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Noob Blue Science Development

Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2016 3:38 pm
by Nitt
Hi All,

I thought I would post this as a new player wanting to develop blue science.

As a newcomer to the game I had no problem researching & developing red and green science for research, however I found myself stuck at setting up effective blue science. After having researched all I could re: green/blue tech, I found myself in a bit of a quandary. There are a lot of designs available but many of them rely on the use of mods to make them efficient or already have some sort of blue science developed.

I ended up finding a design which I thought I could adapt here (kudos to the original author). My design assumes no mods and no blue science development previously. As such it has been tweaked to make it work with the game knowledge I have. For me it seems a long-term solution to science development. I'm sure it can be modified to be more efficient but for me it works:

Image
Pic here

A few things to note:

- All belts are red (except some of the blue science feeders which are yellow). Inserters are blue. Red inserters speak for themselves. All stations are blue.
- No mods.
- Resources have been dragged from elsewhere (iron/copper plates, steel, coal, liquids). This has resulted in some very long belts/pipes.
- Purple science has been included for future upgrade (power outage symbol).
- No robotics/logistics.
- Upgradeable.
- Map: Peaceful, large, rich.
- The tangle of power poles is driving me nuts :(


It's not perfect - I am still having issues around petroleum production. A lot of flamethrower fuel and solid fuel from LO production are going into storage to maintain gas production. Aquiring cracking should take care of a lot of this.

I learned a lot from this exercise, the biggest being troubleshooting. It's easy to adjust a system to improve efficiency but to work out why something doesn't work is a different matter.

Hope it helps others. My next goal is to improve gas production through cracking. This is what is holding my efficiencies back atm.

Regards,

Nitt.

Re: Noob Blue Science Development

Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2016 12:30 pm
by Acarin
Good effort, sir :-) However, it may save you some brain-strain to browse the forums and Reddit before jumping in (or when you think that you have a workable design), as there are a LOT of ideas out there! I can't find the thread that gave me my current refinery setup (it may actually have come from factorioblueprints.com), but the important thing to remember for Advanced Oil Processing is that you will want 4 Refineries, 7 Chem Plants cracking Light Oil to Gas and 1 plant cracking Heavy Oil to Light Oil. This results in the maximum bang for your buck, assuming that your interest is PG for sulfur and plastic production.

There are tileable versions of this ratio, which makes things eminently scaleable, including builds which incorporate beacons (so that you can put PM3 modules in the refineries and Chem plants, and SM3 modules in the beacons for supercharged throughput)

Good luck with your base building :-)

Re: Noob Blue Science Development

Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2016 2:08 pm
by SamSam
Acarin wrote: for Advanced Oil Processing is that you will want 4 Refineries, 7 Chem Plants cracking Light Oil to Gas and 1 plant cracking Heavy Oil to Light Oil.
Pretty sure it is 5 refineries, actually :)

Re: Noob Blue Science Development

Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2016 11:57 pm
by Acarin
I think there was a long series of threads about this, with people arguing math back and forth, and I think you may be correct... but not if you are using Productivity Modules. However, for the OP's purposes, it would probably be worth checking :-)

Re: Noob Blue Science Development

Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2016 11:41 am
by Nitt
Thanks all for the encouragement.

Now that I have blue research I am in the process of upgrading my chemical plant, so I will certainly follow up on the correct ratios.

Putting this together was as much an exercise in understanding how the different manufacturing components work with each other and various methods on how to connect them while providing a long-term research setup. It was a great exercise and a good learning curve. The other part of it was the troubleshooting needed after connecting everything up and having nothing working.

So much more to learn and comprehend...

Re: Noob Blue Science Development

Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2016 1:57 pm
by Acarin
Lol, welcome to the world of Factorio :-D

Here's a good link to get you started on designing refinery layouts, btw:

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... inery_for/

Good luck!