Base Overview :
- main-no-caption.jpg (9.6 MiB) Viewed 595 times
Main mods & difficulties added :
-Expensive receipe-no logistic
-Train world
- labs should work during the whole game, no such things as pausing science voluntarily
- not reusing any previous blueprints
Harder Basic Logistic
With settings to only allow a single inserter per machine's side hence the spaggetthi, this was felt all along the game as it's so counter-intuitive to me.
Bugs Rules Everywhere Around Me
With what felt "very hard" settings at the beginning of the game making bugs constantly spawn at night, necessitating several restart and adpation to find good strategy and felt easier in late game.
FunkedOre
Because at this point why not it sounds funny to have mixed ore patch for extra difficulties. ( with settings copy pasted from the example of the mod page)
discovery tree
Hiding further tech is not always adding extra difficulty sometimes it help make decision faster instead of planning forever, this game it wasn't adding all tht much difficulties due to the tech being vanilla for the most part
Toxic Biters
I like the name a lot, and the mod is pretty cool, not sure if i was lucky to finish before seeing any giant one, or unlucky to miss them.
My own experimental music
Because if all that was not enough, i had my own music playing, it's distracting, and i was paying attention to the transitions to try and improve things that i found were offs so it was even harsher to ear at the time. I think it count as a difficulty even though some song are motivationnal.
Also i had failed some settings and biters were allowed to swim, like me. Making my starting location not "secured from one side" as i discovered soon enough.
Other mods :
Factorissmo ! obviously been using it for a long time, and now i'm using notnotmelon's fork
And the mod player trails i found works well together, when you play multiplayer and someone you follow disappear in nested building you can follow the trail.I used rate calculator that i found very useful for such spagetthi design where things are designed to run constantly. I use it to match input and ouput request of say 3 or 4 machine, and use it to gauge if 3 or 4 is ok, or 1 or 24. I don't go into deep planning for such games
Shrek Because i like Shrek, i feel like Shrek when playing in my factory.
The irregular look of the items comes from item anarchy. I wish it only applied to certain things, for more immersion, but it's already to my liking. I fits with the Shrek and the spaggetthi i found.
To add the beautification, like trees, Dectorio and alien biome also Text plate and Disco science I used settings to prevent many types of tiles from appearing to make sure i would be in a desert with some tiny swampy area.
I also used the car from mad faxtorio but that can't be seen on the screenshot, it was pretty useful in getting rid of bases, but i destroyed lots of my own things and the car itself several time, it's powerful and dangerous as it look beware x). It felt right on the theme of the desert, less with shrek though.
Over the course of the game i added "not so simple wood processing" because i realized i was in a desert and i couldn't grow trees and i wanted palm trees.
Explanations :
If you are reading after seeing the picture i guess you too like spagetthi ! This is a small base, the map time shows "only" 56 hours but as mentionned earlier i had to restart the game several time due to the difficulty. In the end i somewhat managed to keep my labs running all the time by alternating research that need 30 45 or 60 sec per science pack, buffering some science like blue or purple, keeping some research that do not require yellow science to burn through while automating and increasing the yellow science :- prodstat.jpg (303.47 KiB) Viewed 595 times
The early game was made very difficult because every night the biters spawned, normally in train world you can clear bases around a perimeter larger than the pollution cloud and as biters do not expand, you do not face attacks, this was not the case in this game that felt like a deathworld, but only at night. During day time i had to repair and replace defenses, i died in several game and was chain killed by biters at spawn, so after some time i made sure that my spawn point would be near turrets part of the defense perimeter.
At the early stage of this successful attempt i think i only had 3 or 4 labs before blue science, and was joined by players for a few hours which helped in the task of stabilizing the base soon enough to wall off everything and get acces to red ammo.
Getting oil was tricky because at night again biter spawns, so building a long rail lane, like required in train world, had to be done in several in game day and with the need to not be stranded in the open when night falls.
It was also problematic that i couldn't secure a perimeter that contained the oil for a long part, meaning biters at night would spawn near the tracks, and would attack my oil outpost from all angles, causing at first my mispositionned flammers to burn the power poles or rails or belts leaving the outpost. ( Yeah i used super long belts instead of trains once because i thought it would look funny).
This is what a "typical" outpost look like, but given the production rate, i was not required to have that many :
- typical outpost.jpg (4.28 MiB) Viewed 595 times
Re-inforced defense would include rows of laser turrets in the back.
This outpost extract mixed ore, so the train is set to leave the mining area when there is 5 second of inactivity, because otherwise it can happen that all inserters have copper in hand, but there is only 1 iron missing in the train, so it won't move with "full cargo". I am also using the limits to make sure i don't have more than 3 trains going to this outpost at the same time, and the trains are preventing to leave this outpost if the base do not have room to handle them.
- sorted outpost.jpg (1.17 MiB) Viewed 595 times
In game some patches where between 10 to 90 % of 'iron' or 'copper' and the other possibility was a mix stone/coal. So when looking for "iron", you are considering "that patch at 50% iron or that one at 75% or that one at 90%". This i found really interesting take on the matter of "refining" without adding additional byproduct, yet generating pleasant and complex puzzle with a simple rule. ( Laser turrets are here because the outpost was not well covered with lamps and some biters could spawn on the inside and it required manual lazy fix). I didn't tap the whole thing because i had no module available at the time when needing the copper, i could have upgraded to blue belts later if that was required and add more mines but that didn't end up necessary.- train unload.jpg (483.95 KiB) Viewed 595 times
The "iron priority" is there for train containing only iron to unload their iron, this is the first source of iron used, because it's very tiny and it is required for the copper throughput. The second sort of iron consumed is the one coming from mixed ore patch, when sorted right of the "iron priority station". This has somewhat lower priority, but is still the main source of material in volume. In this unload area of "mixed ore 2 wagons train" could unload trains from outpost containing around 66% max of one type of ore. If it was more than 66% or so, i would sort the ore at the ore patch.
The third source of iron would be iron coming from patchs that contain more than 66% iron. Those have lower priority, because they are used to adjust the ratio of the previous because they create so little byproducts, so only as third source.
This was all in my head but cannot be seen in the spagetthi where everything seem mixed up and branched randomly. There is also one factorissimo building that i used to store copper ore temporarily early game when i faced trouble with imperfect system lots of biters and had to find something quickly that would serve the purpose of unclogging stream of mixed ore. Plus there's also a part where the starting ore are incorporated with higher priority so as to free up building space in the starting area.
I couldn't remove the early furnaces becaused they gave identity to my factory somehow, nothing is centralized, that's part of the self inflicted challenge for aesthetic purposes. I also didn't want to have boring arrays of furnaces, nor use beacons to avoid pollution which i notice have strong impact on night's spawn. So i ended up hiding my furnaces in factorissmo buildings :
- furnaces.jpg (844.59 KiB) Viewed 595 times
- greenhouse.jpg (1.31 MiB) Viewed 595 times
- tinycoal.jpg (348.73 KiB) Viewed 595 times
The refineries doing the coal liquefaction are inside a factorissmo building but it look boring like the furnaces, the chemical plants are visible on the screenshot at the top.
Here are some pictures i found more interesting :
- closerview.png (3.21 MiB) Viewed 595 times
Things are not as compact as my prefered / usual spaggethi because it's much harder when you are only allowed to place 1 inserter per side. Plus with expensive receipe, it means a green circuit assembly isn't feed with 2 copper cable assembly it needs more, and other things throwing off my habits, ( thanks rate calculator exists x) ).
Here is another slide with alt view :
- slidealtview.png (4.69 MiB) Viewed 595 times
If you want to see the rest of the map, i will attach a save game in the next post. It contains the modpack, and it was saved when i realized i didn't need to fix my solar pannel problem because i could just launch the satelite and win to try some other mods !