A good starting base, full scalability

[Idlemind79]

Simply put, I love this game. It's the only game in a long long time that I will wake up in the middle of the night and make a note of something to try or some solution to a problem.
Anyhoo here is my starting base design after 4-5 games and thinking of long term scalability. It's a classic tree design with all the material in going south and all the material out going north. Nothing conflicts (I will have to move my labs slightly east at some point) and oil production / processing will be a separate production with outputs joining up with the main trench. My first couple of games were frustrating belt hells until I got the tree approach sorted. Gotta say in a way I liked my belt hell more as you had to get pretty creative.. this base just follows some simple rules and I am sorta going through the motions. I "cheated" a bit and made it easier on myself with ample resources and no water outside of the starting area.. I don't recommend it <yawn>. Hope this helps out some new player lost in belt hell:

[Trepidati0n]

Thanks for sharing this....it is a good topic. Not trying to steal your thunder; just add to it.

1. I agree with having a main bus for key items. For a first play through, a single copper and single iron bus are fine. Just don't go crazy. I would limit main bus to iron, copper, green circuit, steel, red circuits, gears. Just remmber to leave a gap of 2 tiles between pairs of busses (e.g. iron/copper..2 spaces, steel/red..2 spaces...green/gears.

2. While you can live without direct insertion from cables to circuits, I really don't recommend it since they are only used for electronics circuits (green) and advanced circuits (red). See the wiki -- https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... pper_cable

3. Leave more of a gap off your main bus for "other things". I usually recommend 4 tiles so you can fit a roboport in with zero effort.

So..I offer you what I do for all my bases. I usually to 5red and 6green..but for first timers and 3 and 4 is really good. It also has some initial storage of "key items". If you box those up, you can hand create the other things lightning fast relatively speaking. Just remember to limit the box size. I also recommend this design to other because it includes a lot of very basic things

• Splitting off a main bus (copper and iron)
  dual item bus (red green science)
  direct insertion
  long and short inserters
  underground belts
  side loading (iron into gears, inserter into belts)

[Bleda]

Pretty nice layout! You could try to start using both sides of the belts, if you don't need a very high capacity.

And instead of letting the branches go underground, you can let the main belts go underground, so you don't need so much free space between the lanes.

For compact and relatively balanced science factories, especially for red and green, there are lots of layouts out there, including one created by myself on the wiki. But I encourage you to figure that out for yourself, it's much more fun. You can chose your own priority, like compactness, simplicity or expandability...

[DerivePi]

Here are a few of my rules of thumb:
1. Organize the factory by department. This helps you remember where things are and limits what goes on the main bus. As an example, my basic logistics department develops inserters, long, fast and smart. The smart inserter requires the fast inserter, which requires the basic inserter. No other recipe requires the fast inserter, so it doesn't need to be on the main bus. Another example from the same department is the fast and express- belts, splitters and UG belts.
2. Items that take 1/2 second to produce and are not massively required in other recipes, should only need 1 assembler.
3. More of a pet peeve but - you get four underground spaces for each UG belt, using less is a waste.
4. Provide 4 sets of 4 belts on the main bus with 2 spaces in between -
5. As noted by Trepidati0n, provide at least a 4 tile gap from the main bus. This should be used by finished product storage, and for receiving belts from the main bus (see picture).
6. A mini-bus (shown in picture running west) can feed 6 ingredients through a department using an inserter, a long inserter and an offset long inserter to reach the 3 different belts.
7. I usually reserve 4 tiles to the other side of a row of assemblers for handling the outgoing material. One row for the inserters, the second row for chained production (pipes to underground pipes and engines) and a third row for delivery to local storage using smart inserters and red wires to control quantities.
8. I reserve the full width of the bus for the full length of the factory. At some point, I look to expand some of the production to an offsite factory (ex. circuit production). With the reserved lane, I can simply extend the lane from the import station and pipe the production in through the existing factory.

These pictures are from a previous post - https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 460#p64460

[Idlemind79]

Wow great posts, thanks. This game would be a good educational tool lol.

I am running all my production back up and out because I don't know what I'll need in the future (I've yet to research everything). I'll probably have to delete several long rows of belt that ended up serving no purpose.

I googled around but couldn't find a production tree to help determine this.. is there a popular one people use?

[Xterminator]

Nice start! A heck of a lot better than my first few tries
The advise everyone has provided is really good, and I can only agree with it. One thing I noticed, which isn't really a big deal, sense I'm sure your planning to add more labs later, but 3 red/green pack factories is far more than you need for 3 labs. :p

I like that you are already thinking ahead for scalability. But even so, I would leave yourself even more room than you have so far. I would say the one mistake I always make in every play through I do, is not leave enough room. 4 tiles off from the main buss is a good amount as other people suggested, as you can fit a Roboport, or a full length underground belt etc...

Great job so far!

[Idlemind79]

Nice start! A heck of a lot better than my first few tries
The advise everyone has provided is really good, and I can only agree with it. One thing I noticed, which isn't really a big deal, sense I'm sure your planning to add more labs later, but 3 red/green pack factories is far more than you need for 3 labs. :p

I like that you are already thinking ahead for scalability. But even so, I would leave yourself even more room than you have so far. I would say the one mistake I always make in every play through I do, is not leave enough room. 4 tiles off from the main buss is a good amount as other people suggested, as you can fit a Roboport, or a full length underground belt etc...

Great job so far!

I have about 6 or 8 labs now and need more potion manufacturing

I had some difficulties tying oil into this setup efficiently.. just a new learning curve. Is there a good guide for oil related production anywhere? It can be a bit confusing (figuring out I needed pumps was fun).

Also I agree with the other posts that it's better for your main bus to go under the tap offs.. I have so much production running back out to the main bus with no idea if I'll need it or not for some other manufacturing purpose.

Leaving room for future electric smelter was good.

[ssilk]

Some guides can be found in the wiki:
https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... #Tutorials

And this is also good: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 316#p40941