you barely need more than one.
- Science packs. Of course you should begin much earlier, but
--- red is trivial, and
--- green needs inserters and belts so inserters and belts should also be near together. Also trivial.
--- Blue is complicated, cause the need to research stuff breaks normally all conceptional ideas. I try to produce all needed stuff in the sub-factories (Green inserter from the inserter section, adv. circuits from the circuits section and so on) with logistic bots and avoid criss-cross belts over my whole factory, because that is quite expensive, having all that unused stuff been laying on the belts (10 tiles of belts eat about 30 items per side!); for researching logistic bots I move the pre produced stuff myself to the blue potion assemblies - this is an acceptable compromise, cause it lasts only 10 minutes or so.
--- Alien packs is trivial again.
- Module production. That needs huge amounts of all circuits. So that should be near.

All other things I would make only with the logistic bots, not locally.

See https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxC7zF ... sp=sharing if you want to have a look about how this may look in natura (you need to walk up a bit and take care for the trains, I used this map for a bug report). After the rails you see some small sub-factories with about the told functions and of course not everything I say here is really made, see the gigantic lines of green belts coming from left? But I think it is good enough to get the idea and the thinking behind it.
On the other side of the small lakes on the left are also some more.

[DerivePi]

In my base layout, I have 16 belts that carry items in the main trunk (4 sets of 4 with 2 spaces between, link = https://www.dropbox.com/s/syufyiud5vxpk ... LAYOUT.pdf - you will need to zoom in ). I do produce gears in one location and branch them off to each "department." However, for copper cable production, I dump the cable directly into the circuit production (I leave 1 or 2 assemblers to produce cable for the other items - advanced circuits, small electric poles, red/grn wires).

I have found that one assembler making transport belts is usually adequate when properly fed. In my layout, my one transport belt assembler distributes belts to the rest of the logistics department (for advanced belts, UG belts and splitters), to green science and to a provider box for use.

The advantage of making items in one area and then distributing is that you can quickly pinpoint production problems and address them. If gears aren't keeping up, I can go to my gear assemblers and either sort out my iron plate shortage, change inserters to fast inserters, add another assembler, etc... For copper cables, I use 3 copper cable assemblers dumping directly into 2 circuit assemblers in order to avoid the bottleneck caused by the relatively slow transport belt. In my setup, circuit production is limited by copper plate throughput. (as an update to my layout, I produce the copper cable that gets distributed to the rest of the factory first, then I have my green circuits/copper cable setup).

ssilk is right on regarding the grouping of items for production.

This is the previous post regarding my factory layout. I also have a refinery schematic out there too.
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=4965

[micomico]

You can look at this save game for an almost perfect illustration of what ssilk wrote.

You'll have to install some little mods as well.

[-root]

Can someone explain why this is a terrible idea? And when designing a sub-factory that uses direct insertion, should i leave ANY room to manually grab the items (like one line of belt), just so i can see them being produced? Or is it a waste?

It doesn't have to have direct insertion. Basically its a bad idea because belts take up more space than assemblers. Sounds counterintuitive, however it you insist on routing everything on belts, you end up with a factory that is too large to be effective.

Also, a really good pro-tip is to keep going! Don't tear down and rebuild your factory every time you think something is wrong. That's just part and parcel of the game. Just move on and try and to make do!

[silman]

Can someone explain why this is a terrible idea? And when designing a sub-factory that uses direct insertion, should i leave ANY room to manually grab the items (like one line of belt), just so i can see them being produced? Or is it a waste?

It doesn't have to have direct insertion. Basically its a bad idea because belts take up more space than assemblers. Sounds counterintuitive, however it you insist on routing everything on belts, you end up with a factory that is too large to be effective.

Also, a really good pro-tip is to keep going! Don't tear down and rebuild your factory every time you think something is wrong. That's just part and parcel of the game. Just move on and try and to make do!

I see, thanks!

Also i can't help but rebuild when i learn there is an inefficiency in my factory, i'm somewhat of perfectionist....

What if i had a layout like this:
........................(belt>)(belt>)(belt>)(belt>)(belt>)
........................ (^belt^)
........................ (^belt^)
........................ (^belt^)
........................ (^belt^)
(Factory)(inserter>) (^belt^)(inserter>) (Factory)
(Factory)(inserter>) (^belt^)(inserter>) (Factory)
(Factory)(inserter>) (^belt^)(inserter>) (Factory)
(Factory)(inserter>) (^belt^)(inserter>) (Factory)


That way there is a belt taking the extra to another place, but there are also inserters directly grabbing off the belt.

I am just having trouble coming up with a system that i like.

[DaveMcW]

That could work, but you need 3 fast inserters to feed an electronic circuit Assembling Machine 2 from a belt. Running an Assembling Machine 3 at full speed is impossible.

If you reduce the space between assembling machines to 2 tiles, you can use a long-handed inserter for direct transfers (with stack size bonus) and still have room to put stuff on a belt.

[silman]

So in the end which materials need to be directly inserted and what can i put on belts? And are long-handed inserters just too slow for late game?

I read somewhere that for advanced circuits its totally fine to put copper cable on belts because of the 8 second production time.

Basically i am asking which items should definitely be directly inserted and what are worth putting on belts because the production time (or other factors) allow for it? Are Electronic circuits the only thing worth using direct insertion of copper cable?

I saw this thread and am thinking of implementing the second design except with boxes in between the copper cable and circuits, is that a decent layout?

[GewaltSam]

For two copper cable you need only one copper bar, so you should produce that locally to save some space. I am thinking about producing iron wheels somewhere central, because of the same reason: wheels need two iron bars, so that would save some space on belts, too.

I prefer to transport everything by belt that has a big and constant throughput, like bars for circuit or steel production. Everything that is only needed in smaller numbers I try to transport by bot network (like the stuff needed for blue science). That way, not much is just laying around in big numbers, and the factory isn't cluttered in belts.