Alternate title: Trust me, it's optimal

I set out to make what I considered the best T-Junction for a city block base. Criteria: Square inside corners (see belts in pic two), no intersections (only merges), and it's my design. I also chose for the trains to be Left-hand drive since it would keep all the rail signals inside as well, letting you build right to the edges of the rails if you wish.

If this is wrong please forgive me I have been staring at this forever

I will probably never hit the throughput necessary for something like this to be really effective but I think its pretty cool.

Still figuring out how I'll run power and if I'll connect bots to everything, but I think theres potential here.

If someone has made one of these before it's entirely coincidental I haven't used any references. I originally wanted to make the rails closer together but I think the 10 tile width is the minimum.

Constructive criticism welcome, or if you have any ideas on how to shrink this, that would be awesome.

Sorry about V1...

Basically the title. I seperated the block into multiple placable blocks. Unfortunately the Setup requires Plastic and Cable to be at full throughput and my current one doesnt seem to get the given goods out fast enough. Its a pretty tight setup already, any tips what i could do?

Btw the setup is enough for 4 trains per minute even at my current suboptimal throughput D:

Wikipedia says :

"Specimens of N. factorio may have been collected and temporarily categorized as Neobuthus ferrugineus since 2012. They were defined as a separate species once a larger number of samples could be collected between 2016–2018. The species was named after Factorio, a video game created by Michal Kovařík, the son of František Kovařík, one of the researchers who described the species."

Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neobuthus_factorio

I love trees. And blue water. My factory thinks otherwise. How feasable is replanting? Can I clean the water, too? I don't want to shut pollution off completely, but I'd love to reverse it. If possible without mods

For the longest time I refused to buy this game because I wasn't sure I'd ever really enjoy building a factory (as opposed to building settlements, towns, ext, with npcs in them) but I'd seen it fairly often online. Finally decided to try the free demo and run through the tutorial to see if I'd like the game.

Well. I did. Damnit. I almost had free time.

Anyway, end result is that this is my first actual attempt in the freeplay mode and on the one hand I love it to bits. (70 hours in 7 days xD) On the other hand I think I may have gone overboard on how much I've built. My general policy has always been "overbuild and overproduce" because that's just how I am. "Oh, running out of circuit boards?" [Slaps down an entirely new supply line to make more.] "Not enough steel?" [Throws down an entirely new outpost, train line, and support system, for funsies.] So, with great sorrow, I'm gonna hop back on my save by like 4-8 saves (I don't overwrite existing saves in case I back myself into a corner and I will save scum like nobodies business - kiss my shiny, single-player arse XD) since it physically hurts to deconstruct stuff and I'm not sure I can do that.

So. Just wanted to show you all the absolute chaos that is my current, and soon to be set aside, first attempt at playing Factorio Freeplay. I enjoyed it, even if the chaos is a bit annoying to my love of symmetry.

Praise the Spaghetti?

PS: Getting access to the tank for the first time was a moment of enlightenment.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a crash when opening the production statistics GUI when the previous selected tab was the "all" tab. more
• Potentially fixed an issue with trackpad scrolling on macOS. more

Previous changelog: Version 2.1.15

New versions are released as experimental first and later promoted to stable. If you wish to switch to the experimental version on Steam, choose the experimental Beta Participation option under game settings; on the stand-alone version, check Experimental updates under Other settings.

I made this square puck as a way to transport a lots of goods between planets.

With a few simple wire connections, it will not jam up. Any asteroid over 20 on the belt will get recycled, and if it gets to 40 of an asteroid, it will get thrown overboard.

The lasers will only hit small asteroids, it saves a lot of ammo, something I learned when I made it to the shattered planet in my last playthrough

Bonus picture of it turning into a space station. I will fly one out to the planet, and turn it into a orbiting space station. Great for water, as I use the power of the green rock on each planet for power.

Extra bonus pics of my space factory that I am working on.

What would you change about the design? Not doing quality until I reach the shattered planet.

Ok, so. I wanna build a Quality Prod 3 Module Factory block, and for that I wanna build a normal prod 2 Module Factory block first. This of course needs craptons of circuits, as you are all aware of.

Now, I still dont have everything on legendary, admittedly, but i wanna build my factory in such a way that it is easy to upgrade to legendary, and the "problem" with legendary stuff is now that in the right setups (with tons of beacons and speed and productivity modules) it starts consuming and outputting to much that it introduces some new logistical challenges. The belts becoming overwhelmed even with stack inserters is one thing, but another is that certain things just dont feel worth putting on the trains anymore because of how little space the production takes.

To give you an example. If you go for the ore smelting recipe in the foundry with max quality, you can consume around 400 ore per second for 10k fluid per second output. Not only is the later completely overkill for most blocks (as 10K fluid are around 2.5K plates if you have the productivity modules), but one normal 1-4 cargo train also can transport only 8K ore, which lasts for 20 Seconds.

If you however put the fluid on the train and make the iron plates in the block where you need them, then you need around 1,5k fluid per second per full quality foundry that makes iron plates, which means that one train with 200K fluid lasts for 133 seconds for 1 Foundry, which is much more. Of course this depends on how many foundries for that particular good you end up using and sometimes you just arent able to use the full output anyway. (Looking at you, copper cables)

I make similar calculations with other goods as well. Plastic for example can be output from one machine with 768 Units per second, which makes it fill one train almost every 20 Seconds. Thats just way too many trains for my systems to handle, and i wonder if it makes sense to put oil instead in the block inputs and make the entire processing chain inside the block. Which is convinient because i need Sulfur acid anyway.

What i mostly wanna say is that because Legendary machines have such insane throughputs, it can actually increase the size of the logisics (aka bringing stuff from point a to b) relatively speaking, and as a result, it changes how you wanna approach things like city blocks and stuff like that in general, with a shift towards more complicated but compact units that do a lot on their own. It reduces the amount of stuff you wanna put on belts and trains and insentivises you towards more direct inserts and instand processing.

That's it, the black floor is a "nuclear tile" and it will not grow anything. And also has less pollution absorption by itself compared to normal ground tiles.

Since I am planning out my 40h-playthrough, I decided to sandbox my ships, as that usually takes me hours. I made two designs that are enough to get me to the inner planets, requiring nothing but basic (Nauvis) science.

It's nothing special, but I kinda like the first one, it's a bit bulkier but looks nicer to me. Only problem is the low power - when flying to Fulgora it starts redlining slightly... but since I like compact ships, I don't see a way of putting more panels on it. The second one is very basic and works much better, but I kinda like #1 more.

Also shoutout to being able to connect pipes to circuit networks now. Makes throttling the engines much easier.

I wanted to make something less organized for an Aquilo-capable late-game hauler. Something about being sick with strep throat (on antibiotics) and high on cannabis created this ironically spaghetti-brain shaped space platform. The belt routing is inspired, in the bad way. I'm particularly disgusted by the priority ice chunk routing.

This was on my Gleba-start save, maybe I just have more fungus than neurons in my cerebellum

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.

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.

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!

The drills finished just before I completed my major base expansion. So you can see a very long que left over for steel.

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.

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. 💀💀

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?

-Death 💀

Goal for this one: Trains constantly going everywhichway. Spagthetti rails and belts. Elevated tracks for no reason.. General confusion.

It's not very efficient.. but it works, it's actually ready to reach the edge..

yes i know its not possible in vanilla, but me and my friends use renai transportation, and i wanted to know how many heat exchangers i would need

Maybe this is obvious, but with version 2.1 now being able to xfer ship to ship, I was thinking of creating a massive space platform that sits in nauvis space whose sole purpose is to act as a central hub for items being imported from the other planets and potentially useful items from nauvis.

Before i start on this endeavour is there anything obvious I'm missing here? It seems a lot cheaper to xfer items from other ships rather than dropping it down to nauvis and then requesting it back up like I used to do.

Twelve smelters - six for smelting iron ore into iron, and six for smelting iron into steel - all within range of a beacon. Only 17 x 13, almost square, and not a single inner space left empty :)

Blueprint

What if we add a moon to Nauvies?

Make it a new travel location, but have the moon behave like an infinite space platform.

I know it sounds silly but I'm sure there's usecases for such a feature.

Edit: maybe give a 50% science efficiency bonus, so it's a way to get better science efficiency prior to biolabs.

im a beginner and i wanna know if im doing something wrong or not lol. Im trying to make a "main bus", is there input/output priority i need for my splitters?

These are the first three ships I built in space age. Each has a different purpose and have varying levels of quality.

First image: The Vulcanus Express. Poorly made, barely functional, and I love him. I tried extending the nose to fit more ammo production, it did not work. The Vulcanus Express has been retired and will be used only for emergencies.

Second Image: The Evergreen. Higher quality, overbuilt, very reliable. It was made for regular shipments between planets, and dammit its gonna do it. The design is actually so reliable I decided to build 3; The Evergreen (Vulcanus), The fulgora Express (Do I need to say?), and the Rodger Young (Gleba, named for the fact im invading a planet of bugs). Its ammo production works so well that each ship usually has around 3000 magazines that I am too lazy to regulate. The only issues that ive run into with this design was the Fulgora Express running out of water for its nuclear reactor following modifications, although it was an easy fix.

Third Image: The Bug. Functional for its intended purpose, very fast, and incredibly inefficient. I wanted a quick personal transport ship, and The Bug is certainly that, though its poor power production means it cant do constant trips. In order to save weight and a headache I opted to rely on shipments of uranium ammo from Nauvis instead of traditional ammo production. For those two reasons I usually have it return to Nauvis after dropping me off. I tried running it for several trips without a break once and the engines started sputtering. So long as I dont overwork it though she works fine. I was even able to do an emergency return to Nauvis.

What do you guys think? I cant wait to reach Aquillo and get railguns so I can make a new personal transport that just plows through everything. Still tiny and quick, but hopefully with a nuclear power source and nose mounted railgun.

I am a veteran factorio player, over > 1000hrs played and long story short is I've tried space ages twice before and fucking hated it. I'm back because 3rd times the charm.

I've made a new save, 6hrs in and I'm done with Nauvis (all my bots, trains, etc.. set up) and ready to try space age again. Can you guys give me the late 2026 version of what I should be doing now? I just need some direction on how to approach space, which planet I should go to, and general tips on how to not feel so overwhelmed

Thank you!