Better Factory Setup

[WanderingTrader3]

Hello! I have been playing Factorio for a couple weeks now, and I have grasped the game thoroughly (though have not beaten it, as I want to explore as much as possible), and created this, for lack of a better word, monstrosity of a factory that barely works. Is there any way I can fix this, or would I just have to take it down and rebuild?

I can post more images from different parts, if you like.

[mmmPI]

I think you should totally post more images, even for yourself to look at them later with a bit of nostalgia, i do that sometimes with my first factory but also for the feedback ,it can help show what you understood and what you haven't used yet to better provide help.

I remember my first times i couldn't keep a factory more than 4 or 5 hours, because i wanted to have a "solid start" before going further, like "blue science", and i just restarted the game when i realized i could have done something smarter and it would take a lot of time to correct the mess i made unknowingly

I found out later ( maybe that's personnal) that it's much less trouble to build "another factory" next to the first one, potentially reusing materials and buildings from the old one while it is slowly running instead of restarting completly, you get to keep the researchs, and avoid the "early game" burner miner phase and get electricity and materials to take from belts. This is what i would advise currently (seeing the pictures).

I think a very important step regarding this are the construction robots, they make rebuilding/ modifying / editing part of an older factory much more automated, it takes a bit of time to get them and the blueprint system, but if/once you have access to them, you wouldn't want to restart for sure, i'd advise against it more strongly, if you don't have access to them yet, and you don't feel like the "early game" is becoming "repetitive" due to many restarts, there's no downside restarting really, if it does makes time flies in a pleasant way

[Tertius]

monstrosity of a factory that barely works. Is there any way I can fix this, or would I just have to take it down and rebuild?

Well, everyone built such a monstrosity on their first maps. The style is called "spaghetti". Your problem (the problem of every beginner) is that you don't yet know what is required later. You don't know yet where to reserve space you can fill with new assembling machines for new products later. So it's completely fine what you built.
One of the nice things in Factorio is that you never destroy buildings if you deconstruct them. They return into your inventory, and you can place them again. Also, no material on a belt will ever get lost. The worst thing that can happen is a full inventory, but for this you can place and fill chests.

So don't hesitate to reorganize and rebuild your base whenever you feel it needs a reorganization. Actually reorganizing, rebuilding and optimizing your factory and include the newest tech from your newest research is one of the main aspects of Factorio. And so although your base is a monstrosity, it's a completely normal base.
Later you will unlock the possibility to create blueprints from your base and from production lines, so you can design some production line then copy+paste it to reproduce. This way you can organize yourself better and reproduce a somewhat matured and better structured base from your previous map into a base on a new map.

Some things to keep in mind for structuring your base:

• a distributed part of your base is mining resources like ore, stone and oil. Currently you still have the starting resource patches, but they will run out before long.
• part of your base is refining and smelting ore
• part of your base deals with oil refining and oil dependent products
• part of your base is producing intermediate items
• part of your base is producing items you need to build more of your base (that's called a mall)
• part of your base is producing science packs and doing research
• part of your base deals with energy production

[NineNine]

There's no reason to tear it down, unless you want to! You can continue to play with what you have. You can build a different kind of base next to this one, or you can modify your current base. There's no right answer, here. Just do whatever seems the most fun for you.

Since you haven't launched a rocket, yet, you might just want to continue your current base until you launch a rocket, and THEN start a new base, if you want to. If you want to build a tidier, neater base (you don't have to... spaghetti works fine), it might make more sense to play through to at least a rocket launch, so you have an idea what you'll need to build for a base the next playthrough.

[Kyralessa]

The simplest approach (which is also reasonably rewarding) is to chase bottlenecks.

Look for machines that are starved for input. What ingredient are they missing? Trace it backwards until you find the root cause, and then figure out how to improve the production of that item. That might mean just adding a few more furnaces, or if you're pressed for space, it might mean starting a new ore-to-plate outpost serviced by trains.

You can go quite a long way by just making gradual improvements like this instead of throwing the whole thing away to start over.

Not sure whether you're playing with mods, but if you are, there are some mods like this one that make it easier to spot these bottlenecks:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BottleneckLite

[NineNine]

The simplest approach (which is also reasonably rewarding) is to chase bottlenecks.

Look for machines that are starved for input. What ingredient are they missing? Trace it backwards until you find the root cause, and then figure out how to improve the production of that item. That might mean just adding a few more furnaces, or if you're pressed for space, it might mean starting a new ore-to-plate outpost serviced by trains.

I'm thousands of hours and several years in, and that's still how I play 100% of the time. It's relaxing to me.