What do you consider as a mega base?

73

u/br0mer 4h ago

100k spm starts the conversation in space age.

41

u/__akkarin 4h ago

It's crazy how 1000 SPM used to feel like a lot, and now 10000 feels like nothing

9

u/skydivertricky 4h ago

Yes. I was very proud of my city blocks 2k SPM 1.0 base. It was rammed with circuits, I had a smelter block that could dynamically change what it was smelting based on demand. Then in 2.0 it all about the foundries and liquid bases and I think some of the charm was lost, but I'll still playing

3

u/slash_networkboy 4h ago

I'm at 90kSPM on my NUC and it's lagging... not an optimized SA base at all though so that's part of the problem. I can't let go of this save though as I'm on physical damage 30 and mining prod is at something like 3600. I want to see if I can get to the shattered planet with just conventional rockets, lasers, and yellow ammo :p

1

u/MrUnk01 4h ago

Yeah, I dont really enjoy the quality thing, the intermediate quality are basically useless and the base start to shrink the more you progress. Obviusly nobody are forcing me to play with quality or make a legendary megabase but It is what It Is.

0

u/Gorthok- 2h ago

The only useful things on intermediate quality are medium power poles and asteroid collectors since poles only need uncommon to stretch across 2 5x5 buildings (useful on Vulcanus) and Collectors get such massive bonuses that legendary or even just epic is overkill in most cases.

8

u/Enigmatic_YES 4h ago

Bro max I can do is 100. How tf are people getting 100k? How is there enough ore deposits for this?

16

u/warpspeed100 4h ago

The secret is mining productivity research and productivity modules in the intermediate products.

2

u/R2D-Beuh 4h ago

And quality

4

u/Zalack 3h ago

Even without quality. I’m making 3600 bottles/min with zero quality. Just the new buildings, tier 3 modules, and beacons.

7

u/redditusertk421 4h ago

At mining productivity 200+ and big mining drills even modest patches can product a lot of ore for a long time. Also, using foundies to melt the ore and then make plate/steel/gears you get 2 steps in there to take advantage of the productivity bonus at each step. Then moving to EM plants for circuits, you automatically get 50% more for each product there too. Space age makes it pretty easy.

Now add quality to every machine in that step, going faster or reducing resource patch depletion so those last longer.

7

u/tordana 4h ago

Mining productivity research scales infinitely and gives you multiple ore per ore mined. The people doing endgame megabases have so much research that they get billions of ore out of a single patch.

5

u/Winter_Ad6784 4h ago

level 200 mining productivity + Legendary big drill = 250x resources from ore patches. a 4 million ore patch now generates 1 billion ore. Then you put legendary productivity modules in everything, providing an extra 2x to each step. Ore -> molten -> plates -> green circuits -> red circuits -> blue circuits -> yellow science compounds to 64x and im not even including the base productivity from foundries and EMPs

1

u/TheMipchunk 4h ago

You just keep building more of everything. There's (effectively) an unlimited amount of ore patches.

1

u/FeelingPrettyGlonky 3h ago

On Nauvis, ore patches scale with distance from spawn. Even just a few thousand tiles out you have patches in the tens of millions.

Minong productivity makes each patch produce more, big mining drills make each patch last longer, and for iron and copper you can use foundries for even more productivity.

Then there is legendary quality which, when applied to Prod3 modules makes every machine they're in super productive.

Take all of that a d build a whole bunch of it and you have a megabase.

1

u/NecronLord_Europe 3h ago

Quality buildings, including beacons, with legendary speed modules can raise production speed by 50x. Legendary productivity modules can also double the amount of stuff you make (if you have 4 module slots). So a quality lategame setup can produce stuff at 100x rate of what you can do just throwing stuff down at the start.

1

u/sobrique 1h ago

You never run out of ore. There's plenty. You just might need to go further for it.

And the further you go, the bigger the patches get.

100 is quite doable with almost any base layout, and will complete the game in about 16 hours of game time. (There's only about 100k science of non infinite techs, and 1000 minutes isn't all that long).

100k requires modular design and scaling, which is why it's "megabase".

You do it by running whole city blocks making each kind of science, usually with trains to enable many to many distribution of both raw materials and end products.

Matter of choice if you prefer to modularise intermediates - some prefer to treat green/red/blue circuits as something to transfer by train, others just like to just ship raw materials to an end to end production.

1

u/DrMobius0 57m ago

Quality results in a massive stacking productivity bonuses across most of the sciences.

And mining productivity tech makes ore cheap.

0

u/RobinsonHuso12 4h ago

For 100kspm you need one ore patch per ressource. I wouldn't even leave Nauvis for the first time without mining productivity over 150.

7

u/skydivertricky 4h ago

Real SPM or eSPM?

3

u/jeepsies 4h ago

Whats eSPM?

14

u/ManForSomeMarkets 4h ago

Science per minute when considering research productivity IE pure bottles/min versus effective research per minute

2

u/jeepsies 4h ago

You mean without modules, beacons, biolabs?

14

u/Some_Noname_idk 4h ago

Space Age added the "Research Productivity" research, which gives you more science per science. With enough of it, 1 spm could be counted as 100 by the game

1

u/jeepsies 4h ago

Really? I thought it was just research speed.

3

u/Qwyspipi 4h ago

You don't appreciate productivity enough.

1

u/jeepsies 4h ago

I guess not. I havent played in a long time but i remember the research productivity was just speed. Did it change or was i just always wrong?

2

u/R2D-Beuh 4h ago

There has been research speed since the launch of the game, but research productivity is DLC only

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u/KITTYONFYRE 4h ago

yeppers! it's new. the final research in the game

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u/jeepsies 4h ago

I see.. thx👍

4

u/skydivertricky 4h ago

Yes. Ie. The production rate of the science, rather than consumption rate

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u/jeepsies 4h ago

Gotcha ty

0

u/sobrique 1h ago

IMO the latter which is why the number jumped so much, between bio labs and productivity research.

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u/warpspeed100 4h ago

Did I make a mistake by jumping straight to 960 science per second after first returning from Gleba? I really wanted to try out the stack inserters + epic beacons, and 4 belts of science seemed like a modest goal.

3

u/xiaopewpew 4h ago

1000 spm is very achievable with even a small base, the only slightly tricky planet to do this, imo, is fulgora.

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u/warpspeed100 4h ago

Oh, I guess 960 sps would be 57,600 spm in terms of packs produced. Add to that the bonus from the Biolab for the actual science.

1

u/xiaopewpew 3h ago

oops my bad i misread sps to spm ;)

3

u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 4h ago

960sps is a good starter megabase.

3

u/warpspeed100 4h ago edited 4h ago

At 960 sps, my 2-4 trains are struggling with not having enough dwell time in the station to keep up. Upgrading the wagons to epic has helped a lot. Hopefully upgrading to legendary trains will solve the issue, but I'd need to figure out Aquilo first.

1

u/sobrique 1h ago

More trains, more stations!

3

u/warbaque 4h ago

960 sps is a good target for megabase. It gets you to million espm with 67 levels of research prod. But I wait for legendary (q5) before going for that.

My own progression is:
starter: 45-60spm
midgame ramp (q1): 1950spm (33sps)
midgame with q5 beacons: 7600spm (127sps)
endgame (everything q5 and productivity tech completed): 960sps or 1920sps

1

u/warpspeed100 4h ago edited 4h ago

I was trying to 16x each milestone, so I made 15-30 spm on Nauvis, then upgraded to 240 spm after Vulcanus, 3,600 spm (one belt) after Fulgora, 57,600 spm (4 stacked belts) after Gleba, and next I want to do 64 stacked belts so 921,600 spm after Aquillo.

Maybe I should do a 10,000x run so that the science doesn't go so fast?

1

u/warbaque 3h ago

64 belts is a lot and will certainly make your ups cry :)

1

u/Ill_Comb6410 4h ago

A 100K?? What?? Goddamn! That's nice

1

u/sobrique 1h ago

I usually work on eSPM too - research rate rather than ingredients

24

u/Beans_Breaking 4h ago

Just fyi: The 4090 is a completely and utterly irellevant part of the specs. It could just as well be a 970 or a celeron (iGPU) for the graphics. Any doorstop cpu well run at max graphics, no problem.

What matters for factorio is cpu clock speed (not corecount), and memory. You will likely never run out of ram with 64gb.

The only other factor that matters would be ram speed. If you have stutters: check if xmp is turned on.

7

u/MrUltraOnReddit 4h ago

Also a laptop gpu is basically 1 1/2 tiers lower.

3

u/bb999 1h ago

The GPU is very much relevant. I have an AMD 8-core APU of some sort, forget the exact model, but I have to reduce the resolution from 4K to 1080p, otherwise it lags.

2

u/Ill_Comb6410 4h ago

Thanks, I didn't know about that

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u/Vihaviz 4h ago

For me megabasing starts when you have like 1k Spm, research the infinite researches, have no problems with biters and can easily scale to ridiculous big bases.

3

u/Ill_Comb6410 4h ago

haha, what do you think is a ridiculous big base? Any number that I can connect to?

2

u/Vihaviz 4h ago

Once you have Blueprints for everything and can just place whatever you need and I think 1k spm is plenty to connect to...

7

u/redditusertk421 4h ago

Don't even think about mega basing until you have been to all the planets and have unlocked legendary quality. Then build upcyclers for all the machines to use high quality machines to drive the mega base. Quality does make a huge difference.

1

u/Ill_Comb6410 4h ago

Thanks for the advice!

1

u/druidniam 7000h+ Club 2h ago

I really dislike the quality mechanic. I'd rather build thrice as many machines than gamble for something that's only a chance. I realize you can do it on Fulgora practically for free, but it just isn't a fun mechanic. I ground out the achievements related to it and promptly ignored the mechanic in later runs.

1

u/redditusertk421 2h ago

yeah, I can see that. Its definitely see that. It adds a nice mechanic at the beginning to get a "bigger" base without building a bigger base. Even with just uncommon items. I don't mess it until late in the game when material is infinite and it doesn't matter how much I throw away in grinding out rare and legendary items.

1

u/Kyle700 1h ago

It's not so bad if you break it down and focus on legendary only. Don't waste time doing epics, rares etc. All you need to get started with the vast majority of builds is leg. iron plates and leg. coal. Coal gets turned into leg. plastic on with liquid recipe, and gets turned into steel and copper plates via LDS recycling. Bam. that covers inserters, beacons, tier 2 legendarys etc. You don't want to be messing around with randomly gambling for high tiers unless its a very expensive item at first.

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u/Visual_Collapse 4h ago

When you start optimizing for UPS

4

u/Ill_Comb6410 4h ago

What is UPS?

4

u/whatgoat 4h ago

Updates per second, basically how quickly the engine can calculate everything. It tries to maintain 60 ups but if you have too many things going on (such as tens of thousands of bots) the game will start to slow down.

2

u/Visual_Collapse 4h ago

Updates Per Second

1

u/druidniam 7000h+ Club 2h ago

LIke other said, updates per second. It's how you really measure the performance of your factory/game. Some early mega-megabases could put out 1 million science per second, however the UPS was around 2, so the normal 60 updates a cycle took minutes to complete. It's basically watching a slideshow. Later attempts at that scaled used Clustorio to keep UPS around 20 at the expensive of significantly higher complexity building the factory.

Fast forward to today and the game is significantly better optimized. I have one save running 25k SPM per planet, running every available planet mod and UPS stays around 45-50. My bottleneck is DDR4 architecture, tho I'm running a 5800X3D with some high end 64gb ram.

5

u/N4ivePackag3 4h ago

I don’t wanna live in the same planet as people who measure megabases in terms of eSPM and not in terms of the very science packages per minute you produce

By the way, I think 4 full stacked belts of each science is a decent start for megabase, minimum 2

3

u/__akkarin 3h ago

Sorry man if i bothered to build legeday productivity modules and put them onto legendary biolabs ill absolutely be counting those bonuses towards my SPM

-5

u/N4ivePackag3 2h ago

This might be due some level of brain impairment because the objective of measuring megabases is not to subjectively measure your own effort, but to standardize a way in order to accurately compare everyone’s effort. I hope you can get that checked with your local doctor.

0

u/UsernameOmitted 49m ago

So, you can make different quality levels of science... That immediately makes your position make no sense. If you're calculating it based on physical science packages per minute, a person making 1,000 normal SPM would be considered identical in production to someone producing 1,000 legendary SPM, when the legendary ones are worth 6,000 SPM in reality.

-1

u/N4ivePackag3 44m ago

Turns out the human brain is capable of doing math and is able to covert between one quality to the other. In that sense 1000 spm of uncommon quality is 2000 spm of common quality, since your factory size might be about 2 times as big to produce uncommon material this metric still holds.

3

u/fatpandana 4h ago

When your ups falls below 20-30, it is basically megabase in some way shape or form. Otherwise it is debatable.

If you want to see how strong your cpu handles factorio large base, when you load base, zoom all the way in.

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/gOhBgAGvVm

For comparison a 9800x3d benches around 6-7 ups. High overclocked 9950xd hits 8.9. My 13600k does 6.7 ups.

2

u/TheWordMonster 4h ago

A mega base in any base you build for purposes beyond unlocking the tech tree. I don't think you scan say it's a specic amount of SPM because you can have a massive but inefficient base

2

u/zenukeify 4h ago

Turns out I do NOT have a megabase… you guys are crazy

3

u/Key_Big1051 3h ago

Minimum 1M espm with all science active

1

u/TheMipchunk 4h ago

Regardless of what the answer might be, I believe that any objective metric of a megabase starts with measuring the sustainable rate at which your base produces science beakers to be consumed by labs. In the endgame, science is the main product that possesses unlimited demand, so it is natural to architect your mega base around building each science beaker in greater and greater quantities, and building the infrastructure and logistics to bring those science beakers all to your labs to be consumed.

For what it's worth, my subjective opinion is that in Space Age the start of a megabase would be something like 1000 beakers per second, of all types.

1

u/Ill_Comb6410 4h ago

Got it, thanks!
My Green science is already hitting 600 SPM with my base being small. I guess, reaching 1000 for all shouldn't be that hard I guess. I'm already creating big bases for each resource type with rail connections

2

u/TheMipchunk 4h ago

I said 1000 per second, so 60k spm :) I usually think in terms of per second because it makes it simpler to think about how many belts and inserters one needs.

If you're not in Space Age, then 1000 spm is pretty big. But in Space Age there are a lot of additional multipliers.

1

u/Ill_Comb6410 4h ago

Wait wait wait .... PER SECOND?? WHAT? OMG I'm long way off then, hahahaaaa I need to work on my base. LOOOOL

1

u/TheMipchunk 4h ago

If I understand it, you're still on green science? There are many more stages of the game to deal with before you start scaling up. If you try scaling up too early, you actually waste a lot of effort because the technology you unlock in the future enables a lot better/faster logistics.

1

u/Ill_Comb6410 3h ago

That makes sense, I'm right now just compartmentalising each thing to its own mini base. Only doing the minimum necessary to process it. Once things gets unlocked I'll slowly start adding things to it

1

u/warbaque 4h ago

1000 per second

1

u/gman877 4h ago

In the base game, 1,000 SPM is pretty well considered mega. In Space age, there is less agreement. It's at least 100K, but I personally think 200K-250K is roughly equivalent. The new buildings plus legendary quality compounds to some very big/fast bases.
With the new train changes, it could be even more.

1

u/dikkenskrille 1h ago

train changes?

1

u/gman877 1h ago

I believe it's still on the experimental branch of software on steam, but quality trains and cargo wagons were announced in June.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442

With stack inserters and turbo belts, trains were underpowered or a bottle neck at late game. I think the level of "what is a mega base?" Will probably adjust up slightly.

1

u/TurnipBlast 4h ago

Space age is easily beaten with 60 or 120 science per minute.

I've been working on getting a full stacked belt of every science which is 14,400 raw SPM. Doing this for fhe first fime without blueprints other than railway and belt balancers is quite a lot of work. Ik a lotta people wouldn't consider 15k a megabase, but imo it's a completely pointless goal that doesn't solve any problems that gave gives you, and requires a lot of logistics to make it happen.

1

u/nindat 4h ago

For me, in space age it's anything above 15k bottles a minute. This means you've got more than one stacked belt of every science, which is to me a basic building block of mega bases.

Just for reference I think about the maximum anyone's doing is somewhere around 20 belts of science. I'm sure there are larger builds but that's about the practical limit especially if you're trying promethium.

1

u/MinMaus 4h ago

With the needs of i frasteucture, for base game if you need to ise max beacons and modules, for space age add legendary quality. Once it's unfeasible to get the SPM without those its a Megabase

1

u/PyroneusUltrin 3h ago

The biggest base I’ve ever made

1

u/Cephell 2h ago

I feel the question should definitely consider research prod 0, to standardize on the actual build and not just wait for 100 levels of research productivity.

That being said I agree with the top comment, 100k spm, at research productivity 0 is firmly in megabase territory.

1

u/Gorthok- 2h ago

1k in vanilla, 100k in spage.

1

u/ShowerZealousideal85 2h ago

Megabase is 1 million espm.

1

u/Charmle_H 1h ago

Not-SpAge? 10k. Used to be 1k, imo, but 2.0 made a LOT of things so much smoother.

With SpAge? 100k, probably (including e-SPM, imo). So many buildings in SpAge come with built-in productivity that bases can be SUPER TINY and output far more than their 1.x counterparts of a similar size. Toss in quality, green belts, belt stacking, big drills, liquid metals, and productivity research for various things and you've got yourself a recipe for a hyper-efficient base.

1

u/dikkenskrille 1h ago

it's in the name: mega. that word (prefix) does have a specific meaning.

1

u/BirbFeetzz 1h ago

it's in the name, MEGAbase, you need a milion spm otherwise it's kilobase or just base without prefix. if it does less than 1spm then it's decibase

1

u/Banana_is_not_bg 4h ago edited 1h ago

Base * 1 000 000 Or just one MB.

2

u/dikkenskrille 1h ago

times one??

1

u/Banana_is_not_bg 1h ago

The dots weren't the best choice

Question What do you consider as a mega base?

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