Factorio Forums

Summary

Add a recipe to produce calcite from stone, so that late-game Nauvis bases don't need to spend landing pad throughput on calcite.

What?

Add a recipe to extract calcite from stone. To avoid making the early game too easy this recipe should either be late game (i.e. locked behind Aquilo research), or have a punishing ratio (100 stone => 1 calcite), or be like uranium processing with a percentage-based proc.

In terms of balance: Aquilo is unaffected (no use for calcite), Fulgora and Gleba would continue to use imports anyway (due to lack of stone), and Vulcanus is the land of free calcite anyway. So only Nauvis bases that are hitting the landing pad throughput limits would be notably affected.

Why?

Late-game factories are limited mostly by the throughput of the Nauvis landing pad, which is a single chokepoint for all off-planet science packs. Calcite must also be imported, which means the Nauvis base either has to reduce science pack throughput, or forgo foundry-based recipes on Nauvis. Thes isn't a great choice, and it would be nice if I could continue to have my Nauvis factory use molten metal even after reaching higher SPMs.

What throughput are you bottlenecking at? Some pre-release math I did put the theoretical limit crazy high, and that's without bots or stack inserters. Knowing what we know now, the inserter throughput limit is 3360 items per second when leaving space for a cargo expansion to trail off into the distance. 14 fully stacked green belts. That's 6.5 rockets worth of calcite per second. Or if you're only delivering the 6 non-nauvis science packs, that's enough to fuel 33.6k SPM (before productivity and biolab bonuses). Without bots.

I'm currently at ~5k SPM before bonuses, and am planning the next size up (target 50k). That target puts my Nauvis base over what can be transferred out of the landing pad with legendary stack inserters, so I'm trying to figure out the rough division of bot throughput before I start ripping up the load-bearing critical spaghetti around my current landing pad location.

My planned base with molten metal would use enough calcite that it might be worth going back to electric furnaces if that would reduce the load on the landing bay bot cloud, which is a design decision that affects pretty much everything else. So before going too far in either direction, I figured it was worth seeing whether the devs are open to locally-sourced calcite in the late game.

50k?! I'm pretty sure you're gonna bottleneck on PC hardware before that.