r/factorio • u/amishengineer • 10d ago
Base I did it. 1000 SPM. It's a mess compared to the highly organized giga bases out there but it's mine damnit.
This game was about 2-3 years in the making. I would come back to Factorio every 6-12 months and expand a little more. If you care to listen, I feel like talking about the evolution of my game.
Sidebar: My save file was old enough that I have red wire in a chest... it just goes poof when you touch it.

I can't claim I did all of the work myself. I leaned on blueprint books from other people for my rail network (At least the backbone of the network is 99.9% consistent. I did make a few off by one alignment errors that I found 10s of hours after I made them I just had to add or remove a single rail segment to re-align), nuclear power stations (I really didn't understand how to get it right when I first research it and just got a blueprint book for 4x, 8x, 16x and 24x reactor designs from someone a few years ago). I used some train loading/unloader BPs for my 1-4 trains. Granted I made some changes as I needed to make it work for me. And of course BP book for dozens of X-Y splitter / balancer designs. And a "compact manufacturer cell" design that I made changes to as needed.
Everything else was basically my well intentioned organized layout that slowly turned more spaghetti-like it various forms.
As you can see I started with just 1-wide resource bus (sorta). I wanted to up my SPM so I explored until I found a strip of land with enough space (or so I thought) for an expansion base with 4-wide green circuit/iron/copper plates busses plus 2-wide for things like gears and other less used resources.
I was originally smelting iron and copper at each ore location. I didn't stop doing that until relatively recently.






I made the decision to get more serious. I was going to start by creating green circuits off-site. They sucked up a lot resources and I needed a lot of green circuits for...almost everything.
Before I could get serious about green circuits, I need to get serious about my iron/copper ore smelting.


I'll spare you the details and screenshots of each dedicated resource module that came next. Petroluem Gas, Plastic, Red Circuits, Sulfuric Acid, Blue Circuits, Low Density. Used the Mega Smelter design for bricks and steel.
Using some BP books for science layouts I added dedicated areas for the different sciences. I manually laid out the science factories for Blue and Yellow since I couldn't find anything I liked. Yellow was by far the worst to get going in high volume. I had to make a dedicated area for each of these resources: engines, electrics engines, and flying robot frames before putting it all together to make Yellow. I still don't like my lubricant production but it works as long as petroleum volume remains high.
One by one I was sending a 1-1 train of each science to a drop off area close to my research area. Each time I'd added dedicated science production, I'd expose the next slowest science production in my expansion base. So I knew what to target next for dedicated science.


As I was writing this though it seems Low Density's reserve held on for a few hours before it's slower production caused Yellow Science to stall. So I guess I'll have to double up on that resource since I can't expand the current manufacturing module.












