show me your mass storage!

[iklarazu]

also i am finding it quite annoying that coal is only used to make plastics and fuel trains in late game meaning that i mid sized coal deposit could last you for maybe 10 hours or more

Consider using putting all turrets on a separate power loop and use steam engines to run it. Try not to go to town on Solar.

I've not really got to a stage where I have millions of copper/iron plates/ore in storage, I kinda stop playing by that point. I can't find enjoyment in collecting for the sake of collecting.

I love the autocad design though. It does inspire me to try something, but I think I'll wait for v12 and hope that it provides more options for oil.

[DerivePi]

IN REAL LIFE

[nobodx]

Not at home right now, so images will follow later.
And please note, I only use vanilla-stuff, cause I hate being dependant (is this the right word...) on mods.

My main-train-hub consists of 5 unloading lines with inserters>active provider chests, a big storage-chest-grid (for ~750k items) and a fleet of 2000 robots. It is used to ferry in the ores from my outposts. (Iron, copper, coal, stone and oil).

BUT it also features two loading lines for excess stuff.
The way I did it, was to connect all logistic-chest with cables, and when anything is above a threshold, it will be transported into a separate storage facility. If the resources inside my main-hub drops below another threshold, the trains bring those resources back.
The thresholds are set with a constant combinator.
The storage-facility is still a work in progress, and can hold "only" 2.000.000 items. But the distribution is working

http://imgur.com/a/ALOyS

[mophydeen]

Robots ftw.

Mmod increases the stack sizes by x10

Part of storage in the Sample map:

rrrr.png (2.27 MiB) Viewed 64485 times

[Lutz_Scheiter]

Vanilla-Storage w/o robots on an Train-Only Island.. (description below)

left side IN - right side OUT








My diamond



600 Chests x 2400 Items = 1 440 000 or
600 Chests x 4800 Items = 2 880 000 x 24 stations= ~70million items

Each 'station' will get its own train. Waiting-stations on top (mainland) is planed. Also need to wire logistics..

It took me 15h+ to plan, test & finish...

How its made

fail. missing one line... need to add a line of cars or tanks to get it

first planed setup with robots (can be added optional)


on the left side my used setup, later i found the right setup with less landfill,







landfill is used nearly perfect, can't get much less... (testing was fkn hard )

[hansinator]

I use these buffer modules for belt storage. It prefers giving resources to the main line and buffers/unbuffers only on demand. One module can store or output two full blue belts and has a capacity of 38400 items, enough for 8 minutes. There's an explanation here, but I have improved it since then: viewtopic.php?f=193&t=33056#p212468

[doxsroxs]

Running Bob's mods so these might not be applicable to you, but we are using central storage as a buffer so we do not have to chase down new ore patches all the time.
Using a central sorting system we setup new ore outposts and load everything mixed. We also use level 8 productivity modules in the miners for a 340% production bonus. (no GOD or RAW modules though)

Here is a picture describing parts of the process:


Here is an example of the multiprovider stations, all the combinators are neccessary since we are loading mixed ore. Normal stations only have one combinator for balanced loading/unloading:


The sorting facility and its temporary storage to prevent clogging if a single material is queued up on the outgoing station. This is serviced by robots.


And finally the central storage area where all the ores are stored, we have quite a lot of them due to the many ore types in Bob's mods.
These are basically two hacked together stations from siggboys system with some extra logic to ensure they always provide ore to everyone else and only pick up ore for storage if no one else needs it.
That ensures ore is sent straight from mining or sorting to the factories if possible to avoid uneccessary traffic.

Also note the central storage for barrels, canisters and gas bottles. These are there to ensure the system is always balanced.
New containers are automatically created up to a limit to ensure empty containers are always available to any station needing it.
Storage is vastly higher than that limit to ensure we do not clog the system if we remove a lot of stations. But to be honest, we are mostly expanding the system so it is mostly there as a fail safe.

Here is a radar image showing approximately half of the central storage, each section here can buffer just under 68 million ore:

[MeduSalem]

@doxsroxs: I somehow find the track layout extremely inefficient... especially the crossings are one of the most problematic things I have seen so far because they only allow for one train to pass at any given moment due to lack of signaling that divides the crossing into multiple sections. So a lot of trains will be waiting for another train to pass before being able to go through a crossing causing a lot of traffic jam in high demand scenarios. Also that a train if you have bad luck might want to go through ALL other stations due to the way the pathfinding would consider all the parallel tracks also viable routes... so there would probably be a lot of interference between trains because of that too if there are a lot of trains on the network.

But then again since you are using a customized siggboy's smart train implementation for trains on demand there might not be as many trains on route at any given point, I don't know... at least I have the strong feeling that the layout is not exactly at its peak efficiency.

I have worked out my own grid system for railway stuff to avoid above mentioned problems, which can be scaled pretty much endlessly. A concept picture I made a few months ago:

Factory Layout.png (50.68 KiB) Viewed 61805 times

The orange squares are the Roboports... they are basically placed at max distance from one another. 3x3 = 9 Roboports form what I call a "building square" (the area where you place your chests or assemblers etc). If you don't want the logistic networks of all these building squares to form one huge factory-wide logistic network you can obviously space them 2 tiles further apart, creating a gap between these building squares, effectively seperating the logistic networks of each building square from the ones next to it. That way the robots wouldn't be able to leave a building square and fly all over the base (though I don't really mind that, because after all I want them to be where they are most needed).

It's possible to place additional roboports in each building square if there is really high demand in that block for some reason (like is the case with Bot based smart furnaces etc). I found that to be necessary because otherwise there would be a lot of robots waiting to charge, reducing throughput.

Also since the train stations now are both vertically and horizontally of equal length you can have 2 trainstations on each side of a building square... a total of 8 trainstations per building square, though it would be pretty much overkill. In-game I actually use 2 stations for delivery, and on the other side 2 stations for export, just like shown in the picture above. If you are really into some monsterbase madness I even think it would be possible to have 4 train stations at each side of the square, given if you do some additional spacing between the building sqares to accomodate all that, making a total of 16 trainstations serving one of the building squares... but that's just ridiculous.

Quadruple track networks (with 2 tracks going in each direction) or more a possible too if you want them. In that case the most inner pair would serve far-distance traffic and the outer pair would serve the near-distance traffic, though never actually tested such a system because quite frankly... I don't need that throughput and my computer couldn't handle such big bases anyways.

Basically the trains are single-headed and have all a length of 4 wagons (it's what I found to be most convenient) and 2 locomotives (to boost acceleration speed, minimizing the amount of time the train needs to get out of the station so that a leaving train doesn't stall the main network for too long).

My crossings actually look like this ingame:

Crossing.jpg (166.88 KiB) Viewed 61811 times

[doxsroxs]

Trains are only dispatched when they have a full train load of 64k ore to pick up.
Traffic is minimal and congestion nonexistent so I get away with simple crossings.
The parallel tracks are no problem, they dont stack up, only use another track to go around any obstacle.

That said, you are of course correct, the track layout would never work if trains where used without the on demand system.

[hansinator]

Why do you buffer up so many ores instead of using them directly? The buffers I see here are very deep but they have limited throughput. It looks like it takes a lot of time to buffer/unbuffer when you could just have used the material directly and use the ore patches themselves as a free large-scale buffer.
Especially when using smart train deliveries I only see use for buffers that compensate for when there are more or fewer trains unloading in parallel. This buffers would need to be large enough that they can buffer up when a lot of trains are unloading at the same time and should have enough throughput to unload fast enough to keep the furnace line completely busy when there are fewer trains. If you have a lot of blue belts it still needs a lot of buffers but it is enough for the buffers to have a few chests per blue belt.
Maybe someone can explain to me the need for large and slow buffers with multiple chests each feeding the next in long rows?

[MeduSalem]

Why do you buffer up so many ores instead of using them directly??

Well I do it because I want to get these ugly ore patches out of my face before expanding my base there, even if I'm not going to use the ore for the moment. I just hate building ontop of unmined resource patches. Maybe other people are doing it for the same reason.

[hansinator]

Ah it's not a technical reason but an aesthetical one. A good one . Actually I hate building atop ore patches, too.
I'd really like to hear from Lutz_Scheiter why he builds the big train station buffer islands. They are just impressive.

Edit: @MeduSalem & doxsroxs How do your smelting areas look like? I know it's a little OT in this thread, but maybe you've already posted it somewhere or can share a savegame? I want to study how such big robot based storage systems work. My own work just focuses on large scale belt based systems for processing from train-station to smeltery but I want to compare such systems without having to build a robot based factory from ground up.

[doxsroxs]

We only use robots for storage and in some small scale production of low volume items.
Like train stops, combinators etc.
The rest is produced on a normal belt bus. However we are now leaving that as well and moving as much as possible off the bus to use a train bus with distributed production facilities.
Throughput is insane to be honest. Remember that each 4 car train can load 64k ore in bobs mods, our T3 engines have way more power and a top speed around 400 km/h :p
Using productivity modules in combination with speed module beacons and vastly improved assembly machines it is rather easy to get 20k or more in output for any given material.
We generally aim to produce between 20 and 100k/min in the new facilities we build depending on the type of material.

My friend just completed a new template for gold smelting yesterday, just one iteration outputs around 26-28k gold plate/min. We plan on copying it a few times

When it comes to buffer storage I agree it is a purpose in itself to clean up the ore patches.
However, for us it is also needed to ensure the sorting does not clog up the system.
That in turn is an issue tied to bobs mods where we had to keep track of so many ore types and new mining stations it was becoming a full time job to just keep the flow of ore coming. Without buffers we would have catastrophic failures all over the system when mines ran dry. (Coal was a huge problem!) We still run coal though, 1,6 Giga watts available

Using mixed miners we just vacuum any ore patches and feed it all into a single new station. Setup time for new ore mining spots are drastically reduced. The second part that made this easier is level 8 productivity modules in the miners. This made ore patches last much longer.

Dont have more pictures etc, but I might add a thread later when building the next powerplant

[MeduSalem]

Edit: @MeduSalem & doxsroxs How do your smelting areas look like?

I basically always use a Smart Furnace setup... with PM3s in furnaces and SM3s in Beacons. Everything is done by robots... because at some point I just can't deal anymore with the belt mess as it really becomes a throughput bottleneck with how fast the furnaces are working.

Currently I'm using it to do Iron/Copper plates... Steel and Stone each have their seperate setups because of how 0.13 messed up the Inserter Stack sizes.

Though I'm basically still preparing to use XKnight's Smart Furnace approach (though I haven't started implementing anything yet because of lack of time and lack of motivation to play Factorio recently). Also I wish the devs would really look into the Inserter Stacksize problem so all the overengineered combinator stuff wouldn't be necessary in the first place... since it's easy to do something wrong and that may cause a cascade failure and it takes forever to figure out why it happened with all the combinator crap.

And yeah, I basically only play Vanilla... no mods whatsoever.

[Lutz_Scheiter]

I'd really like to hear from Lutz_Scheiter why he builds the big train station buffer islands. They are just impressive.

Thanks

Me was sitting on thousands of iron-plates (+green circuits) and I wanted to clear all ore on one of my captured areas to build bigger solar arrays..
Also I always wanted to have a safe backup-storage on an island.. then it got bigger and bigger (and much more complicated ), just like me conquering more ground...