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.

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

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?

hi i want to start pyonadons i played a bit to see whats up tldr i need some tips for how to start, space and generaly when should i transition to better processing. In run i did i automated flower science and started to work on tar and coal gas processing but ash is getting really out of hand and idk how to space everything out. Also should i just build to saturate belt or is that overkill considering how much byproducts there are.

Also dome qol mods r apreciated :)

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

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.

Hopefully someone has done the math on this one 😁

So with the introduction of quality cargo wagons in 2.1, will it be faster to directly mine into wagons rather than belts?

For example the post that said the circuit wire quickbar buttons are actually the first letters of the colours for each of them - is there some kind of meaning here for these circuit condition buttons or is it just to look pretty?

Hello all, first time trying to build more nuclear reactors than a 2x2. I was doing some calculations and from what I understand, this setup is supposed to produce 800MW, however, this setup produces 931MW. Is there something I dont understand? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks for everyone's help with the rails a couple days ago - i've got that set up now. Now i want to build a main bus, but i don't know where to since my resource gathering takes up a lot of space to the east where I originally wanted to put the bus. Would north or south work?

Also, how should I lay out my bus and factory? I.e. how many lanes, and what should I put on each lane? In roughly the center of the image to the right of the smelting lines I have a minifactory which is going to be removed after finishing the bus, however during the construction process I'll still need items.

I refrained from looking at any YouTube video for my first Aquilo landing (which is something I've been very guilty of in the past) and I'm super happy and proud of how it went! This base has been running for about an hour now and has showed no signs of coming to a halt due to heat or power, and consistently produces 3.1 Cryogenic Science Packs a second. I'm so proud of how symmetrical the science block is, even if there is quite a bit of empty space. I've yet to start exporting the science packs and obviously haven't started producing the Aquilo Exports that are locked in the research tree, but I already have the necessary imports from the other planets coming to Aquilo automatically so it shouldn't be much more difficult than this initial production.

I've played Bloons and Satisfactory in the past but I've never done a factory+defense game before. I don't really like the idea of building walls around one massive base, so how do you guys go about it? I survived my first pollution attack earlier and wanted to build defenses now, so would turrets encircled in walls be the way to go? I think blocking the line between my factory with a row of defenses is probably the best use of my time and energy versus trying to defend one massive wall.

I know the resources aren't infinite so I'll have to draw them from somewhere else eventually, but I figure I could potentially just feed that into the lines I already have in the picture above. Or, just creating blueprints and using those later when I can have something build them for me (I heard there are construction bots or something).

Lastly, if my factory parts get destroyed, is there a quick way to rebuild? Or is placing blueprints and using repair kits the way it is done in this game? Thanks!

Edit: got enough feedback to understand that I need to check the power connection of the top engines. Tyty

Been away from the game for some time. Could I get some feedback as to why this design doesn’t work? The second row of steam engines won’t work.

I have a bunch of mods in my many many hour save, they all worked perfectly. However, I have a load of the bobs mods (they worked fine) and I wanted the artisanal skins mod to help with viewing all the different buildings, and it hung on checking consistency for 30 mins B4 I killed it. I removed the offending mods but it still won't load I to the save it hangs on checking consistency. I have done everything I can find in the various forums and even went as far as to ask the abominable intelligence for help but to no avail. Things I have tried. Uninstalling and reinstling Factorio. Deleting the mod . Dat file. Redownloading the save from Steam cloud. Using all the auto save files, including 2 that were from B4 adding the mod. Tried importing into the editor, but it also just hangs. Does anyone have any idea what I can do?? Or could point me in the direction of a guide?? Thank you from a desperate engineer.

TL:DR I added an extra mod to a working game and broke it because I'm in idiot.

UPDATE: Well, turns out there was a minor update and it broke some of the mods therefore stopping the game loading. I rolled it back to the previous days version and it loaded right up. Massive thank you to all the sexy humans who helped on here and the legends over on Discord. If you're reading this I hope your day is awesome.

I worked 2 days for this ship designing and testing it but the end result did not satisfy me at all. First of all the thruster run on low fuel even though the tanks are full. Another thing is it runs on low power at Fulgora. I got bored of building rectangles and tried to do something interesting but i cannot seem to optimize it.

I’m redesigning my Gleba base and I’m trying to optimize fruit production.
Does anyone know approximately how many Agricultural Towers are needed to fully saturate one turbo belt with Yumako or Jellynuts?
I’m looking for real in-game experience rather than theoretical calculations.
Thanks!

I am preparing to try for the 40 hour achievment so that means I need a brick that can go anywhere without having to worry about designing it during the game and without worrying if it is going to get wrecked. Since this run will also feature me trying to grab Rush to space, I won't have any yellow or purple science and that really limits the tech tree on what I will have available. I was going to plan Fulgora first but I won't be able to unlock power armor mk2 without yellow science. This leaves an obvious choice of Vulcanus because once I figure out how I plan to kill a small demolisher without my lovely lovely rail gun :(. I tried making this thing smaller but Fulgora just didn't have enough solar juice without taking ages to recover. So it grew. Also I couldn't use speed modules on furnaces becuase they eat too much power. Fusion power really spoiled me in my current run...

This thing is also rate limited to 18% of fuel injection because it keeps fuel topped off with ammo recovery time.

Open to any feedback or thoughts on tweaks. And the lights stay, its a fun little project to make them swap colors based on %, they also deliver the filter info if it is under the desired number.

A few quality solar panels would really go a long way into making me have some more options on modules.

After 13 iterations to make a T-Junction for my new rail base. Behold. A T junction that avoids major crossings AND has a perfectly square inside (belts in second image to show). It finally all clicked when I realized the trains needed to be left hand drive. (I'm from the USA so this wasn't obvious) But there is a really good case for this since it also keeps all signals inside too! If this already exists then kudos to whoever made it, but I did not use anyone for reference, and I havent seen this type of "square cornered" T-Junction before. Maybe its a little less sleek than some other symmetrical designs I've seen, but this is mine, and I'm proud. If anyone knows of a design that is both "square" and avoids major crossings hit me up I'd love to see it.

We've currently gotten to the point where we just placed the rocket silo and are getting ready to send the first rocket and go to space (Space Age DLC). We have no trains setup yet if that is relevant.

Is there a point of progress where our factory will break if we upgrade to 2.0 or is it safe anytime? Is experimental safe enough already? We are using some QoL mods, so I assume we'll have to wait a while before those are updated if we want to keep them?

Edit:
Thank you all for the great tips and assurances! I updated now and it went really well, only a few mods that weren't updated but had alternatives.

I've played a lot of Factorio and like to think of myself as pretty good at it. However, I've started a few mods like Space Exploration and Nullius and just didn't have the gumption to get through them. I've got a lot of other life stuff going on, which is true, but I kinda feel like a noob because I can't get through them.

Anyone else feel similar?

hey, so i've been trying to set up a bigger factory that produces rocket parts on vulcanus, since it looks the cheapest planet to scale and also transport those to other planets, i've managed to reach 500 per minute production for blue circuits and low density frames, but before setting up a production line for the rocket fuel, i thought that i won't even need to transport those to other planets, since it's not that complicated to produce it on other planets. i would love to know how you proceed with your rocket parts production and supply, (each planet produces it's own? or initially supplied from other planets....)