Factorio Forums

Setting: (very?) high water, (very?) high fragmentation, RSO, all else normal (I think). This yields a sort of archipelago with connected and disconnected islands. This gives fun logistics challenges and allows me to ignore the biters for a while as they can't swim, so a "cleaned" island remains clean. (This is also somewhat risky as it means evolution factor will be pretty high before I get enough artifacts to get good combat gear.)

Mods: FARL, landfill, warehousing, RSO, rail tankers, and probably a bunch more.

Design rules / limitations:
Up to green science there are no restrictions, i.e. set up normal base for the usual goods and red+green science

From green science on: all new production has to happen in separate/dedicated factories on different islands. Mines produce only the ore (no local smelting), and every station is a "company" with a single output item or a group of related items. E.g. ASML produces green circuits, Intel red circuits, and IBM will produce blue circuits. Corus produces iron and steel, the Stone Works produce stone, bricks, and concrete, etc.

When all basic goods are produced (currently lacking belts/inserters) I will disband starting area or convert it to a dedicated academy. I will setup one or more storage areas to have the basic stuff needed for my character.

From blue science on (not there yet), I will probably go "beltless", and have factories work with just robots (possibly excluding mining/smelting?)


"Company" (sub-factory) design:
Every input should have a dedicated train set to wait indefinitely until empty. Warehouses will be used at all train (un)loading, but may be limited at unloading sites to prevent overstocking for goods used in more than one place. This prevents empty trains from driving around (unless a good is "sold out", but that shouldn't happen), but also means a station is needed to every item to be (un)loaded.

Trains are single-headers using roundabouts. Stations are (generally) anchored at two sides with a roundabout, with 2 routes totally clear, and inspection/passenger station, and a dedicated track for each good.

Production chains should be directed away from the station, so they can be extended "indefinitely" (i.e. until the island runs out).

Progress / Screen shots:

I will just post a single teaser screen shot now, I will post a map and some more screenshot next time I play.

This is my battery plant:



As you can see, the rail yard takes much more space than the factory itself. This will be improved if the factory expands (although I'm not sure I'll ever need 100 chemplants making batteries )

Bottom right are the input stations: iron, copper, and sulphur*. Top left is the factory itself, which is almost trivial: one plant makes sulphur gas, the rest batteries. Top right is the battery loading dock, only a single warehouse at the moment.

This was a mining site before I made the battery plant here, as soon as it is depleted I can expand the tracks so every station also gets a waiting bay.

* my chemical company makes plastic and sulphur, so transport is easy - will need to use tankers for lube later on.

Overview of the whole network:



For most factories, the rail yards are much bigger than the factory per se. For example, this is the stone works: (the station is not wide enough, so it should be expanded in the future)



The most ridiculous ratio of station:factory is the current version of the battery plant:



The general setup of each factory is a horizontal station between two roundabouts, with one set of rails that should always be clear, one passenger station (prefixed AA), and one (un)loading station for each good. Input goods have trains set to wait indefinetely, so the train will only ride when there is a shortage. Maybe I should put all chain signals on the through tracks to prevent deadlock, but this is more efficient (as otherwise the whole station becomes one block for through trains). The reason for the unloading stations being so far to the right is that there was an iron mine on the left, now that it is depleted I can

The corus iron/steel smelting has the biggest rail yard:



Since I ran into trouble with too many ore and iron trains, I expanded the rail yards an improved the setup for loading/unloading:




For ore, iron, and steel, the warehouses are sandwiched in between two rail lines so two trains can load / unload simulatenously. Moreover, there is room for two trains waiting behind each (un)loading bay, so the system can deal with 6 trains of each type in the station. Each warehouse stores 40k ore or 80k plates, so the station itself is an impressive buffer.

The steel warehouses are balanced by placing smart inserters between them (see viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20605)

The iron ore warehouse has extra output capacity by placing the warehouses 3 apart and running a central line through them. Since train->warehouse has stack bonus but warehouse->belt doesn't, I think this improves general throughput.

Smelting is done with coal and is trivially extendable by simply building more or longer columns (although longer columns will require blue belts, so maybe I should use seperate belts for ore/coal, or have three belts (ore+coal / output / ore+coal), where each half of the column has its own feeder belt but the share the output belt).



The old starting location now has the red circuit production (Intel) and the Science Park (unpaved)



This is the circuit production and station. Since plastic and green circuits are shipped in, the factory itself is pretty trivial (and again, trivially extendable).



On the N side of the same station is the science park. I'm a scientist IRL so I figured I should pamper my colleagues with a nice lakeside location in the forest.

Inventory management for bulk goods is really easy by keeping trains there until empty and restricting warehouse capacity to the desired buffer size. Since each mining outpost has a buffer of 2x40k and the smelting site also has 2x40k buffer, there is a lot of built-in buffer space. Keeping stock of more specialized goods that are produced remotely (e.g. belts, inserters, etc) it is a bit more fiddly, but wagons with reserved slots plus smart inserters at the (un)loading station from/to a mixed warehouse should do it (e.g. at loading bay, smart insert (or request) into warehouse up to desired output buffer, at unloading smart insert into warehouse up to desired input buffer).

My current setup still uses chests instead of warehouses, but I'll change that when I move it to logistics:

Loading for inserters and belts: (the train also goes to the battery plant)


Unloading for inserters, belts, and batteries at the Science Park:


I would like to keep a train in the station until one of the stock levels is not full, this should be possible with a smart train stop.