Please tell me it's not just me.

[tatsuu]

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Like you go from your starter base to your mid term base and mid term is already pretty hefty I mean I literally scratch the entire base, clear the entire board to start from scratch (I spend quite a bit of time hoarding items like red belts, steel power poles, blue inserters and blue assemblers in preparation), build TONS of electric ovens (400) in my case with like 3% for stone, 17% for copper, 45% for iron plate and 35% for steel plate (steel plate cooks slow so need a lot to compensate) and this carries me through having a solid and pretty balanced setup pumping out Red, Green, Black and Blue science at a rate that keeps up with 20 labs.

it's really quite beautiful to behold and since not all science is used at once with clever use of splitters the same feed will automatically reroute itself to either blue of black or green science.

With purple science I kinda expect that by then I'm really way past the limit of what's possible with my red circuit output and I'll need to subsequently start with the green circuit increase but when I'm starting to prepare yellow science everything feels super enticing and a fun challenge (Blue Circuits : YAY! Electric engines: YAY!) EXCEPT for some reason low density structures.

It just throws such a wrench in everything suddenly the entire factory that felt very scalable and versatile before feels wholly inadequate. I'm about to scale up plastics for red circuits but I know what I planned is nowhere near enough (I'll have either enough plastics for the red circuits or the low density structures, not both). The sheer demand in all three ingredients that were before fine tuned to EVERYTHING else in the factory now means everything is wrong.

plastic and steel in particular. sure copper is annoying too but that's such an easier problem to solve.

Is it just me? no other item in them game feels to me like it throws such a wrench into the factory progression

haha I know this is very ranty but it's still incredible fun.

[Abarel]

plastic and steel in particular. sure copper is annoying too but that's such an easier problem to solve.

Have you ever tried to distribute petroleum gas and coal instead of plastic bars, then produce plastics locally where needed?

[tatsuu]

Have you ever tried to distribute petroleum gas and coal instead of plastic bars, then produce plastics locally where needed?

the issue isn't so much transport, I tend to centralize to the extreme... and that leads me to have to reorganize the base a lot.
I also spawned on a planet with a very high density of trees and cliffs so I need to clear out before I can build further.

This was when I made my post :

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and this is now after having improved electricity generation and laid down my low density structure template.

I piped some plastic and steel plates into it and I have them shelving heaps of plastic. (and I'm also shelving copper) my steel will probably be able to keep up when I turn it on (although I'll need to upgrade all steel belts to blue in order for it to never desaturate) But I know that my current plastic layout needs to be multiplied by three at least (so I need to delete and redo the entire thing because that spot isn't great (also incidentally I'd like to put that train station to another use) so I'll move the whole thing down.

As for copper it's woefully inadequate I need to maybe move the current copper stop to somewhere else with more room or to just add the new furnaces on the outskirts. I think i'll probably go for the latter but the problem is i'll need to spaghetti at least a tiny bit of that new copper back into the current base because there's currently not enough for just the small red and red circuit setup I have:

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[Abarel]

the issue isn't so much transport, I tend to centralize to the extreme... and that leads me to have to reorganize the base a lot.

Sorry, I did not expect that, but something about deliverying plastic on a "main bus".
It is true, you centralize to the extreme. It is ok, as long as you get fun, and you said "it's still incredible fun".

So let me answer from scratch. Yes, it is not just you: Low Density Structures can be a pain in the ass until you tame them.
Maybe later you could say something about Rocket Control Units...

And I agree that it is very fun to find new things to think about as you progress in the game.
Maybe next run you start with all those in mind, and plan different ways to solve the puzzles.

[tatsuu]

exactly. thanks for those words!

I think I'll definitely space everything out more next run and mostly I need to plan way way more copper and steel even if I wont use them for a long long while.

My plastic attack was aggressive enough this run and I did leave a lot of space to scale it but I hadn't left enough space to scale the oil refineries too.

I've moved them down now and I now have plenty of space for as much as 10x the current plastic production :

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Is is just low density structures or do other people have other pet peeves?

[Tertius]

While you're still unlocking technologies, it's quite normal that you have one bottleneck after the other. That's the usual workflow: you build a production line for some new item and realize you don't have enough input material. So you add a new production line for that input material. After that, you realize the input material of that production line starves, so you fix another bottleneck. And so on.

This lead me away from building my factory and made me design production line blueprints in map editor mode instead. So when I identified a bottleneck, I put down one of my prepared blueprints to fix that. The biggest challenge for me was blue circuits, because they need a really huge amount of pre-products, and these pre-products are also needed directly for other items.

Plastic was not an issue for me, because after two insights, I was able to make large enough and efficient oil processing lines.

May be I tell about these insights. Oil and refineries were an issue for me, because I never had enough oil. Not enough oil means not enough fuel, means energy spiraling down, bringing everything down. All oil was used up for solid fuel to power my boilers, and I was desperately seeking for more oil patches.

Until.... well, I made some small error in my mall, and my mall generated two full chests with solar panels while I struggled with the oil crisis. I didn't want that, I wanted to jump to nuclear plants instead. But now I got these chests, and since there was no means to get the material back, I could as well make a bigger solar field instead of letting them rot in the chests. So I built a huge solar panel field, totally oversized (almost 300 MW), and I was surprised how all my energy issues vanished into thin air. And so did the oil crisis. And I got less biter visits due to the lower pollution. And I added accumulators (also created a full chest by mistake, now the oil production was running again and I got lots of batteries), and for quite some time I was able to retire any other means of energy production.

The second insight was this. Initially, I tried to build an oil plant that created all required oil products. Then I switched to separate plants: one plant to only produce plastic, one plant to only produce fuel, one plant to produce only the rest. All these in their own blueprints, so if there was a shortage of one material, I only needed to build another blueprint. This scaled much better than one big integrated oil processing plant that did it all together.

Ok, there was a 3rd insight. I was curious why there was coal liquefaction, where there already was advanced oil processing as technology. But I saw there were more coal resource fields than I would ever consume, and I wondered if they were put there for me to use with coal liquefaction. So I built a fine coal liquefaction blueprint and created solid fuel and rocket fuel with coal liquefaction instead from crude oil. Seemed the best use for coal liquefaction, because cracking to petroleum oil wasn't required - only to light oil. And this again lessened the oil demand.