Productivity-oriented factory

[westy]

Hey all,

I thought it would be interesting to build a factory based on optimizing productivity. If enemies aren't a concern, and you're on full solar power, a productivity-oriented factory seems to make the most sense if you want to really crank up module production. I also wanted to try to make a factory that easily supports expansion to extremely high throughputs of copper and iron.

As it stands, the factory still has a lot of room for expansion, but the lag is extraordinary on my machine so I've had to stop for the time being

Here are some details:

• Wide main bus system that supports up to 8 full blue belts each of copper and iron. Currently the factory only has five of each, but it's a simple matter to add more train stations.
• Pretty much everything is full of productivity module 3's, with a lot of beacon usage to compensate for the speed loss.
• Uses some cool designs from the community: The optimal solar field, the complete science suite, and a train unloader (Sorry, lost the link for that one).
• Over 1GW of power usage including accumulator consumption.
• About 6k green circuits/min, 1.5k red circuits/min, 200 blue circuits/min. No idea how many 'rocket defense per hour' that equates to as I'm not very willing to turn all my modules into useless squares :S
• It's mainly reliant on belts in the factory itself. Robots only used when belts are seriously impractical.
• I don't store anything in large quantities. All produced steel, etc goes straight to modules.
• I turned on peaceful mode around halfway through as I wasn't willing to compromise on pollution for less productivity. By now the pollution is insane.
• There's definitely a fair bit of legacy stuff/stuff I'm not happy with, but the module production is pretty good.

Here's a link to the save.

Here are some pictures! (Open in new tab to see them in full)







Let me know what you think! And feel free to expand it yourselves if you feel so inclined

[quinor]

Fuck. And I thought I build big when I used about 2 blue belts of iron and copper... I still think there is a couple of things that can be better planned, like wire-plastics-advanced ratio at advanced circuits. I also like how you don't overly use bots.

[westy]

Fuck. And I thought I build big when I used about 2 blue belts of iron and copper... I still think there is a couple of things that can be better planned, like wire-plastics-advanced ratio at advanced circuits. I also like how you don't overly use bots.

The red circuit system was like that on purpose. Basically, putting cables on belts meant that I would have needed two parallel belts of cables to fill the demand of a full blue belt output of red circuits. However in retrospect that probably wouldn't have been a bad idea, especially considering that each 'module' only feeds half a belt anyway. Would definitely have saved a bit of power and a few modules.

[ssilk]

This is quite interesting. The factory I've been building the last months was nearly exactly the double size. Max energy usage 2 GB, 400 green circuits/min (a peak of 2000 would be possible), I had about 80 trains running. Etc.

But it wasn't so nice, as yours. Really nice built. I generally don't look so much for looking good, more for efficiency. And made much more with bots, cause with that dimensions, you cannot use belts anymore, they just take too much space, I had a smelting area, with over 20 belts in parallel going in and out, that took a lot of space. Happily I used then also the boxing mod, which was a great help in handling the bots and trains: I could reduce all trains from 6 wagons to 4 or 2 and it enabled to remove most/all the belts, because one bot could pick up 200 iron at once. And it is indeed a new type of game.

Sadly it doesn't work with 0.11, only with 0.10. (Edit: I meant the factory, not the mod)

I think I really should show some parts of this factory, cause there are some thing, I can show, what I've learned from that. Thank you for bringing this back to my consciousness.

[waduk]

I wish the end game content will force player to built the factory as big as this,..well maybe 50% less big,..scrap that...75% less big.

Care to share the whole layout ?
I'd really love to see a beautiful base you have here in detail..
Not the mini map version, but the "google" map version if possible, using this factorio map mod : https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =14&t=5812
But maybe the resulting image will be too high to share due the size of your base, and possibly the mod is crash when try to output the the image (but i've seen someone upload a very big map with success though)

[westy]

@ssilk thanks for the kind words

@waduk the save is uploaded if ypu want to have a look around the factory. As for the google maps thing, the only really interesting stuff is what you can see in the screenshots already. The external mines etc are pretty basic.

[waduk]

Oh, thank you, i didn't notice the link.

Wow, my system is took a hit when opening that saves files, i only got 10 fps...
I have save file (from other player) with much bigger base than yours, but it never took a fps hit like that.
I guess, because their factory more like in "idle" mode, not in full production as this.
If i may ask What spec is your machine ? What fps do you get ?

And the whole thing is interesting, not just the screenshot in layout.

[westy]

@waduk yeah my FPS is about the same.

My processor is an intel i7 4710-HQ, and yeah I was getting about 5-10 fps by my estimate (I didn't have the fps counter showing).

Yeah, I think all the belts really murder the performance here. Maybe this is an area that could use some optimization?

[MadZuri]

@waduk yeah my FPS is about the same.

My processor is an intel i7 4710-HQ, and yeah I was getting about 5-10 fps by my estimate (I didn't have the fps counter showing).

Yeah, I think all the belts really murder the performance here. Maybe this is an area that could use some optimization?

Minimize use of belts. The entity count is what is killing performance. Use trains or bots more, or hell, cars on belts. More technically, it is a combination of both the items on the belts and the inserters, but going from container to machine will reduce inserter operations by a factor of the inserter stack bonus. Sadly, it is a product of the deterministic nature of factorio, and why it is so heavy on very few threads. The best way to increase fps/ups is to minimize belt and inserter use.

[westy]

Minimize use of belts. The entity count is what is killing performance. Use trains or bots more, or hell, cars on belts. More technically, it is a combination of both the items on the belts and the inserters, but going from container to machine will reduce inserter operations by a factor of the inserter stack bonus. Sadly, it is a product of the deterministic nature of factorio, and why it is so heavy on very few threads. The best way to increase fps/ups is to minimize belt and inserter use.

Sure. But something as abstract as game framerate isn't really enough to make me compromise and redesign my factory. I'd rather just have my optimal design even if it causes lag. Maybe next game I will take a different approach

[NotABiter]

I have been on a "productivity quest" as well. Though I don't have too much switched over to using productivity modules yet (just iron mining & smelting, alien science, science labs and refineries/crackers) and I'm mostly still using level 2 modules (level 3 for science stuff). I am trying to keep pollution low, though, so I am using a lot of efficiency modules in the beacons (and only using speed modules to the extent that I can still achieve -80% power use as that directly impacts pollution).

My beacons seem to be doing more work than yours. By placing adjacent rows close enough that one row of "worker things" gets affected by two rows of beacons, each "worker thing" gets double the beacon bonuses. See attached picture of my oil setup for an example. (The reason the crackers are placed irregularly is because that is needed so they are always affected by 8 different beacons instead of just 6.) I also make the row of beacons extend a bit past the row of "worker things" to make it so the "worker things" on the end of a row see the full number of beacons.

Did you run the numbers for your setup (compute input/second and output/second taking speed and productivity +/-%s into account) to determine what optimal ratios were? For example, I noticed you're using the standard 3:2 copper cable:electronic circuit setup, but by my calculations you really want that closer to 1:1 (15:14 to be precise, but 1:1 is more practical) if you are using 4x level 3 productivity modules in both types of factories, because ignoring speed changes (both factories will be affected the same by speed so it cancels out), the productivity increases only apply to outputs, not inputs. So while the number of copper cables needed by the electronic circuit factory stays the same, the number of copper cables a copper cable factory will put out goes up by 40%. (I haven't checked yet, but I'm also wondering if a buffer box might be needed to smooth things out -- to prevent the copper cable factory from stalling when it produces the extra cables.)