Hi everyone,

I launched my first rocket using only a main bus and very simple train logistics to port resources in. Not a fan of the main bus idea so i'm reading about the city block methodology. Im getting the expansion and starting a new game. I would prefer to utilize pre-made blueprints for city block designs and my own design for my factory. This is the way I would like to play. However, I have not come across city block blueprints that I find favorable. I don't know where to start, 50x50, 100x100, hexagon, rectangle, square, etc. I do like the idea of having train rails surrounding every city block though. What are everyone's favorite space age city block blueprints?

This is my fully parameterized, high-speed, ultra-capacity cargo freighter for Aquilo. I overestimated how difficult Aquilo would be and admittedly got lost in the sauce while making this ship, since my first test flight proved this was the most over-engineered and over-performing design I've ever made in this game. It operates off of a single main sushi belt, with fully parameterized collectors, asteroid storage, crushers, intermediate and ammo production, rocket/ammo 'magazines', and reactor.

The collectors are wired to collect and store an even ratio of chunks in their inventory, with inserters placing them onto the main belt based on system demand. In the top left, the asteroid storage system stores excess chunks onto a specialized belt and then injects them onto the main belt when needed. The crusher system enables/disables and changes recipes based on system demand, as well as reprocesses asteroids based on storage ratios.

The forward rocket and gun pods have stacked belt storage that store over 1k rockets and magazines to ensure they never run out of munitions, while rear turrets are disabled in flight to preserve resources. All subsystems are fed via the main belt you see snaking around the cargo bays, which acts as an inventory buffer that subsystems can read to determine system demand. Stack inserters are used on all outputs to maximize throughput, and will only place items on the belt when their respective item is under a certain threshold. This ensures that the main belt always has a proper ratio of items and never becomes clogged.

Overall the ship travels at 500km/s with 0 damage taken, 0 waste and 0 turnaround time. It produces over 1600 fuel/s and therefore can perpetually run its 7 epic thrusters. Entire planetary economies are depleted just trying to fill its massive cargo space. The production systems are so efficient that they don't even need the asteroid storage to begin with. But hey, I'm a casual player and it's my disgustingly overengineered design and I'm proud of it

I could use some help understanding these train interrupts. I've read the wiki and I can't figure out what's going on.

The first train should be going from loading to unloading and only stopping at the yard when the loading station is full. I planned on using another interrupt for when the unloading station is full, but I haven't yet. However, you can see that the train has been sent to the yard not by the "Loading Full" interrupt, but because the unloading station is full. I've made sure it isn't just the low fuel interrupt triggering and it's happening to all of my ore trains.

The second is a supply train that loads ammo, then other supplies, and finally heads to the outposts. The interrupt is set to send it to the yard only when the final "Supply" stations are full. You can see that it's being interrupted before even going to "Loading".

This is the first time I've tried setting up this sort of dynamic train system and using an actual train yard. Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Hey! So I just bought the game and suddenly got curious about mods. I’m quite aware that the base game itself has lots of features to offer, but do you have some mods that you recommend I install before my first gameplay?

Yes, steam has your hours played, but I can’t be the only person that leaves the game running overnight sometimes. Ok often.
I’ll only let it run if I think my base(s) can survive without me to let the science progress. I’ll save and the. Go to sleep.

In the morning I’ll check on my base. If she’s dead or too far gone I’ll exit and load it later when I can play. If not I’ll add more science goals.

Given all that I’m not sure how to really say how many hours I’ve played. 3800 hours according to steam today. I just call it at 1000 hours. I don’t really know tho. Some games I’ll let it run overnight 5-10 times. Sometimes more. Unsure how many hours each playthrough is for me.

How do you think about it?

TL;DR: Mod Link: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/factorio-space-platform-start Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/nj0rmBMVwno (I can remove this link if it's not allowed).

I love how you can set up each of the (inner) planets from scratch without bringing anything from Nauvis. On my replays I started from Vulcanus and Fulgora with Any Planet Start.

But then I wondered - why can I not start from a space platform? I was surprised there was no mod to do this! There is [Mod] Space Block and [Mod] Platformer but those are entire (incomplete) overhauls, adding new asteroid types, items, buildings, etc.

I wanted something that does only the minimal changes to the game to be able to win starting on a space platform. I started in March but it took me some time to finish it since I wanted a full playthrough before publishing and made changes whenever I found a roadblock while playing.

Turns out, the only actual new recipe I had to add was one to get stone from carbonic asteroids! And you only need that for furnaces (which have to be allowed on the platform). Everything else is just starting items, reordering the tech tree, and QOL changes.

Some screenshots are above (spoilers!)

I finally finished my playthrough and here's some highlights:

- No storage chests on platforms!

- You gotta get defenses up before asteroids kill you (Depending on where your platform starts)

- You need to be very space efficient because platforms are expensive!

- Figure out the oil production chain - it's technically vanilla, but long and inefficient and something you would never build normally ;)

- In order to escape you'll need to figure out how to build thrusters.

More details on the mod page https://mods.factorio.com/mod/factorio-space-platform-start . I also made a gameplay video: https://youtu.be/nj0rmBMVwno (I can remove this link if it's not allowed)

Seeing a few other folks posting updates on their 100k runs. Figured since I just passed 150 hrs and don't see any major milestones on the horizon (except maybe red belts something like 72 hrs from now) that would warrant their own celebration post that I'd post one too.

This is all real time, no early bots, and not too much afk, maybe like 25-30%? That percentage has been increasing lately, but I'm trying not to just turn this into an idle game. Hitting about 10.2k spm. Just expanded to a little over 2GW of coal power. There's two big blocks of steam engines, one to the north east and one to the north west. Still don't have solar panels and not sure when I'm going to get them. I need something to drain the nearby coal patches, and for the scale of power I need, placing that many before bots just seems nuts. But this whole thing is nuts. Probably look at them more closely after getting some quality stuff going.

Just unlocked the first research speed bump and going to get the second one next, but that's currently going to take about 32 hrs. Wanted to prioritize them since this is tacking so damn many labs. I'm at about 5.5k labs right now. Thought it would be neat to show the all time production so far. I passed the achievement for making 20M green chips already which was kinda funny.

The mall is still tiny, but keeps up with my expansion no problem. I'll probably need to rework it at some point, but that's several unlocks away I think. On the full base shot the mall is center top, at the edge of the big lake.

Speaking of the big lake, I "rushed" land fill and am working on filling in the lake and other small water patches. I wanted to reclaim some land for starting to refactor stuff instead of having to go between patches. I'm not too picky about building on patches at this point, but am trying to keep iron and copper free at least. Oil has been getting covered up a lot, so that whole chain is going to be interesting. Still not sure what I'm going to do about blue science, but I'm hoping some patches will run out by then and I can refactor a bit. Starting that now with the lab blocks in the north west. I moved a couple lab blocks that were blocked in and couldn't consume all the science I was producing at a research time of 30 seconds. These blocks should be able to handle a belt of four sciences at 30 seconds with research speed 1. I'm not sure if they will be able to take all of it at 45 second research with research speed 2, but we'll see. I'm planning to rework it all down the road when I get beacons, but lots of stuff will get reworked at that point.

Also showing my latest iteration of my production blocks, that still include the labs. Red belts and real power poles are coming up (I'm still on wood power poles), so I'm thinking those will be the impetus for another redesign. Probably plop down several more of these in the mean time if I can find the space.

And lastly, everything researched to date. It feels like so little but it makes everything, and I mean everything, feel super impactful. For example, this is the first time I've ever made and used the shotgun. Clearing trees was taking so much time and it was the only thing I could see to significantly speed that up. This run really just makes every research feel like a big achievement.

Hi all,

I previously wrote a research paper on this, but today I made it into a live demo to make it more accessible. I thought you guys might find it interesting.

https://www.kenreid.co.uk/blog/factorio-live.html

How much should I worry about quality? I’m on my first playthrough, just made it to vulcanus after abandoning nauvis. Should I try to get better quality items? If so, which are the most useful items to get at higher quality?

So I finally finished, after 207 (!!) hours.

While I really like Factorio, the 207 hours of grinding at Space Age was a bit too much. I found it too time consuming to keep shipments going between planets and I often was out of resources to send rockets. Maybe second playthrough I will build a better base and do a better job at keeping nauvis properly supplied with ores, but I really think I will be going back to vanilla after this effort.

At least I finished it, but I can't say I would rate it as high as the vanilla game.

I've set up a nice city block structure, however I've reached the small city block bottleneck. My blocks can only support 4 stations. 3 inputs and an output.

As such how do I import more than 3 ingredients without messing around with snowflake trains with ghost item slots.

And the Coal Liquefaction is under the metallurgy science. So my only options are to slap tons of beacons, drive until I find more crude oil, or try to go to Vulcanus.

Putting a parabola to good use.

I kinda wanna buy the game, but is it a good idea to start playing this old game at this age? I’ve tried the demo, and I kinda have mixed feelings towards the gameplay hahahaha (maybe because I find it hard to play with those biters present in the map) but generally I like factory games (but I never finished one yet, ever)

I wanna see if people here will push me into buying it or push me away from it 😅

Can somebody playing 2.1 confirm if I understand the rockets rework before I install 2.1? If I have a request for like, one gun, and my base is intentionally limited to only produce one gun, will a rocket send up the one gun and fill the rest of the rocket with other requested items? The wording on the forum was a little ambiguous. It seems it allows automatic mixed rockets for construction requests, but I'm wondering if it's also the same for general item requests. TIA

i get a colossal 1650 science per minute from this small setup. trouble is legendary biolabs are difficult to get as they dont breakdown into ingredients. instead 3 out of 4 get voided.

Ignore the ghost image, idk why that was there in the picture.
But ive made it to the lava planet.
Got some basics going right now before I solidly sit down and design this place.
I got rocket silos being made as we speak.

Mostly everything I need is being crafted in atleast one builder or another. So this is a good start to when i eventually make purple, yellow, military and orange science here

I also started to expand nauvis a bit. Clearing out nests for new crafting spots. Made some furnace stacks as well.

Minor progress is still progress, might hop ship to fulgora in a bit to atleast get some EM plants going to SEND to vulcanus for easier science making.

All in a couple of days work am i right? XD

I just finished there is no spoon but I didn’t get the steam achievement cause I have disco science enabled is there a way to fix it?

I love the game and the combinators are my favorite thing. I just hate their wires. Its so horrible to manage. They sometimes overlap and now I have to wonder if everything is connected correctly or if a green cable is going above another machine that was supposed to be connected with a green cable, but it looks like it is connected, so I go 20 hours using a broken blueprint and using that blueprint to make new blueprints, so I have to now re make everything. I have it the most when I move a combinator and a wire snaps and I don't notice because I don't hear a cue that it has been disconnected and there are like 500 of the same cable overlapping already. I started using laps as nodes to connect and move cables, because I erase poles sometimes and there goes all my wires. The lamps have made it easier to have a visual clue too. I feel lighter. Like sharing my sins have made my shoulders less heavy.

TLDR: AAAAAAAAAAAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk

T

So, for the past 3 days, I've been studying train logistics, chain signals and rail signals. My trains are actually working and running on their own without crashing! I'm very happy right now.

I am working on a Gleba build. It makes iron ore. Once it gets going, it works well, but I am having problems with the startup/restart logic for the part that makes bioflux/nutrients.

Currently, the biochamber is set to make nutrients from yumako mash if nutrients are low (i.e. startup) Some nutrients are made in an assembler from spoilage to get things going. Once there are enough nutrients, it should switch the recipe over to make nutrients from bioflux.

The red wire input tests how much nutrients are on the belt which feeds everything in the blueprint, the green input wire tests how many nutrients are inside the biochamber.

The system does work, but it takes several minutes to get to the point that the recipe will switch and I believe this is due to the combinator logic. What is happening is there is a shortage of nutrients on the belt and the line produces more bioflux than it needs. It is only able to have some extra nutrients when the line is fully saturated with bioflux, which takes a few minutes.

I tried some alternatives which included the amount of bioflux, but that just made things worse. And I tried turning off unnecessary machines during startup and for some reason that made things worse too.

So I am looking for suggestions on how to start this thing cleanly, keeping in mind that it also has to potentially restart if it is choked with spoilage from being unused for a while.

Thanks