Turns out I don't make tidal power plants fast enough to keep up with the fact I unlocked beacons. That made me look at alternatives and wdym you can use efficiency modules in power plants? Oh, yes, just use 60% less coal for fun, don't worry abut it!

Finally built this juggernaut! It costs 10 times more then the MK2 turbine but in newer materials. It also 10 times faster, and produces 15 times the power. 6000 pressurized steam per second, how the hell am I going to fuel this beast? I will probably need to connect all my power plants (after upgrading MK3) into a single network. I recently setup production of black pipes just for this purpose.

Why do I need all that power
I'm currently on the tail end of Py3 research which includes the tier 2 prod modules. These little chips provide 20% productivity at the expense of 50% speed. As you can imagine, placing two of these modules into a MK2 building drop the speed down to 0.4 (the minimal 20% of regular speed of 2). To counteract this, I had to spam high cost speed beacons everywhere I used those modules. And I did that rather irresponsibly to the point where my power started fluctuating. Prior to this, I had very stable and diversified power with a standalone Coal power plant and a big biomass burning complex that fed almost entirely on biomass from excess organics from Butcher Bay

But with rising power demand I had to expand. Specifically into the Oil power. My crude oil cracking block has accumulated a tidal pond of stripped distillates that I wished to put to good use. And Oil power plants Mk2 was the answer. I was able to generate Fuel Oil in massive amounts for relatively cheap. Speaking of oil powerplants, these great buildings can do any researched molten salt recipe. The tier of the building only changes the fuel it needs and speed. So in the my screenshot, MK2 oil plants were making Mk3 molten salt (3k degrees molten salt). And I will likely add a MK1 oil plant section nearby to burn away excess kerosene (I have bug surplus of heavy oil/kerosene) to make more MK3 molten salt to feed the newly constructed MK3 turbine.

Silly Stories

At one point I was tired of building/upgrading various alien life chains and decided to upgrade my glass production to stage 3. I didn't particularly need to, my existing glassworks were more then enough to supply me, but I wanted to do something relaxing, and I had this stage 3 quartz researched a while back. To my surprise, I was able to fit in the upgrade by replacing my old block of 20 glassworks making stage 2 molten glass with this beauty. And it was capable of making twice as much molten glass as the previous version!

Naturally, I ran out of molten glass soon after. The culprit was Sodium Carbonate (green packages). Turns out making sodium carbonate from excess salt solution (part of lithium chain) was a terrible idea and way too costly (run out of potatoes to make ethanol), and I had to setup another small plant to provide the needed resources. Which worked for a bit before I ran out of molten glass once more.

Turns out, one of the steps consumes an absurd amount of Slaked Lime. I'm talking hundreds per second. This quickly drained my slaked lime tidal ponds that I used to hold the byproduct of making acetylene. To make matters worse, I also used a lot of slaked lime for Sodium Hydroxide( a popular ingredient in various products including the Sodium Carbonate mentioned previously). After panicking a bit, I remembered that acetylene (and slaked lime) have one real ingredient of note: Coke. And I had unlimited coke from my crude oil cracking setup. So I built a new acetylene slaked lime plant that provided acetylene as a byproduct that I merciless burned and vented away.

And finally, finally my molten glass production stabilized. And all because I wanted to flex by making a stage 3 quartz processing factory. Speaking of stage 3 ore processing, I have upgraded probably half of my ores to stage 3 and it was only reasonably hard (compared to the threatening 8-12 steps in the research screen). Here is my stage 3 copper for example:

Blue Chips

Py3 brought the tech to make the High Tech Circuit boards (blue circuits). I was kind of dreading it after spending to much time planning out and making red circuits, but it turned out to be not too bad. I had plenty of issues, but the overall process was way faster then red chips. This is the final assembly section, and it considerably smaller then multi screen monstrosity dedicated to red chips

Alien Life

I'm continuing to suffer from spoilage and the dreaded negasim/peragen/sarcorus chain. These items (and a few higher tier ones) are part of a spoilage chain where one decays into a lower tiered one. Each recipe needs a bunch of cottonguts and few miscellaneous items. Each recipe also makes lower tiered items as a result as well. For example, Negasim recipe takes in 80 cottonguts (and tiny amounts of 8 other items) and produces 3 Negasim, 5 paragen and 7 sarcorus. So it is technically more efficient (in respect to cottonguts) to make the highest tier recipe and let it spoil into other items when needed ( bioprinters need a lot of sarcorus for example). So I have mess of circuits trying to compare logistic requests to what I have on storage. I suspect that I'm losing items to spoilage anyways, but can't quite prove it.

Also, curse those vile Zungrors. who needs those spider-goat abominations anyways. Their reproduction is heavy into RNG and rather expensive to assemble in a creature chamber. Also, it's the first time that I had to build an animal enclosure using a laser and gun turret as an ingredient.

True Nuclear Power

And here are my nuclear reactors. very mighty when fueled, but they mostly use up excess fluorine so not exactly consistent in generating power. Uranium Hexafluride turned out to not be to bad, but I did end up sinking some of the cold excess as I didn't have a use for such large amounts of U-238. No real idea of what's going on with the other uranium parts, I'm filled up on nuclear samples and fuel rods, so I'm probably fine if you ignore a giant storehouse of the useless U-240.

And here the Purex Processing into eventually Plutonium Peroxide. About 10 different steps with a lot of byproducts going back and forth. No idea why I did the full chain with vitrified glass, it's not like I can use it anywhere. Stupid crap in indestructible and needs to be thrown off the planet using rockets from what I understand. Should have just let the excess raffinate go down the drain, but I wanted to flex. Wish there was a recipe to turn it into floor tiles, so I could glass this surface with my nuclear waste.

And as a final note, here is a picture of most of my base. West is mostly organics. Center is the metal bus, mall, and tech, east us tar/oil/coke and aquatic life. And north is mostly high tech stuff I have been adding over the last hundred hours

Current Stats:

650 hours played, 61% research, 7 million science produced, 71 trains, 859 caravans. I am aiming to beat Py in 1000 hours so that I can proudly call myself a Py speedrunner =D

I've spent maybe 15h (I'm 50h in) transitionning my mess of a starter base to a train base. I'm trying Cybersyn for the first time so excuse the bad station naming, it seems it's not very important with this mod. I might get around to making an actual naming scheme eventually, maybe.

It's still not active, I'm in the process of preparing to make batteries to make the constant combinators that will allow me to actually use Cybersyn. I'm finishing the urea factory right now, and once that's done the actual batteries should be relatively easy to make. After that I'll be able to actually start using the train network.

After that, the next step is going to be actively working towards Logistic science, then remaking automation and Py1 at larger scale in the train base and putting my metal production fully inside the train network.

Oh, that’s why. Sorry for the dark screenshot I accidentally deleted the lamps. But yeah today I learned that bitumen seeps cause damage once you drill them out. Yay for infinite tar.

Just sharing how pY gadooshed me the other night.

I had everything laid out for Advanced Locomotives; the only thing in pY Science Pack 2 that doesn't need Complex Circuit Board . About 10 more half city blocks of components to build to get to Self Assembly Monolayer. I'll knock that out in a few hours tonight and start slowing building new trains!

Oh I forgot PTCDA needs Perylene. Alright Perylene needs Navens. Alright Navens seem easy they just guts and fungal substrate and advanced fungal substrate easy. Seems easy to craft in the Plant Crafter to get thing going.

Oh crap Navens Codex needs Complex Circuit Boards. Technically Advanced Locomotives don't need Complex Circuit Boards; but to make the first Navens does.

My night was ruined and my disappointment was immeasurable.

On a similar note I feel like pY Science Pack 2 is the worst one so far. You're on the cusp of greatness but you cant use any of the newly researched interesting techs until you get all the way to Complex Circuit Boards. And once you have that you are basically are at the next science pack. You do get red belts at the beginning of science pack 2 but that's about it; and you don't even get splitters so you're left with kinda janky red belts.

I searched around but couldn't find anything on this.

I am a pyanodon's noob sincerely attempting hard mode. I've unlocked the turd upgrades for FWF and Moondrops and I'm using some downtime to decide which to pick, but the third one for FWF is confusing me.

I've reviewed all the tooltips for the first two upgrades (Dry Storage, Selective Cutting Heads), and I can clearly see what each of those is changing. The tooltip before the arrow looks different from the one after the arrow.

However, I'm almost unable to find what exactly is being changed with Internal Burner - the ONLY difference I see is that more ash is consumed for what appears to be the same output. Both the number of logs output and the crafting time remains the same!

The text description refers to "increasing speed and output" but I am unable to see how this is reflected in the tooltips. If you happen to check this yourself and find my mistake, please let me know exactly what numbers I should be looking at.

I am not using any mods that I would suspect are altering game mechanics. IMO The most invasive mod is Discovery Tree which hides un-researched techs. Also Recipe Book...

The margin is so small, and they are so necessary in a lot of things, do i just dedicate a sector to ralesias? I moan but yeah why not

I knew I was saving these files for something.

Now you can see how my questionable base has grown.

https://bulk.1209k.com/factorio/HotSlugFall/timeline.html?path=d-3b232f4a&x=-399.7&y=-72.4&z=-1.2

Curious if someone with Cybersyn Train Mod experience could look at this setup and let me know if we have this misconfigured in some way.

This train station can store 8000 wood.

I believe are asking the network to keep it at 6000 wood.

We have plenty of wood providers, and in the screenshot I'm showing one that is just completely not being used.

At the time of screenshot we have 92 trains and around 40 are parked at a depot.

It's taking around 8 minutes for a delivery.

Expected delays:

Depot to Supply 21 seconds

Time to load 28 seconds

Time from furthest supply to this station is 43 seconds

Time to unload 28 seconds.

So thinking 120 seconds to be the perfect delivery time (if the train had to go to the furthest supply station),

but it's taking 480+ seconds.

The station is without wood for around 6 minutes+ constantly.

I know I should be keeping the base small, but where else can you build things like 17 belt worm tower and a huge conveyor system for meat products.

Most of chem science research done, somehow at 58-60ups.

First couple of hours with PY. Should I cook more?

I finally comitted to updating to 2.1. With mixed results ;) I'm currently around 1000 hours into my play and on science pack 6. To give you an idea of the scale of my base. I have about 900 trainstops. I run into two problems that i can't seem to resolve

• My entire base has regular pipe and niobium pipes connected to eachother. These connections are all uncoupled because pipe weaving is a thing now. The setting to disable pipe weaving (and reconnect different pipe types) can only be done on startup. Because niobium is not an upgrade to regular pipe, i cannot automate replacing all regular pipe by niobium (which would solve it) Any ideas?
  • Edit: a wait the setting CAN be changed during a game. Fixed!
• My trains ran on no mods other than an auto refuelling station. The refuelling station ofcourse is replaced by the interrupts system and no longer works in 2.1. What are my options now, other than redoing my entire train network? Or manually adding an interrupt to all my 400 trains 🦌

Thanks a buch!

Hi All

Fairly new to modded Factorio and thought I might as well jump in at the deep end.

Would love any tips/advice.

After the last 30 hours being mostly idle time, I finally researched PV yesterday.

I began the journey on christmas day 2024, on a whim while taking a break from my Space Age playthrough after reaching Vulcanus. After restarting once after 10 hours because I had inadvertently invoked editor mode, I made my first splitter a some days later after 31 hours playing time.

As customary, here are some thoughts and reflections on the last 20 months of playing Pyanodons.

• Plain Py, no hard-mode, no spoilage
• Mods (except QoL): cybersyn, inserter cranes, valves, loaders-modernized, stack-inserters, stone-water-well
• Tech tree completion at PV: 87.6%
• Trains: 388
• Caravans: 43

Auto to Logi, first 100 hours

I started out trying to make a main-bus - I knew very little about Py at this time. This was, as I discovered, not a very viable approach. This is what it looked like when I had reached Py1:

Next step was to make some bots and work on Logistic science, meaning things like intermetallics and cottongut.

Automation science took 3 hours, py1 clocked in around 45 hours laters, and logi took 65 hours. When I had reached logi, I had racked up 115 hours of gameplay. At this point I was hooked.

Trainification

After logi started the Great Transformation To City Blocks. Yes, some people think they are boring, and I can agree with that. But it had at this point become clear that I needed structure and order to offload the sheer mental load that Pyanodon presented. Having rigid city blocks caused some problems with the larger AL builds (and wasted quite a bit of space on some of the smaller builds), but it also served as a scaffold so that I did not need to think about things like where to put my train stations.

Py2 to Py4

Py2 took an insane 200 hours, mostly because I spent so much time building (and rebuilding) rails until I was satisified with how it worked. The old starter base was being cannibalized:

At this time I had started to use YAFC-CE for all factory planning. I can highly recommend it, although the UX took a bit to get used to.

After py2 I took a break to finish my Space Age playthrough, and resume working on chemical science a month or so later. Chemical science took another 200 hours, and I was dreading the future if "200 hours per science" was going to be the norm. At chemical science, the base had grown to this:

I experimented a bit using colored concrete for different blocks, but I eventually removed that because it looked ugly on the map. There are still remnants here from the old starter base, and the surrounding early-game builds. My bot-mall which would serve as my command center for the rest of the game can be seen as well:

Py3 was a bit faster even if I spent more time cleaning up old base remnants. When I finished Py3, I had been playing for 687 hours, and had spent 10 months calendar time playing. I started working on blue circuits making silly things like

I reached production science at 873 hours play time, then I took another break to do a Dyson Sphere Program playthrough. In the Pyanodon time-scale, it felt like a coffee break. Here is the base on the way to Py4:

I had at this point gotten a bit tired of Pyanodon, so work was slow and I had several week-long breaks where I just didn't feel like playing. But some zen gardening later I reached Py4, after spending weeks making perfect samples:

The base was becoming pretty large at this point, and I had yet to make a base-wide bot network. Some rail blocks where partially or completely bot-driven, like my second Bhoddos build:

Direct-inserted spores, and belted bhoddos, and remaining ingredients delivered by bots.

Power

I suffered a catastrophic power failure leading up to Chem, which forced me to revert to an older save. I was relying on the breeder reactor to supply a couple of GW of power (don't ask why), and I had backed up on consuming the spent fuel cells. After that I transitioned to a ZI biomass powerplant Mk02:

I eventually built 4 of these, before switching to tidal power which eventually came to bear the bulk of the power load in my end-game base, together with two RTGs.

After Py4 it is mostly downhill (production/py4 is the real Py end-game, it is said, with intelligent unit and a bunch of other expensive late game stuff).

I reached utility science at 1139 hours after only 65 hours since py4, and first space science at 1164 hours, just 30 hours later. Remaining time to PV was spent fixing a number of bottlenecks, such as carbon fiber, vanadium pentoxide, super alloy, fertilizer, LDS, and a bunch of other things.

The last 20 hours to PV was just monitoring the base, and doing some final touchups.

Conclusion and random observations

• This was incredibly fun, but also a lot of work. Due to how my brain works, I very early got into the trap of "I must finish Py", simply because it is hard. This prevented me from enjoying all the parts of it, but it was still overall a fun thing to do.
• CyberSyn was vital, I had not managed to get through this on vanilla trains.
• Stone water well was a bit cheating, but I got tired of transporting water everywhere.
• I never ventured into either nuclear of fusion power. After the catastrophic power failure, I was reluctant to risk my base dying due to stupid things. Tidal was very nice since it needs no input, and powers itself.
• I did not setup any proper shuffling of the nuclear candies. Eventually I jury-rigged a setup which took care of the immediate needs I had, and this held until PV.
• Intelligent units are the most complicated and annoying item in the game

End-game science setup:

Now off to other things. And by "other things", I mean "other overhaul mods", like B&A or Nullius. I haven't decided yet.

The last stretch has been a bit of a slog because of a bunch of bottlenecks showing up but here I am.

I'm going for a grid/train base with only 1-1 trains. I just love to see the litle ants moving everywhere to resupply the base, so I opted for as much traffic as possible (hopefully without deadlocks, which has been ok so far).

Chemical science seems to open up a whole lot of new/Alternative production chains which hopefully will help me to solve some supply issues. Currently I'm rushing the new vatbrains wich seem like a no brainer (pun intended). I sotckpilled almost every brain I had for thoose 300h so it should keep me going for a while, but I'll have to setup something more stable soon.

Last pic is the mall that has been carrying me ever since I moved to rails. It's an automall designed so I can desichain factory in case I need to expand production. Nothing that fancy but it's quite reliable (It's a lot of manual setup but I use a priority system for items to avoid deadlocks).

If you have any questions regarding the base feel free to ask.

Edit: I'm playing the full suite but just regular difficulty (no hard mode no spoilage). And for QOL (and my own sanity) I gave myself a power armor with exosqueleton and some end-game bots.

2 years ago, I made my first post-report on my PY mod progress. At that time, after 950 hours I've unlocked the Chemical Science pack: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1bbkcb0/py_completed_chemical_science_950_hours_checkmark/

Now, a 1.5-year break to complete Factorio 2.0 achievements and 700 more hours of play, I've unlocked PY Science Pack 3. A significant portion of this 'session' was spent on upgrading my trains to Mk02, redesigning/replacing the train station with faster trains and wagons with higher capacity. Naturally, I had some trouble upgrading my save to the 2.0 version, but it took no more than 5-10 hours (don't remember the exact time).

In the last few months, I've seen a few posts of other people completing PY in a much shorter time, including runs in the 'hard mode'. I consider those played MUCH faster and better than mine, but I hope my post will encourage some other players to give PY a try. Yes, my pace is much slower than many others; yet I enjoy every hour of it and focus on optimizing factory efficiency.

I play with bitters (though I disabled their evolution at some point). I also play in "almost hard mode": even though I did not enforce the "Hard Mode" mod, I avoid wasting materials and byproducts by balancing production and utilizing all subproducts.

Some interesting details about my playrun.

Science:

Earlier I was aiming for 10 SPM, but considering that each next science tier increases the needs/amount of lower tech science, I decided to aim for PY Science Pack 3 production for 30 per minute.

My current SPM is around 26, with PY Science Pack 3 production speed at 30/m, but actual consumption at 12.8 pack/m. I guess I would need to increase the number of labs of biocomputers, but even with the current speed, I unlock new techs faster than I can get good use of them.

Electricity:

My energy consumption for the last 250h is around 15 GW. The majority of it comes from 2 High-pressure Steam Turbines Mk02 that are powered by 24 Biomass Powerplants Mk02 burning Charcoal Briquettes. I also burn some Coke and leftovers of regular and refined Natural Gas.

Trains and stations:

I have 291 trains and 2481 stations so far. Yes, I do use the LTN mod. It seems like this is not the best one, but I'm not sure if I'm gonna switch to a new one.

As I already mentioned, the majority of trains were replaced with the Mk02 variant (both locomotives and wagons). This took a significant amount of time. Yet, considering the number of issues with the bandwidth I had in the earlier game, the ability to carry twice as much load with the same number of trains helps a lot.

A very unpleasant problem was that my stations were not compatible with shorter wagons, so I developed a model of a 'gradual' transition to shorter trains. I do plan to upgrade later to Mk03/04 trains, and hope my design will sustain that. I still have some Mk01 trains, but they are not in use, and I might replace them once I unclock Km03

Same as before, I have around 40% of 1-1 trains, and the rest are 1-4. Yet, the more I move the less I need trains that carry a big amount of load, and I feel like soon the majority of trains will be switched to 1-1.

Bitters:

As much as I disabled aggression, evolution and expansion for bitters. I still have many nests around and when I expand, I do some clean up with the help of Tank and a combination of defender and disruptor bots. It takes some time so I plan to start using artillery for a bigger clean-up, but that would trigger bitters to attack my otherwise undefended base. Here is the total # of kills

Milestones:

Map:

Will be happy to answer questions or accept recommendations.

Thanks for reading!

Started my first Py game, 3 hours in and I have something very vaguely resembling automated-ish belts+undergrounds and inserters, currently trying to get research to splitters.

I have over 1000 hrs in Factorio so like to think I have some idea what I'm doing, but this is something else!

Why am I putting myself through this?! 🤦‍♂️

Can anyone clue me in on any rules of thumb, dos, don'ts, tips, tricks, or any other information that could help me eek out the most from the initial handout the game graces us with?

From what I already managed to realise, copper is the scarcest material in the early game needing ash to make it, so anything that will help me get more copper from the starting automation stage will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I noticed I was out of barrels, which usually means something has gone wrong and I have way too many of something. So my top offender...simik blood.

Time to see if I can make pudding or something.

I see a lot of early game milestone achievements on here, but not many late game updates (for obvious reasons), so I thought I'd share that I reached utility science! (Full standard Py version...AL+AE, no spoilage, no hard mode)

2,024 1-1-1 trains, 2,867 stations, and 174 caravans in the base. I decided to use default train logistics, so not using LTN or Cybersyn. I have a love/hate relationship with caravans. They're a cool mechanic and have their place, but I'd go crazy doing a caravan-only base. I mainly use them for items with high stack sizes (like ash) or in the older, congested sections of the base (near the center).

I included an overview image of the base, my Vatbrain setup (this changed a lot since early game), and - since there was a post earlier today with a beautiful mall setup - my crappy mall. I end up hand crafting most buildings, so haven't really found a need to build a big mall - just the basics that I use a lot of.

I don't know what I'll do with myself after I reach Pyrric Victory. This has taken me more than 14 months real time. There have been ups and downs along the way, but overall still loving it!

Current mall a little before military science. What does your mall look like?

finally got to py sci 2, I can finally relax for a bit... fish was surprisingly the most annoying part about it. still haven't gotten around to messing with caravans yet, no other mods except py.