Looks like I will never learn (caution: noob at work)

[DanielHall15]

So, I haven't played in some four or five weeks while waiting for a stable 0.10 version, and got it on Sunday, finally. This is just two hours in my first game with it, and I already boxed myself into oblivion. Looks like I will never learn how to properly plan a factory.




Plus, all the nests around the base have worms in them. And I mean, all of them. Looks like I'm gonna spend 12 more hours on this, then give up in frustration, because I can't get any artifacts.

[Boogieman14]

You can drop poison capsules at the very edge of their range and have them slowly eat away at the worms.

[-root]

If you get stuck send it to me for a "fixit"

[DanielHall15]

Thx, but... then it wouldn't be "mine" anymore and I would lose interest instantly.

You can drop poison capsules at the very edge of their range and have them slowly eat away at the worms.

Two hours into a game (2:12 to be exact) I had barely enough researched to get the green beakers automated. I'm slooow. Like glaciers. Just a bit slower.

Chose the Hedgehog strategy with this game and threw up walls and gun turrets around the vicinity. There is plenty of coal, copper, stone, and oil in my little realm, but iron will become a problem sooner rather than later. Also, lots of forest in the way. Brrrrrr. Gonna take me a few days to admit defeat on this one, but I will post in here then...

[xnmo]

One solution to this problem would be to just ignore everything you've built there and build a brand new sparkly and shiney factory right next door Or you could just tear it down, but where's the fun in that?


Down south looks promising, nice and roomy. And you can use trains to transport resources to your new base.

[Tashen]

Why not watch some of the many videos posted here and get some ideas based off of that?

Also, you could turn down the biter settings and increase some of the other things for your time run through. You'll learn a lot on the way then you can make it tougher next time.

[DanielHall15]

It's not visible in the screens above, but just south of the part of the map shown there are biter nests with worms (still no poison...)

Expanded a bit, some five hours into the game:



Orange is my oil refinery, which produces only batteries so far. Red are smelting areas, with iron on the left and just solar panel production on the right (accumulators are done by manually feeding an assembly, since I can't be bothered to route the batteries back to the base). Green is the science production (no blue beakers yet). Yellow is energy production. My solar farm is in the bottom left, the steam engines on the top. I don't have enough solar to tear down the steam engines just yet.

Closeup of the solar panel production. It *probably* would have been smarter to horizontally mirror the bottom half below the iron/coal belt, but it was already too late.



Right now I am very short on iron plates and have completely botched up my initial smelting area, so it's high time for those steam engines to go so that I can give that northern iron ore deposit a workover...

[DanielHall15]

Exactly 7:30 into the game now. I got blue science up and running, researched military stuff, and finally got poison grenades and cleaned out some nests in the vicinity, yielding a total of 450 purple beakers.



That's all I have. I see other people finish the game in 10 hours, I have merely gone full solar at about 6:30. The five big blue slaps are all solar arrays of my own quirky and probably horribly inefficient design.



Here's the old part of the factory. There was a stone deposit next to the untapped oil ressources that has been depleted already, and I got to say that I have a decent amount of walls stashed away from that. The labs were here as well, but have been relocated to the northwest.



The new part of the factory, including the oil department and blue beaker production. The iron/copper plate belt at the bottom of this part is the oldest thing here and used to feed the battery production, which was the first thing I built up here. The blue science production was in no way planned, I just slapped one thing next to another and in the end just barely managed to squeeze everything into the place.

Next thing I have to do is to find another iron deposit, because the two I have won't last for very long. I'm estimating that the upper one will run out in less than five hours, and the lower one in eight to ten hours, maybe. There is a decently sized iron deposit with four oil ressources about 200 tiles to the east of the old part of the factory. I recently cleaned out the biters there, but I need much more iron and steel to construct a railroad there.

[DanielHall15]

Started to suffer from power outages right after I posted here. I'm not dead yet because of two things: no biter attacks for hours (they always came from the south and I eradicated them), and no laser turrets built at all.

Right now my problem is readily identified. While I have hundreds of solar panels ready to be installed, batteries for accumulators are lacking badly. I'm pretty much adding solar panels in miniscule chunks right now because I'm not getting enough batteries built even after connecting the two westernmost oil ressources.

While unable to keep everything running at home, I am looking at expansion sites:



1) Iron + Coal, however with a large biter nest on top of it, including a few worms
2) Iron + Oil, biggest iron deposit, and oil is always yummy (although a pain to ship by rail)
3) Iron + Copper, closest for convenience, but I don't really need copper...

I tend to built walled outposts with turrets and independent solar power supply + accumulators (there we go again...), and have the train cross the wide open ground on its own. Deposits in the middle, train loop around that and the power supply, and finally walls around that.

Still need hundreds more batteries.

[Mangledpork]

Hello again Daniel, long time no see!
I see you've got past it now but if you want to avoid boxing yourself in try the parallel processing (AKA tree) design for your production. The initial work is more fiddly but once it's running it works brilliantly! *Link*

Now that multiplayer is on it's way and has a date, I'm thinking about ways of doing a series on it, and I wonder if one in which I teach you how to build a good base might be fun, considering how many times you've popped up in the gameplay help section while I've been there.

[DanielHall15]

Your tree is obviously more efficient and prettier than anything I can do. Then again, it must be ton of pain to set up initially. Also, I started in this cramped location because all ressources were close by. The wide open area to the east would have been better for that, obviously.

I'm not a multiplayer guy, I don't even have any equipment for that, sorry. I have a Youtube account, f.e., but have never uploaded anything, since I don't do videos. What I have been doing for years is producing walls of text for a variety of games. For the last two and a half years, I have extensively elaborated on my fictional baseball team, the Portland Raccoons, at the board of OOTP Developments. So maybe I am not a good specimen of a terrible Factorio player for your videos.

And as far as the game here is concerned, I examined the two eastern expansion spots again. #1 is all overgrown and messy (still cleared out two biter nests there, the biters are medium by now), while #2 is clear and the iron is truly massive. It's about 30x20 tiles, with an estimated 1,250 average iron per tile. 750k iron should do for a while, I guess. Plus, the five oil ressources are all above average, and three have a 200%+ yield. You really have to think about whether you would want to actually produce batteries over there. There's just one major issue: no water anywhere close to it, and now I *really* miss liquid cargo cars badly!

Shall I be honest? I would love to see liquid mechanics improved much more than multiplayer implementation.

Also discovered a new and big (4 spawners, 3+ worms) nest close to the big copper despoit due west of iron #1. The area is heavily wooded and I can't find a good approach to attack them. My plan is to route the iron train from iron #2 to the south so that it will drop off the ore at the south of the old part of my base.

[Boogieman14]

The area is heavily wooded

That too is something poison capsules are very useful for

[MeduSalem]

The area is heavily wooded

That too is something poison capsules are very useful for

Or going on a shotgun rampage... Always fun. :>

But that's one reason why I rush the robotics as fast as possible so my construction robots can take care of that useless waste dump... I'm directly inserting every piece of wood into a boiler&steam engine that's always connected even when I'm using solar energy... It's my "waste disposal" and I wish I could do the same for many other useless items later on once I don't need them anymore. xD

Makes me wish there would be a wood industry in Vanilla Factorio... since once you switched over to burning coal all the wood you are gathering through expansion becomes utterly useless. Some of the mods solve the problem, but it is something that should be taken care of for the vanilla game as well.

[DanielHall15]

I *never* destroy *anything*. I always have a trash chest for burner inserters and the like, and several chests with wood or small iron or copper ore deposits that have been mined without feeding them somewhere at that point. Sometimes I melt them down at the spot to get plates right away, and I will collect them whenever I please.

I don't usually destroy woods through means of war, since that's a waste of ressources. "Oh, Daniel, you have tons of ressources". Yes, I know, but still...

---

I’m about to prepare for extension to iron #2. First I want to throw up some walls, gun and laser turrets, and of course an independent power supply. Since the iron deposit is already about 30x20 tiles, and I need space for the train station and the tracks, as well as the power and I must include the oil (and built around, not over, it), I will need to enclose about 70x60 tiles, so I need 260 walls. 20 accumulators and solar panels each should well do for the start, but I might want to double that eventually. Since I can’t get batteries in sufficient amounts right now, I will to with 20 early on. I also need to fit the train station and railroad tracks. I always carry several hundred iron and copper plates with me, so I can craft inserters and such quickly, but I have zero rails built so far!

I packed about 300 walls, 150 straight and 42 bent rails (all that I could manufacture that quickly), a couple hundred copper and iron plates, 20 accumulators and more than enough solar panels and headed east. There, I found out that somehow that’s not 30 tiles high. That’s bigger.



Somehow, I envisioned this differently… I suck at building anything.

Took me a whole day to throw up the walls and the solar power, then the laser turrets in the corners and at the entrance, plus power lines all around. The train station is on the eastern side, but of course I forgot something: I couldn’t fit the inserters for the cargo wagons since I failed to bring any engines for the train itself, and I always do it wrong when I just fling something next to the rails…



So, back to base and re-equip, plus lay some rails along the way. While I had been setting up the expansion, my red/green science belt somehow got blocked and research stopped for almost two full days -.-

While back home, I arranged for 15 engines being manufactured (holy crap, I had 31 *electric* engines lying around uselessly now…), and more tracks, since I had run out of the latter halfway home.

But well, it’s Daniel, nobody expects anything but failure.



The semi-finished contraption.



At home. Daniel’s designs suck for obvious reasons.

By the time I increased the number of mines at the iron deposit to 15, I found the accumulator capacity sorely lacking, so there was the next miserable condition uncovered.

This game. The tasks never end. That’s what sucks so much. But that also is why it is so FANTASTIC.



Iron smelting extension (extendable).

Also choked up the iron plate belt to the north and had to lay down an express belt there. (Luckily I took care to produce 2,6k of lubricant by accident earlier…)



Redesign (not better).

So, that’s how go about expansions. Failing a lot.

[n9103]

Not a bad expansion process.
Only got two main points I'd point out:
1) That seems like a very small amount of accumulators for the new mine if it's not connected to the base. Any moderate night time attack seems like it would overwhelm their capacitance capacity.
2) You seem to be neglecting parallel belts in favor of faster ones. It's almost always a better idea to do a little remodeling to accommodate a 2nd belt, than it is to upgrade to express belts. (Even with that lube surplus.)

[Boogieman14]

For your ore unloading station, I would recommend unloading into chests first and from the chests go onto the belt. That way you'll build a bit of a buffer in your chests, to keep the belt full while the train is off picking up a new load.

Also, I always build my train stations horizontally, because that way it will fit 7 inserters (8 for some of the cars). Vertical stations don't go above 5 or so. Perhaps this is just my CDO talking though

[DanielHall15]

Not a bad expansion process.
Only got two main points I'd point out:
1) That seems like a very small amount of accumulators for the new mine if it's not connected to the base. Any moderate night time attack seems like it would overwhelm their capacitance capacity.

Yeah, I realized that already. In the last pic, I am ready to hop onto the train with 10 more accumulators, but thinking about it, I need at least double that. 15 mines and all the inserters are already draining that power there. I need to move the northern wall a fair bit to make more room. I should have known something was amiss when I went there with about 300 walls and had 90 left over in the end...

2) You seem to be neglecting parallel belts in favor of faster ones. It's almost always a better idea to do a little remodeling to accommodate a 2nd belt, than it is to upgrade to express belts. (Even with that lube surplus.)

I don't see how I can make that work. Double belts in the smelting area seems impossible to me. Double belts leading away from the train station seems much more doable.

For your ore unloading station, I would recommend unloading into chests first and from the chests go onto the belt. That way you'll build a bit of a buffer in your chests, to keep the belt full while the train is off picking up a new load.

Also, I always build my train stations horizontally, because that way it will fit 7 inserters (8 for some of the cars). Vertical stations don't go above 5 or so. Perhaps this is just my CDO talking though

I built the other station with chests and then thought about it for the dropoff and then didn't do it, overkill and such. Turns out it's not overkill. The main issue here is that I have never thrown up:
- so many mines
- so far away
- and having the train wait 60 seconds at each station

I found before that I could get away with fast belts if I only had some 200-300 ore to unload. It's definitely impossible for this system to unload 600-900 ore that rapidly. The middle car gets emptied, but the other two have about 900 ore stuck in them.

---

One more thing about wood: I find it very useful in burning it away in trains. Of course that means manual restocking the chests in certain intervals.

Still, my wishlist again:
- engines that burn either diesel (made from oil of course), or coal/wood, or electric engines on electrified tracks
- liquid cargo cars
- fill what the heck you want into barrels

[DanielHall15]

After some fails with the ore unloading I finally went with a double fast belt away from there. I need high throughput for my next project: manufacturing processing units. I want to do that right here, at the old factory, which is still partly messy from the beginnings (notice the dump boxes strewn all over the place; all green outlines show various crap that was manufactured at various points and just dropped here)



The yellow area is were I made solar panels. I already shut down the production by 50% by taking two of the four copper smelters offline, and now I will raze the whole thing. I have about 1,000 panels between my bag and the storage box, and those should last for a LONG time. Daniel needs space for his newest madness.

I want to manufacture processing units in the blue area, with an additional line of iron smelters and extended copper smelting at the lake. I will also unfurl some of the belt chaos around the oil ressources, which I need to tap in order to produce plastic and sulphuric acid (and this is where the main nightmare begins).

Red: improved copper smelting
Pink: actual processing unit manufacture
This leaves a corner open for some capsule manufacturing later on.

And it will undoubtedly go horribly wrong. While I will break stuff here, for the first time in a 13 hour game, biters have attacked from the west. There are two 4-spawner nests there that I just can’t take out, I suck too badly.

(cue dramatic music)

[DanielHall15]

Daniel never learns his lessons. Wanna see?



Not enough copper wire. By far.

I'm gonna cry now.

[HeilTec]

Whenever I see copper cable on belts I feel an urge to say:

"Use direct Insertion of cable on the spot where it is needed"