Factorio Forums

Hey everyone,

I was wondering if I could get some advice on using Bob's Mods and Angel's Ores as I am now sort of stuck/overwhelmed on what to do/how to set my factory up.

I typically enjoy doing large main buses making all my things, but even at like 24+ lanes, I am nearly full, and just barely made it out of Nickel Processing. The bus usually has things that are stored for me to pick up on one side (belts, inserters, etc.) and the other usually has items that would go back on the bus (mostly circuits at this point).

Where I am really looking to get advice is how to deal with all these new methods of production and tips/ideas/suggestions for setting up my base so that there's some rhyme and reason to the madness.

What do you like to bus when using Bob's/Angel's mods?
Do you have large main processing areas (smelting, crushing, flotation, etc.)?

Sorry for being vague, all over the place, but any help to get me through the first part of the game is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
bbkdude

with my bus i moved all of the circuits to one side and made a mini bus strictly for circuits to handle all of the different types of boards, components and other bits. same with modules. with angels ore processing lines ive been remodeling the processing areas to have each type set up and wired up to only produce ores as needed. as you go down the sorting list the later ones are not always better than the previous ones so im setting it up to only run sorting on crushed, chucks, crystals, or purified ores if i need the ore that stage provides over earlier stages. and i set up the buffers to take ores from highest stage to lowest stage so the extra production is used before turning on a lower sorter type.

I would really recommend adding factorissimo to your mods if you have not already. It makes it much easier to make things less messy.

So basically you get stuff out of your bus with splitters and underground belts, resources go into factorissimo factory building, you set up assemblers and stuff in the factory and then end products come out of the factory. Makes things much cleaner and less messy.

I have an example save game in this thread viewtopic.php?f=18&t=35207. Its not perfect as it is my first attempt at bob´s but maybe you might get some idea or two out of it. Maybe even bad ideas. Its still quite messy and I could make it much cleaner by adding a few more factorissimo factories here and there. (If I would start over I would probably also only make the bus 2-3 lines per resource, not 4)



basically you then just expand your factory in small chunks. first set up basic electronics components, then go more advanced one step at a time with more and more advanced things assembled in factorissimos further up the belt.

Where I am really looking to get advice is how to deal with all these new methods of production and tips/ideas/suggestions for setting up my base so that there's some rhyme and reason to the madness.

Set up the angels ore processing AWAY from the main bus, and give it PLENTY of space. as you need to process 6 different raw ores, each of which can easily take up 20 tiles of width (or height, if you set it up that way), you need to reserve 120 tiles of width, and...crushing->floatation->chemical refining->thermal refining->Sorting is 5 steps, with around 20-30 tiles for each step, so 150 tiles tall, except you'll also want 6-8 tiles extra in each so you can bring the products to a special sorting zone later on, so reserve yourself a whopping 190 tiles of height. (you need the extra width if you don't know what you're doing so you can squeeze in some of the chemical production, such as flouric acid, where it's needed rather than finding yourself without a remotely convenient place to put it). You might not actually need that much space, since you'll want to chuck beacons at it anyways, but it's definitely better to reserve too much space for the ore processing than too little. Indeed, you may not desire to make a full setup at all...but again; it's better to have that space and not need it than to have to redo your entire ore processing just becuase you didn't reserve enough space.

You may need to have a separate crush and smelt area to get yourself started. Note that for any process other than crushing and smelting, you will always sort it before smelting it. Ideally, you will never have to move the sorting machines if you set up your stuff correctly. Bob's inserter configuration mod will really help here.


Reserve an area near the ore processing for slag and geode processing (these two interact a little bit; note that all of this needs lots of water), and an even bigger area reserved for angels refining (to multiply ore output if you desire it).

Reserve a giant area for angels refining. POint the output of the ore processing towards it.

Use wood as your source of plastic so you can just use the treefarm for it.

Use a one-sided bus so that you can expand the bus as needed.

You will get tons of sulfur once you start your slag processing up, as long as you recycle the sulfur waste water (also known as yellow waste water). You can get some sulfur water from most ore floatation to get yourself started, and can safely ignore most sources of sulfur.

You will also want to leave room for multiple purified water pipes coming in, as flotation demands lots of water once you really get going.

You'll not need to bus iron ore beyond the smelters/refineries, not even for ferric chloride; you only need a little bit of iron for it. One inventory of iron ore should last you until you get robots up and running.

You probably won't want to bus most of the gears or other exotic components like bearings; if you really need a few tier 2 miners, for instance, just handcraft them, build them on-site, or wait till bots.

Most of the things which use ferric chloride to produce have very similar other things they use, so you can produce these on the same branch of the factory.

Angels petrochems makes rocket fuel complicated enough to have a dedicated fluid bus all to itself.

You'll want to bot a lot of the gases like chlorine and hydrogen chlorine once you can, becuase otherwise you'll have to pipe them. However, most gases and fluids do not need to go on the main bus; the main exceptions are ferrich chloride, and maybe sulfuric acid and/or hydrochloric acid.

Get squeak through, and maybe far reach. This is a hard enough modpack combination WITHOUT needing to worry about what you can or cannot walk through.

Mendel wrote:I would really recommend adding factorissimo to your mods if you have not already. It makes it much easier to make things less messy.

So basically you get stuff out of your bus with splitters and underground belts, resources go into factorissimo factory building, you set up assemblers and stuff in the factory and then end products come out of the factory. Makes things much cleaner and less messy.

I have an example save game in this thread viewtopic.php?f=18&t=35207. Its not perfect as it is my first attempt at bob´s but maybe you might get some idea or two out of it. Maybe even bad ideas. Its still quite messy and I could make it much cleaner by adding a few more factorissimo factories here and there. (If I would start over I would probably also only make the bus 2-3 lines per resource, not 4)



basically you then just expand your factory in small chunks. first set up basic electronics components, then go more advanced one step at a time with more and more advanced things assembled in factorissimos further up the belt.

just keep in mind you can only build 255(?) of them before running out of "layers" and crashing the game. with a modpack like this, going over that limit wouldn't be hard.

fractalman, that was a most helpful reply, thank you!

I think it's time to give it another go.

Do you have any advice for dealing with the multitude of gases and liquids? I think I may start sending barrels of them down the bus instead of via pipes.

Also, do you have specific ways to deal with slag and crushed stone (outside of the Slag > Crushed Stone > Stone & Stone Brick (which I send down the bus))?

And I started to do stuff with the oil but was getting this purple Oil Residual item that I have no idea what to do with.

For ore unloading you could check out my topic viewtopic.php?f=194&t=39636 which is a useful design for unloading a large number of ores from a single station, then you just need to work out how to arrange the smelting.

I started a bus approach but my map genned me in a bunch of forests and it was very tedious trying to clear enough space, plus I was woefully underprepared for the sheer complexity of everything, so I opted for a modular approach. No main base, just outposts connected by trains. Tbh it was much more difficult to get started, bots are much harder to get in Bob's Mods (not even using Angel's) which made rails a pain, but once I got a Roboport in the car it became a much easier way of handling the increased complexity and it has been pretty fun messing about with so many trains, there are so many ways of implementing and tweaking them. The biggest advantage is that it gives me pretty much as much room I need to expand any module in almost any direction.

For example I've got separate outposts for Electronics and Circuits, though while I'm finding Electronics (especially Basic Electronic Components) are very high-volume which makes them difficult to transport it does make it easier because Electronics themselves need so many materials and so many steps to produce. Also two half-sized outposts are more easily manageable and Electronics can be shipped off to say Modules or Logistics (for bots) without needing to tack them on to Circuits.

bbkdude wrote:fractalman, that was a most helpful reply, thank you!

I think it's time to give it another go.

Do you have any advice for dealing with the multitude of gases and liquids? I think I may start sending barrels of them down the bus instead of via pipes.

Also, do you have specific ways to deal with slag and crushed stone (outside of the Slag > Crushed Stone > Stone & Stone Brick (which I send down the bus))?

And I started to do stuff with the oil but was getting this purple Oil Residual item that I have no idea what to do with.

You can liquiffy slag (requires a little bit of sulfur to get started), which you can then filter (using either coal filters (consumes coal) or ceramic filters (requires blue science, consumes only water)), then finally crystalize into useful ores. You'll get a surplus of sulfur when it's all done.

You only really need hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, and ferric chloride on the bus proper that I recall. The other gasses will mostly be used pre-bus to process some of the ores into plates, or as a one-step-and-done thing such as in the case of making plastic, or tungstic acid, neither of which should be bussed. It may be very useful here to do a playthrough with just bob's mods to get used to dealing with the gasses. I don't usually find it worthwile to bottle/barrel them until I've got robots running around, but then again maybe you'll find it easier to work with belts (since there's less chance of contamination).

As for oil processing, I usually discard or store everything except the green oil for lubricant (the jax pressure tank has tons of capacity), and the stuff used directly in plastic from wood fibers. I do remember that Synthesis gas is used somewhere, but I think you can discard it if you don't care to get deep into the petrochems mod.