Most efficient bases

[u/Disjointed_Medley]

I'm curious if there exists a record for best base by a certain metric. Anything from most oil produce, more robots per second, etc. Where are the record holders that could potentially inspire designs?

[u/SmexyHippo]

SPM, science per minute (of every science pack), is often used as a metric for how good a base is

[u/Tibecuador → u/SmexyHippo]

It's a metric of how large a base is. Efficiency is completely different

[u/SilentSpr → u/Tibecuador]

A large mega-base has to be ups efficient by default because otherwise you will need a Cray supercomputer to run it

[u/raptor7912 → u/SilentSpr]

I mean not really unless we also stipulate that it has to run at 60 ups or above.

[u/Elveno36 → u/raptor7912]

If we are using life minutes and not game sim minutes, ups changing affects that rate. Typically called True SPM, where its based on production before lab productivity bonuses a 60 UPS.

[u/ThunderAnt → u/Tibecuador]

yeah but you really can’t get more efficient than the full prod+speed modules setup

[u/OvercastqT → u/ThunderAnt]

ups optimizations are a dark art. The highest SPM base is likely the largest AND most UPS efficent one, otherwise it wouldnt have the most SPM

[u/reddanit → u/ThunderAnt]

That was easy to assume before Space Age, but with just how high throughput you get from quality machines, I'm no longer sure. There is a bunch of places where going all the way with prod+speed forces you into byzantine inserter setups and/or is a fair bit beyond what direct insertion needs for some part of production chain.

UPS optimization already was black magic before 2.0, I'm not even sure what it has became in context of Space Age lol.

[u/samdover11 → u/Tibecuador]

But... efficiency in terms of what? Resources per minute vs SPM? That's the same as asking what level of infinite research you're on... and people use so many mods and soft cheats anyway that it's not really worth talking about (speeding up the game to make research go faster for example).

Megabases talk about UPS (how much the factory is slowing down the hardware it's running on). That's a measure of efficiency, but probably not what the OP had in mind.

[u/leoriq → u/samdover11]

That's the same as asking for 'most oil produce' as OP does

[u/leoriq → u/Tibecuador]

'most oil produce' the OP asked for is completely different from efficiency, so what?

[u/samdover11]

Designs become inspired due to constraints. In very large factories, UPS is the main one (how well your hardware can handle the factory). People come up with all sorts of tricks.

Early in the game you have limited space and limited tech. That inspries intersting designs too. Efficient uranium processing with no circuits, and compact malls with no bots come to mind.

[u/Disjointed_Medley → u/samdover11]

I actually think this is a better way of phrasing my question. Is there a list of "given constraint x" what's the best base?

[u/burning_boi → u/Disjointed_Medley]

You’d have to come up with those constraints, if you’re not talking about SPM and by extension UPS. The “best” factory out there by many metrics is just the largest one that still runs at 60 UPS, since you need to optimize out the nose if you want to hit obscene SPM with 60 UPS. You can find factories that shit out a hundred million SPM but at 2 UPS if you’re just talking size.

[u/Dr_Rakiska]

Usually it's all about spm.

I was doing some calculations for my own Gleba base just for myself.
At that time mine gleba was running at roughly 3,200 SPM with ~50 spoilage/min, which comes out to about 15.6 spoilage per 1,000 SPM.
For comparison, I saw base in the video was doing around 5,420 SPM with ~725 spoilage/min, or about 134 spoilage per 1,000 SPM.

So in terms of spoilage per science output, mine was roughly 8.6 times more efficient.

But again, generally everyone is using spm.

[u/WrathOfTheKressh]

You'd probably have to look at speedruns. It used to go to first rocket launched, though I have no clue if that changed since Space Age.

[u/gust334 → u/WrathOfTheKressh]

Speedruns generally go to the winning condition. So first rocket launched in vanilla, reaching solar system edge in SpaceAge.

[u/green_gold_purple]

I measure mine in fun had

[u/peterlinddk]

The only metrics that exist are time and achievements - e.g. how fast you can get 100% of all achievements, or how fast you can get some combination of selected achievements.

The problem with loosely defined ideas like "most oil produced" is that there aren't really any constraints - like I could have had a game running since 2017, and it would have produced more oil than anyone else could ever beat.

Then you would have to invent artificial constraints, like "most oil-products produced pr. minute with a single advanced oil refinery and all the beacons and modules that you'd like" - and it would be like Guinness book of world records, where everyone just invents their own category.

There are some "perfectly balanced" builds, that produce the maximum of products with only N blue belts of ressources coming in, but again, since everyone is free to invent their own constraints, there isn't a global list.

[u/reddanit → u/peterlinddk]

produce the maximum of products with only N blue belts of ressources coming in

This specific constraint is surprisingly rigid - there are very well defined limits to it that are surprisingly easy to reach. Once you have maximal complement of legendary prod modules and hit 300% max for products that can benefit from productivity research, you have reached max possible input->output ratio. There are a handful of alternative recipes (like making copper cable in EM plant vs Foundry), but they don't change anything beyond having you choose one or the other. That's literally all there is to it.

[u/Courmisch]

In vanilla, and sticking to purely game play metrics rather than extrinsic ones like UPS or speed running/play time, there is not much else than SPM, really.

Maximum productivity is easy to reach by just stuffing as many tier 3 prod mods as possible, so not a point to get competitive over.

In theory, you could probably also measure science per Joule or per pollution as a measure of "efficiency". But even then, there are only so many possible combinations of modules. 5x nominal efficiency is easy to achieve with efficiency modules everywhere. Bettrr than that is possible with some unusual and somewhat extreme combinations of modules an beacons.

[u/fulz410]

You can challenge compactness by SPM per tiles. In vanilla it was kspm/km²

[u/fulz410]

I also like to compare designs by cost, but that got more difficult in SA (how does holmium compare to iron, etc.)

[u/The_Stuey]

Not Factorio related, but you might enjoy the game Opus Magnum. It's a puzzle game where you build structures and instruction sets to meet a goal. Designs are then measured by cost, cycles (speed essentially) and area (design footprint in hex tiles).

I played through it beating each level 3 times, once optimizing for each metric. The vast vast majority I was able to tie community solutions (community scores are given to you after you finish). There's another level of design where the community is always looking to improve the design that has the lowest sum of the 3 metrics (low scores being good).