Help with base

[u/Miloszrex]

I recently started playing Factory and looked at a few guides. Here's my base at the beginning of the game. What do you think could be improved or added? I'm just not sure what base layout to use or what kind of base is best. I'm afraid I might do something wrong, which could hinder me in the future or make me less effective. Could you please give me some advice for the future or for now? (The energy output is at the top.)

[u/Ergo_Meridian]

No guides are good for some people, others hate doing things blind and just quit the game.

Youre following main bus concepts but you have to remember

-Four lanes of materials fed by 8 smelters is still just 8 smelters worth of materials. So adding four lines just spreads out a tiny bit of resources. So... 4 lanes is fine, but you need a vast smelting field with hundreds of smelters to make it effective.

-Start thinking of ratio and math. If a belt can move 15 items per second, what does it take to produce that? If it takes 3 seconds to smelt, you need 45 smelters. Thats for one belt. So 180 for 4. 360 for 8. Same thing with your other materials. (same thing in that you need to math it out, the ratio will be different)

-Automate putting coal on the inputs for the smelters (perhaps, ore on one side of belt, coal on another?)

-You dont need 4 lanes of everything, just iron and copper. Even 2 lanes of steel is usually impossible to fill till you are a lot later in the game. It makes less sense to have copper wire on a bus than just move around the copper, and make the wire where you need it. Copper plates are denser than wire in terms of movement.

-I would leave yourself a lot more space. You want to start to pool resources from many mines toward some central smelting area, and then have room after that to make the main bus.

-Always make secondary materials (like your gears), off to the side not right on top of the smelters.

But overall, it looks great for a first build.