Factorio Forums

Ability to transform a blueprint into a single entity that acts as an assembling machine, for UPS optimization, increasing megabase size.

As in converting a complex of with 50 assemblers making Processing Unit into a single entity similar to a giant custom assembling machine.

Custom assembly machine (called an "industrial complex" for the rest of this post) would need only a few simple parameters:

Recipe (ingredient counts and product count, which could vary based on productivity)
Fabrication Time


Parameters could be determined easily:

Fabrication time is calculated as: time between beginning saturated belt inflow, and steady state maximum production outflow reached.
Recipe: continue running blueprint in a sandbox until steady state on inputs is also reached, then for a duration of 1 fabrication time, count the number of ingredients and products.

Now CPU cycles don't have to be spent on belts, inserters, logistic robots, effect transmission, individual assembling machines. Just 1 entity that acts as an assembly machine.


Notes:
Requiring steady state ingredient and product, and curves to fit expectation sufficiently closely prevents exploiting by dumping.
Having each game instance run the "industrial complex" blueprint itself to determine parameters prevents spreading exploited "industrial complexes," allows compatibility with mods, allows users to be sure they aren't cheating when using shared blueprints.
Would probably be best implemented with belts flowing into and out of the "industrial complex" for minimum CPU load, but this has been implemented in mods.
"Industrial complex" would be inferior to un-complexed blueprints until UPS becomes an issue, because of longer fabrication time. It would be balanced.
Custom recipes would best served by 8 or 12 ingredients, allowing production from fairly raw ingredients to advanced products in an industrial complex.
Power usage could be set with idle as power usage before ingredient input and working as power usage during fabrication step.

A lot of work has been done optimizing the game. I stopped playing when my base became laggy / reduced UPS. I'd really like to be able to create larger megabases with the computer setup I'm able to afford. The factory must grow.

This is a great suggestion! Seconded!

This definitely seems like an interesting idea. Can the engine be designed not to risk prematurely detecting a "steady state" when recipes with probabilities in output are used (e.g. uranium/fruit/asteroid processing, quality)? I suspect it would be necessary to create new logic to "trace" the production of the blueprint, which is unfortunate because it sounds like significantly more complex new development than the proposed sandbox simulation. Probably next to impossible if you want to account for any circuit logic within the blueprint (circuit logic is another concern for the simulate to steady state scheme. It opens a world for player ingenuity to find ways to foil the engine and create overperforming Complexes).

Broadly speaking, pessimistic estimates should be acceptable (if the simplification makes the feature more feasible), in the spirit of "Industrial complex would be inferior to un-complexed blueprints until UPS becomes an issue." For instance working power usage = sum of working power usage of all components, even though running the actual blueprint would usually not imply continuous operation of every inserter.

It would be nice to add some kind of sugar such that Complexes make gameplay sense (in addition to UPS sense) when but only when building on a massive scale, even before UPS constraints kick in. Being able to not hit your hardware constraints feels good. Rebuilding your factory because you hit your hardware constraints feels not great.

I assume the footprint of the Complex would be not smaller than that of the blueprint (probably minimum rectangle to contain blueprint). To build it, do we place an initial foundation, then insert all the components called for in the blueprint?

It seems to me this could be achieved by a mod, which adds the new Industrial complex machine, and recipes for it.

If it's about the general converting a set of machine into one machine with the same output, won't this simply push the core issue of reaching UPS just a little later?
So then it will be about converting a set of Industrial complexes into one Mega industrial complex, recursively into infinity?

This has been discussed to death here, if anyone is interested in arguments/ideas to be had:
viewtopic.php?t=82060

I am wondering what people are building to need this given many people seem to be able to build 60UPS 14.4k SPM setup (in SA at least) unless it is a case of low performance computers not being able to handle even moderate larger scale production?

A quick think of the use cases for this pre-SA would have been the vast arrays of smelters, circuits, LDS, RF etc, but in SA and especially when quality get used, I just don't end up with vast number of machines anymore to support high SPM and those machines are spread across many surfaces. About the only thing that hits my SPM is a platform moving at very high speed out to shattered planet which of course absolutely kills any (even high end) PC.

There is the factorisimo mod.