Factorio Forums

Russian dolls, Programs, Lanscapes, Trees, Factories, they have one thing in comon: Fractality - they show similar features on different scales.

What is an assembly machine? Basically a little factory.

What is INSIDE an assembly machine? Could it be another factory? Could it be another factory with other ASSEMBLY machines?

Where I come from it could!

Could it be factories all the way down? YES!

Do you remember the mod NESTT? Basically you go inside the train. But something is missing! The train inside the train. The loop is not complete. The law is broken. We must fix it for assembly machines! Every assembly machine is a small room where things go in and things come out. Small inserters and small assembly machines are used to process the items. Each level does its duty.

But I only have finite memory and time, I would never get down to the deepest level!

You don't have to. We can use the law of recursion by placing an assembly machine of the same type inside another assembly machine of the same type*. Mathematical series expansion will take care of the details how effective the machine will be with a recipe and the end result is an assembly machine we can place on the top level**.

*: Or inside second type of assembly machine which by logic is also inside the first as the first is in the second.
**: Talking about the top level... you know we use rockets to get to space where we build a platform. On that platform we'll build hyperrockets to take us to hyperspace... to build a hyperplatform. You know where this goes. Hyper hyper!

I strongly recommend your Factorio-guy to take less Somnacin.

I always thought it would be nice to have a feature like that: making complex assemblers or ("factory buildings") with assemblers inside.

This is how it would work:
You create a small factory (10x10 to 50x50) for making a specific product / list of products, with up to 3 transport belts going in from the left and 3 going out on the right. You then blueprint it, the blueprint automatically detecting what the input/output belts are as they are on the edge of the blueprint.

Later you can set them down as buildings looking like assembly machines in size 3x3, except you use belts on the left side for input and the right side for output (like the new loader would do or the slipstream mod). Alternatively they could be a little larger (like 5x5 to 10x10) and look like assembly halls/buildings where the inner workings are "indoors" and not visible.

These buildings would be only buildable by robots, as you need a lot of components (assembly machines, transport belts, inserters, ...) to build them, and robots could build them like in some other building games, with a progress bar (35 of 412 entities delivered).

Energy consumption would be the sum of the machines "indoors", as they actually are computed by Factorio, or maybe even more energy consumption due to "shrinking penalty". Another penalty could be to multiply the resources needed to build the building in the first place, like if you have 12 assemblers in there you'd actually have to deliver 36 to build it.

Now that I think of it, I thought about that before we had moddable surfaces, would it be possible to implement something like this as a mod now?

If this became a mod, it would be beyond cool...

Hehe see that very old thread:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1016 Idea: Factories

And more serious: This is already possible. See for example the NESTT mod.
viewtopic.php?f=97&t=18637 NESTT: Build your base inside a train


(or a bit similar thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=20759 )

Yes, I think this should be implementable in a mod since the NESTT is one, too. The way daniel describes it sounds very reasonable, implementable and buildable. This way the inside of the factory is a real place and the player could "go in" into to it. Having limited recursion inside by building factories inside factories should also be possible. The infinite recursion I envision is insane anyways .