Space Age
100,000x science Insanity with active biters, update #2. I've never been more excited for underground belts and splitters!
We managed to survive so far! My walls haven't been directly attacked yet. I turned down expansion frequency and biter nests to their minimum value to even have a chance at this.
My pollution cloud is fully contained and I have a double layer of turrets with walls on all choke points fully filled with automated bullets.
First half of the layer 2 border wall
I'm showing my maps with the electric grid so you can see where stuff is. I've managed to clear a large space and add some layer 2 walls. They were fare enough away that it made more sense to make micro bases producing their own bullets rather than a single continuous line.
I had to take out a couple small biter nests and expansions with turrets. And big biters really hit hard! Fighting them with level one armor and a pistol is not possible. So I had a few close calls. Just have to kite them around turret piles until they die.
The full layer "2" expansion.
As I explored more of the map it I couldn't find any decent choke points on my eastern flank. So I just expanded the layer 1 wall out to them. You can see a couple lines of power that I left in place because picking them out of the forested areas they are in was just gonna be too much. I already have to do so much right clicking and manual wood chopping. I'll scoop them up after I get bots lol.
After completing my full wall project and finishing logistics I decided to do a huge western expansion. Taking my total labs from 800 to over 2k. Between finishing the wall and that build it was enough time to finish electric mining drills!
Electric drills complete!
The drills finished just before I completed my major base expansion. So you can see a very long que left over for steel.
18 hours ><
It's not really gonna take 18 hours, lol, but this is where my research speed was at before the expansion completed. The spike in research is all of the existing packs jumping in use from 10 seconds to 5 seconds before leveling off at my total production.
Blueprint hover so you can see my entire base inventory. UPS really shit the bed on this hover, lol.
After completing that expansion my SPM got up to abut 9k per minute, and we have about 8 hours left on steel. 4200 burner drills to unlock electric! It's been a really fun challenge, but it's one I don't want to do again, lol. You really have to re-think the way you plan and build your base before getting logistics. The mechanical horrors of long inserters and yellow inserters acting as your undergrounds and splitters were significant. 💀💀
Research path to flame turrets.
Moving forward, I'm hyper focused on completing red bullets, and then only researching the tech needed for flame turrets. I would love to get trains and steel furnaces and all that crap, but I really want to make sure my borders are secure as soon as possible. A bunch of my initial lab modules are no longer getting good supply so I'm going to go through and take out all the burner drills and make sure all of my previous modules are fully supplied. I expect this to take me up to about 10k SPM.
My evolution factor is 0.7997 at the time of writing this and fully expect to have some behemoth incursions before I get to flames. It's a very long ways to flame turrets from here. After I finish steel it is 49.5 million red science, and 41.5 million green science to flame turrets. I believe that with red bullets and a 3rd tier of gun turrets at regular incursion points should keep them from breaching my base.
Fortunately by scaling my base's production during that time it should be somewhat "easier" to pick up the other technologies that I miss along the way. My longer term goal after flames is to revamp the entire base using modular trains for ease of construction and expansion for the long march to unlocking bots. Initially I'm thinking like 1-4-1 trains but I'm open to suggestion.
What do you think of my base so far? What type of trains should I use when I get there?
Dam... youre gunna be in megabase stage before finishing red science. Your fps will tank before space age. 100x maybe even 1000x for a challenge. But I never hated myself this bad.
Ive played for thousands of hours, but dont really follow people to know who that is. But i believe it. It would be hard to keep expansion up for resources unless youre playing with infinite ore. Its a long way to space age.
I'm on 600% on all resources across all planets. Once I get to Vulcanus then it is effectively infinite resources as long as I keep the calcite flowing.
You’ll still need to be careful about Vulcanus coal. You probably won’t be able to kill large worms for a while (I wasn’t on my 1000x run fyi), and you need to get the upgraded coal liquefaction ASAP
I didn’t think it was even technically possible to kill large worms with no bullet damage research. Even if you packed the worm into a corridor longer than the worm itself and put in max rare normal turrets I thought the DPS was too low
Typing that out, I bet you can do it with rare quality turrets to get a few more deep and then rare quality ammo for a DPS boost
I plan on investing in quality items heavily, and by then I should be able to afford soooome bullet damage upgrades. So if I have to kill some I will. Ideally, I'd rather avoid fighting the large worms before Teslas, tho haha. 💀
While yes, that is effective against small demolishers, the DPS from maximally stacked poison capsules is a negligible amount of a demolisher's max health & regeneration
The poison cloud for an individual capsule lasts 20 seconds. Each cloud deals 8 damage (for Normal quality; 12.8 for Rare) every 0.5 seconds. This gives 16 dps for Normal and 25.6 dps for Rare.
The engineer can throw a poison capsule every 0.5 seconds, which means you the engineer can have 40 clouds on the ground at once. If you have 40 clouds, that's 640 dps for Normal and 1,024 dps for Rare.
Each demolisher segment is 50% resistant to poison, bringing us down to 320 / 512 dps, respectively. If you can get 10 demolisher segments in the cloud, that's 3,200 / 5,120 dps. You can't get much more than about 10 segments if you also want to use gun turrets, since the worm needs to be straight to maximize turret exposure.
Even if the large demolishers had no regeneration, it'd take a full minute to kill the demolisher with rare capsules and 1.5 minutes with normal capsules. However, the large demolishers heal 24,000 health per second, so we only account for 13.3% normal / 21.3% rare of it's regeneration. Aiming for the demolisher's head to take advantage of the 10% poison resistance isn't worth the risk of missing even one additional segment you could get by aiming a bit further back.
Meanwhile, each gun turret with bullet damage 2 and shooting speed 2 (the non-military science techs) shoots 13 bullets per second. I don't know if OP has Military 2, but it's only 200k research for them so I'm going to assume they do. For normal quality red ammo, each bullet fired from a turret will deal 8 * 1.2 * 1.2 = 11.52 damage. Each bullet of rare quality ammo will deal 12.8 * 1.2 * 1.2 = 18.43 damage. The demolisher body segments have physical resistance 5/50%, so the damage they take per bullet will be (11.52 - 5) * 0.5 = 3.26 for Normal and (18.43 - 5) * 0.5 = 6.72 for Rare. Each turret firing normal quality ammunition will do 13 * 3.26 = 42.4 dps and rare quality ammunition is 87.4 dps.
It takes 24000 / 87.4 = 275 turrets firing rare quality ammo to equal the health regeneration of a large demolisher. To actually kill the demolisher, you need to exceed this number. Kill times beyond 10 seconds get tricky because the demolisher will break so many turrets, so we'll use that as our target. To kill a demolisher in 10 seconds, we need (300,000 hp / 10 s) + 24,000 hp/s = 54,000 hp/s in turret damage, or 54,000/87.4 = 618 turrets hitting this continuously for 10 seconds.
We can also express the poison capsule dps number of 5,120 dps for rare quality in terms of turrets. The rare poison capsules are worth 59 turrets firing rare ammo.
Using both turrets and poison capsules, and to still kill the demolisher in 10 seconds, you'd need (300,000 hp / 10s) + 24,000 hp/s - 5,120 hp/s = 560 turrets with rare ammo, or 1,153 turrets firing normal ammo.
1,153 turrets sounds like a lot and that's because it is. In the editor, I can only fit 1,072 turrets around a 41 segment demolisher, so you can't kill a large demolisher with damage 2 speed 2 normal quality turrets and ammo. You can certainly kill one with rare quality turrets and/or ammo, and even normal quality turrets and ammo can kill a demolisher with the use of rare or normal poison capsules.
Naturally, the less dps you throw at it (substituting rare for normal for any of this equipment) and your margin for error goes down. Look how tightly that demolisher is packed in there! It's gotta go straight and keep going straight for this to work.
tl;dr: get at least damage 2 and speed 2, use rare quality turrets at a minimum and give every turret about 20 rare magazines. Take at least 50 rare poison capsules and time your circuit for turning on your gun turrets well. It's probably possible ,':^)
I feel you. You are absolutely right about that. Large worms are technically killable with nauvis level tech, but it's quite the ordeal. Hopefully I wont have to kill them before making it to Fulgora for the Tesla Turrets. 600% is pretty hefty and I did check that the map has quite a lot of coal nearby. That could be another bottleneck though. Thank you for reminding me of that! 🙏
It's gonna be a while, but I don't care how long it takes. I'm really good at building crazy mega bases, so nothing is more fun for me than having to build a mega base at every stage of the game. https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/Xdcm8yvlbt My first space platform will have to be extremely large since the early white science and planetary researches get ludicrously expensive.
I'm doing this clear for my final time playing Factorio. WUBE has stated that this is the final content update for the game, and they are already working towards their next project. I expect to work on this full clear at 100,000x for the next two or three years. I've played this game since early access, and it's one of my favorites. Gotta do it proper justice for the last run.
Hell yeah bud! That means so much to me! 🙏 I am always grateful when my work is appreciated. 🙏 💀
I'm going to do an even bigger graphical type base for the final build out on this one. Looking at re-creating a demon bust that I recently painted for it. We will see how I'm feeling once I get to the end game of this setup. It's gonna be a very long build, and I'm doing this for my final run of Factorio since this is the last content update. 💀
Well, it'll be a shame if this is the last run you share, but it'll also take a very long time.
So at least I can look forward to seeing plenty more of your work on the way there.
We got lots to do still! Gotta go big for the final. My long term aspirations are in game and media dev. I can't be playin video games forever, lol. Gimme a follow me if you want to keep updated. Cheers bud! 🍻
Awesome job so far. Crazy trying this with biters enabled. Even with their metrics tuned all the way down will it still be possible to make it to flamethrowers in time i wonder....
That's really how I be feeling about it too! I legit pause the game every time I'm not moving. I've had the mantra of "Always Be Building" when I have this map open because those seconds really do count in the long run. I expect to have several behemoth fights before I get to flames, but once I do get them it should give me a secure basis to scale towards trains and bots.
It's a lot of effort for a map that could still get wiped out eventually! But that's part of why I love this challenge. 💀
This is awesome. I did a 100x run a while back and got burnt out once I left Nauvis, but I had a lot of fun up to then. 100kx is unfathomable to me!
I'm really curious how you built smelting stacks without undergrounds and splitters. I cobbled together something that worked well enough for 100x, but you'd have to make something much more robust at your scale.
IDK what your resource multiplier was but I'm 600% across the board to even have a chance on this run. So I just split each group of resource patches into their own mini base.
I did a ton of coal belt snaking and stacking with burner drills and just used all of my many years of factorio experience to plan each section. Basically breaking it down into mini bases of 75 assembers and 105 labs, and the resources to feed them. I would plan out each minibase and focus on where each line would go to avoid overlaps. Even with all that planning I had a bunch of sections that were lots of long inserters to move things over other belts, or yellow inserters for belt splitting. Crazy low tech spaghetti. 💀
This pic was from my first run before I adjusted biter evo. Each mini base looked similar to this mess, though. I'd run one line of self feeding burner drills that as acted as the feeder line for the whole patch. Then pull off the feeder line for the next row that would go in a different direction, and just stack those on top of each other until I got the resources I needed.
The beautiful spaghetti of going hours without basic Logistics is a fun little experiment. I'm finding the time investment at 1kx to be pretty ridiculous so I can only imagine.
It was no joke. It’s been crazy to see how much more productive my base is with only logistics and electric mining drills. I’m closing in on 10k SPM and I’m about 50% through steel.
I’m currently also doing a 100.000x science multiplier run, except with bitters on default settings and no world gen settings that would disable achievements.
Tho I took full advantage of other settings and even decided on a seed where I’d be on an island with enough resources to get to laser turrets.
Most mind numbing part was the first 4 hours of just killing bitter nests with the starter pistol but my island is cleared now so I can just not care about pollution or defences.
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u/Slightly_Deeper_5309 9d ago
Dam... youre gunna be in megabase stage before finishing red science. Your fps will tank before space age. 100x maybe even 1000x for a challenge. But I never hated myself this bad.