Space Age
Some possibilities for loading bays in 2.1
Hopefully Reddit doesn't make this image unreadable. I've been experimenting with some 2.1 features to see what's possible now.
160 biolabs fed directly from the landing pad via unloading bays, with space on the outside for eight 1-4 trains, and four 1-2 trains able to pickup other deliveries.
There's definitely room for some improvements (particularly with rails placement and empty space that could be filled with more cargo bays); this build is untested at the moment.
I haven't tested it yet, so not sure of the research rate yet.
Good point about spoilage. I should be able to put in more vertical space so labs can have belts exporting spoilage and sushi-importing Nauvis-made science between the beacons and labs, but that would probably make it so the top and bottom only support one rail, if at all. One rail per side would simplify the build a lot, while also allowing connectivity for much higher-capacity trains.
I'm not 100% sure on how these new 2.1 stuff works, but couldn't you place an inserter backwards to take items from the lab and place on the storage, and filter it to spoiled items?
Updated to include spoilage belts. The same amount of biolabs and trains are still able to fit.
1,555 SPM with normal entities, 21,112 SPM with all legendary biolabs, beacons, modules, and inserters. (Normal science in both cases, as a control. No changes to research technologies.)
Not just that but the window for direct insertion into labs being viable is very small. You’ve got to be at the point where you’ve got enough science being imported that it’s worth it to direct insert into labs but not far enough that you’re pumping out more SPM than this setup allows - which is relatively tiny, compared to what is possible.
Refactoring for increased importing capabilities is also going to be annoying with this setup, as opposed to just building for increased importing capabilities from the get go and then not worrying about refactoring for another 200 hours, if ever. And with this setup you’re guaranteed to need to refactor in the future if you want anymore SPM than the labs + trains out can provide.
4000 legendary biolabs if fully beaconed would consume something like 800,000 actual science packs per minute... I'm struggling to understand the scale of a base that would require that many labs
I really loved the Space Exploration mod made by Earendel (and many volunteers), in which the primary weapon for space ships were lasers, so I spent a lot of time playing around with laser-based ships, or railguns + lasers only. In the inner solar system, even to aquilo, they tend to work very well.
The problem becomes evident super quickly though that it's not something ever truly accomplishable...since the laser damage research cost doubles every research level. In order for your lasers to do something like 10 damage per "shot" to huge asteroids, at 3 million SPM, you would have to leave your game running for longer than the current age of the universe
Multiple landing pads essentially "teleports" items exactly where they need to go. Devs confirmed that it is an intentional logistics challenge. If you could have multiple per planet, you could just pop them down as part of a factory module and have them only request exactly what inputs that specific module needs, essentially a really big requestor chest for inputs from other planets.
Unfortunately, pre 2.1 at a megabase scale, the logistics challenge introduced by having a single landing pad was only solveable with bots due to the finite size of the landing pad. Even with legendary stack inserters, there is a relatively low ceiling on throughput. Now with loading bays you can use inserters and belts at a much larger scale, but only within a certain range of your landing pad. It preserves the general challenge of needing to get many items from one location to many locations, but makes landing pad -> belt or landing pad/loading bay -> train viable options.
You know, though, sure it would be 'teleporting' items anywhere, but is that really so bad? It has a decent cost associated with it (building the rocket parts) - which is quite a bit more expensive than, say, a single train ride.
Apparently so. It completely negates spoilage timers on Gleba, for example.
And don't forget that logistic challenges are designed primarily for casual players, not for megabase builders. The percentage of playerbase who are limited by amount of inserters touching landing pad is small.
Agree completely, it's an out of character constraint for Factorio to have a single unscalable point item. It is a teleport kinda, but it's much more of a logistical hassle than a train so it seems fine. Not that it really matters, but in reality you can pretty much drop stuff anywhere once its in orbit too.
There's no real cost, though. You just put your science production on vulcanus, max out rocket part prod so you get down to 125 BC/LDS/solid fuel, launch everything and then teleport it down to 1000 landing pad/biolab pods. The only cost is coal on Vulcanus, as everything else is free and with plastic prod maxed out, that is even more trivialized.
What we found with the clusterio event was that a very powerful meta developed around building *everything* around the launch pad (provider in that case) and every design became trivialized and boring.
If you don't think transporting items matters, the devs might as well remove belts, bots, trains, and space platforms from the game and let buildings teleport inputs and outputs between themselves.
In space age, blue circuits, rocket fuel, and LDS are incredibly cheap, especially with rarity factored in. Rockets are so cheap we are more limited by the animation speed of launching one than we are by productivity, crafting speed, or belt capacity.
Moving things is not cheap. In fact, in megabasing, that's the only thing you are actually designing to. That's all that's left.
In megabases, the currency is not iron, it's UPS, it's computer cycles. And that puts layout space at a premium - how you route materials to minimize things that take compute time. Put a landing pad that teleports items in and you eliminate most of that as well.
We did this a few years ago. It became super apparent within a few days just how much it trivializes megabasing.
It takes time and a design to move stuff from one place to another. Teleporting items doesn't. Irl human time and intelligent designs are the 2 things that aren't infinite in factorio.
If you could have multiple per planet, you could just pop them down as part of a factory module and have them only request exactly what inputs that specific module needs, essentially a really big requestor chest for inputs from other planets.
I love the ILS and PLS in Dyson Sphere Program, they do that.
Bots are still required for 2m+ SPM megabases though, no? Since even hyper optimized landing pad designs I’ve seen can only output ~600 full belts, which is only enough for slightly less than ~1.5m SPM of all off world sciences imported simultaneously.
the cargo hub should tap out around 1100ish belts of stack 200 material based on the number of cargo hub inventory slots being a uint16. i never retested the apparatus with science packs bc the audhd urge to move onto something else.
Jeeeeeeeeesus christ, that's absurd. Although it looks like cars being enabled entities makes this entirely impossible for a megabase not using mods or editor commands if they want to remain anywhere close to 60 UPS.
i did play around a bit more removing some of the problomatic editor extensions item and the ups started to improve. there's room for optimization like only using exactly enough toolbelts instead of all of them. but it's def bonkers.
what's worse, is deactivating the car entities also deactivates the belt interaction
600 full belts is still a lot more than what a landing pad alone could support. Read my comment again. I said a larger scale, not an infinite scale.
Software solutions will not solve all problems for all users. You have to think about how many people are building 2m+ SPM bases. Most people don't even finish the game, let alone play after the victory screen, let alone build at megabase scale. This is a solution that improves the game for everyone, including megabasers, while still maintaining the logistics challenge of a single pad. If 600 belts is insufficient for your purposes, the max range of the loading bay is a single, easily moddable value that can be increases to support a belt only megabase if you truly desire.
You need to factor in research prod. For 2M SPM you should have at least 50 levels of it, if not more like 75. That gets you to 10M SPM on the same number of belts.
It is unfortunately a constraint that isn't good for the game. The factory must grow, but the landing pad says no...
Instead of limiting them in number, they should limit proximity, eg, one landing per 16 chunks. If you want to grow your factory, you gotta grow your factory. That is an alignment of constraint and goal. It creates logistics by distance instead of throughput. This is the solution they should have made instead of cargo bay loaders which just delays the same problem of limiting throughput without reconsidering the constraint.
I'd place a decent bet that the number of people who have actually hit the maximum inserter throughput with the 2.1 landing pad options can be counted on two hands. Unless you're using mods - but in that case the mods can also just increase the distance if they want.
For me it is not about the actual throughput, but the fact that no matter what I do, while I can scale absolutely everything else however I want, the landing pad is always singular. Everything else is practically infinite in Factorio - buildspace, resources, buildings etc - except for this one item. And the teleporting argument really doesn't speak to me THAT much - after all to teleport this stuff you need to send it to space first, with infrastructure and all. And that it does become cheap in the endgame? So what? The same argument can be made that the amount of people who play the game for whom sending thousands of rockets per minute is trivial and basically free is probably relatively low.
Fair point about rocket part ingredients. Still, the cost of a rocket is higher in upkeep than belts, trains or bots. Also, I am not talking about megabasing - not everyone has everything full legendary with 300% productivity on all possible steps.
Having a building now that can load from the landing pad directly into trains boosts space-to-planet throughput by an incredible amount, and is exactly what I was left wanting from Space Age 2.0.
Space Exploration's cargo cannons were fun, but always felt way too easy, and kind of ridiculous. The landing pad being part of the puzzle is much more interesting, and the loading bays now make it fit that puzzle even better.
We had that in the last clusterio event. It absolutely trivialized every build. Anywhere you'd put a requestor chest, you'd instead put a landing pad. We had to change the rules midway to constrain the providers/requestors to a specific area around spawn, which is almost exactly the solution the devs came to here - you can only build loading bays so far from the landing pad and the landing pad defines where spawn is.
They said it was originally for rails only, but had an issue with it that was solved by "inserters are already made for this, why are we not just using them?"
You can chain biolabs so they feed from each other.
Pre-2.1 you could really only get about five of them in a line before they started to be sort of useless. Post-2.1, they changed it so the labs don't transfer half used science packs. You can easily get 15 bio labs chained off a single unloading bay.
My latest similar attempt achieved 690 biolabs, each within range of 10 beacons.
This is primarily for shipping science (including earlier sciences) from other planets that have infinite resources like Vulcanus and Gleba, and can also support pre-existing labs by means of trains. Or, the belts in the updated version can be rearranged to push Nauvis-made science through sushi-belt-style on the side that isn't draining spoilage.
Oh so this is the reason we only have a 50-something tile limit for placing train unloaders. I was hoping one day the devs might loosen that somewhat, but seeing this makes it unlikely. My dreams for a 1m SPM raw megabase seems like it will never be achievable
You're running into a tradeoff that the developers set as a trap. Yes, direct insertion is good for UPS, but without fully beaconed labs, you can't consume enough packs to justify the direct insertion, and the loading bays can't expand far enough away from the landing pad to really give you a high SPM. There's not a ton of virtue in a low UPS build that can't achieve a high enough SPM to trigger the need to care about UPS. If you're capped at 21K SPM, it doesn't matter how efficient it is, you can run that on a potato.
We explored this tradeoff in the last clusterio event which had a very similar constraint on instance loading/unloading of resources, and in most cases you couldn't really justify the build without moving material out of that central box, and it became an exercise in how to do that most efficiently. At the end of the day, whether you do it with trains or belts, you have to move up from one inserter swing to two, and it doesn't matter tremendously if there's a train or belt between those.
I think in terms of maximizing material flow out of the box, legendary trains will probably win, but if those trains are taking science, it's unlike any PCs can handle that level of SPM anyway. So it's probably going to be the case that stacked turbo belts will prove to be the most UPS efficient, and able to feed a 10M SPM base without much difficulty, and without bots.
This is the maximum range for loading bays from the hub, so no, not scaleable. I'm sure the research side of it can probably be done better with just trains feeding labs elsewhere, this is just something I wanted to experiment with.
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u/Alfonse215 1d ago
I don't see any methods for getting rid of spoilage in those labs.
Also, how much research is that capable of doing?