Factorio Forums

Hi,
is it correct that i should use everywhere productivity modules inside the buildings and in the beacons speed? Or is there a way around?

I dont care for polution and or energy atm.

You cannot use prod in beacons at all, only on machines making intermediate products, so yes, the idea is to use speed in beacons to offset the speed penalty of the prod modules (since they do so additively, which makes the synergy much better than it would be if it were multiplicative).

are there any reasons to not put prod in where i can use it? without polution, slow, whats a good ratio in speed beacons per machine? Currently my beacons hit 5-10 machines per beacon.

Prod modules have 2 downsides: Additional power consumption & reduced production speed.

The reduced speed can be countered either with beacons or simply more fabs. Both costs space and initial ressources. If you have enough of both, its a no-brainer. Talking about the initial ressources spent, its a question of mathematics to calculate after what time the investment pays out.

Concidering the energy consumed, it again simply space and ressources for the power supply.

Often, I use 1 T3 speed module + 3 T3 productivity modules, which roughly doubles the effective output compared to 4 x Productivity - very late, I extend the fab and switch to 4 x productivity.

One of the main reasons to use productivity is that it is generally multiplicative with speed ones. So you put 8 speed beacons abound a building to make it 400% faster and then you multiply that by 1.4 by inserting productivity ones.
The end production rate is mostly the same as if you would install 4 speed modules (+200% speed) but you will need 1/3 less resources for production which is a major impact.
The effect goes even further while progressing through intermediates as the resource needed multiply with a number of intermediates used. For example if you would calculate copper needed for an item made using blue circuits you would see you will need near to one third of copper compared to no modules. This change is pretty huge as building new outposts is the most boring aspect of endgame

nuhll wrote:are there any reasons to not put prod in where i can use it? without polution, slow, whats a good ratio in speed beacons per machine? Currently my beacons hit 5-10 machines per beacon.

Depends on what matters to you:
If you want to min-max resource stretch (from stacking productivity bonuses), then obviously use them everywhere you can, however, some things it's hard to make effective use of Beacons to counter speed penalty (main examples are Electric mining drills and Oil refineries), if throughput per fixed cost or per energy is important to you at all, then you may want to forgo use of productivity modules there and either use Eff1, or nothing at all. Tier 3 modules are very expensive, which is why the fixed costs can be an issue if you can't use a Beacon'd layout nicely, and they also massively increase energy usage while lowering items/sec (which is a double whammy to energy cost per item) so it can make energy usage in for a reasonable throughput skyrocket (which has it's own fixed and possibly running costs associated with it).

If you aren't making mainly high-tier products, then you can't get as much mileage out of prod modules because there are fewer intermediate product steps in which to exploit them. In those cases, using Eff1's (and perhaps some Eff2's) to lower energy consumption to the minimum 20% is worthwhile, especially since Eff1 modules are cost-comparable to providing the power with solar, and have the added advantage of lowering pollution generated. This is another reason to hesitate on using prod modules: they spike pollution by a lot, since pollution is based on energy usage and is further modified by prod modules own pollution increase, and the two effects stack multiplicatively too.

If you do decide to go with prod modules, then there's no reason *not* to use Beacons for anything that isn't Oil refineries (because of size and needed space for pipes to handle all the fluids) or mining drills (can't get full coverage layout and fit beacons in, gaps are 2 tiles wide at the largest, Beacons are 3x3). The question then becomes, what is the best layout?:

Assuming you intend to eventually build to a very large scale (megabase territory). Then you really can't beat alternating rows of Beacons and 3x3 machines, you offset the Beacons 1-tile to the side relative to the assembly machine lines, so that each Beacon affects 4 machines per side, and vice versa (each machine is affected by 4 Beacons per side). The result, in the interior of the layout at least, is that every machine is affected by a total of 8 Beacons and likewise, each Beacon affects 8 machines. You can even widen the rows to give up to 2 tiles on either side of the machines (between them and the Beacons) which gives just enough room for a belt or logistics chest and an inserter to feed from there into the machine, you can also handle up to 2 Pipes per side if exploit underground pipes to keep the two pipes from forming any connections between them. You generally will need to find space for power infrastructure, but if you pay attention to your layout, you should be able to engineer 2x2 gaps in the insert/chest rows (if you go bot route) to fit in Substations to power it all. Most people make some extra beacons at the end of the rows to cap all machines at 8 Beacons affecting them, these Beacons are being under utilized but it's generally preferred to having the machines near the ends of the rows underperforming. Likewise, the exterior rows are usually Beacon rows for the same reason: to ensure all machines are getting 8 Beacons affecting them. The overhead scales linearly with the size of the production block (which with robots can be up to 50 units in one direction and unlimited distance in other; I would generally extend rows forever and substitute in a row of Roboports as needed to continue expanding the block; aim to keep it roughly square shaped to minimize overhead), whereas the core of the block scales quadratically with exterior dimensions (this why overhead tends to become gradually less significant as the layout increases in size).