Factorio Forums

I make all of my science on planets other than Nauvis. I ship my research to Nauvis, and do research there. I decided that I want to make a beautiful, symmetrical grid of biolabs inserting the sciences, and for them to be fed by trains. So I make a train grid, with 1x8 trains, roundabouts, etc. That took me a good day or two to make one that I liked (that was also symmetrical). I took another day to make my biolab inserter/belt setup. Also symmetrical, and looked great. Because I was using 1x8 trains, my train grid was pretty huge, and I had to do a 3x3 grid to get all 12 sciences inputted and inserted. Just to make all of the legendary stuff I needed for this, took about a week of improving, building, etc. After about a week, everything was built, and I was ready to start hooking up my science inserts to my new train grid and watch my beautiful creation work.... (continued below) As I attached the last science... the light green science from Gleba, I remembered... they spoil. None of this will work, because they will be completely (or mostly) spoiled by the time they get to the biolabs. I am dumb.

Hmm...

Well, what I'd suggest is pretty extreme. Do you have beacons on it yet and how close is your cargo hub to this location?

I feed my labs with half a belt of each, 2 of agri (because spoilage will otherwise always make it the weak link, in reality im always 85%+ but anything below 100 exactly would make it lag behind, so I round up to a full belt and a half for everything else). With how many sciences there are this leaves half a belt empty, my spoilage output.

Looks like you have belts come in on one side and daisy chain though, so im not sure how you could work around this

I was hoping I could do what I did pre Space-Age... create a grid template, and stamp it out as many times as I want to, place the pieces anywhere, and watch the trains zip all around the grid, no matter where the actual work was being done. But with spoilage, you have to consider how close things are to each other, how quickly you can move the (light green) science from one place to another, etc. I could maybe cheat and use trains for all of the other sciences, and really fast bots for the light green science, but that wouldn't be any fun. I'd lose all sense of symmetry.

It is, if not correct than valuable for everything else to have the grid. All other resources are brought in. Reason why I asked about the cargo pad, is because you can put that bad dock a hundred meters from your target location. Make it easy on the bots.

As for symmetry and design... I mean I get it. But, you have to deal with the spoilage. Not with how the science hits the labs. Has this been made in such a way that spoilage can simply be put into an active provider chest?

Everything but the lab layout is right, so don't be too hard on yourself.