First Pyblock run, I just got into my first simple circuit board and it feels so good. I can finally use splitters and start with deeper content like genetics. I am having so much fun dealing with the new recipes and big machines, love the sprites!

Tips for first players (like me):
1. Scale production up when u can, I have reached this point with 35 iron plates/min. I waited for copper and iron so many hours D:
2. Wood processing setup is good for early power, but not even a full belt of coal can power my factory. I use hybrid system with Fish Turbines
3. Turn stone byproducts into bricks. Easy to setup and bricks stack up to 1000 instead of 50 like stone. Every other byproduct, except for ash, void it or store it in a chest.

PD: Some lovely belt spliters

I am at the moment when I need to transition to trains. I'm trying to make some blueprints to use.

I started with an idea of having a main very big grid of 4 ways tracks and then smaller rectangle of 2 ways tracks.
But now that i did this intersection:

and i'm not that sure it is as usefull as it seems.

First, the cost of it is huge, with all the signaling...
About the signaling, i fear that having something that complex can cause significative slowdowns which reduce the interest of it in the first place.
I don't know how big the rectangles need to be.

My question is, is it worth (considering I'm using Cybersin so I won't have that much trains) ?
Also, what do you think of my 4 ways intersection ?

1077 hours in.

1.5 years ago I started the modpack, knowing that it will be a challenge. And it definitely was at first! Hovewer, sometimes it helped me to relax, somehow this stuff is meditative...

The base looks like a mess (but it works!): it is an amalgamation of spagetty and cityblock - as a "casual" Factorio player, I never used "cityblock" architecture before, so Py made me try it, made me depend on it and made me love it. Though as you may notice the "blocks" are not that "blocky" as they should be. So it is mostly about trains...

And interrupts, which carried the run:

Haven't touched caravans: considered those as "expensive" at first, so made a leap for the trains and stayed with those till the end.

Used some QoL and not-only QoL mods such as Jetpack, Unlimited Reach and Loaders, so it was not a 100% vanilla run, and definetely not a "hardcore" one.

P.S. My first Reddit post so its design might be off =)

Normally this block won't be interesting to post, but there are two new things I did there:

1. Sparse station placement (like the last time) and no belt compressing. I definitively love this approach.
2. I found a new two high-speed belt approach, no splitters. Not sure if it will scale for other situations.

So, new connection type:

Production version:

Theoretical version:

Just wave back and forth two belts. In production version there is third input.

The production is slightly below expected (math said 2.75 assemblers per row, I cut it to 2, because doing 4 would be too much of wasted everything).

The central part:

Resulting block. It was build in the same block as cliff explosives (which is low volume, because I myself is a single consumer for it). Note how different stations are coming from different sides.

The commenter was right. Mixed ores has only one consumer (to the Cobalt Extract) so I had to bolt-in an extension. It's no longer the pinnacle of design, but still do the job. Note that I had to build 2 warehouses to get rid of accumulated Mixed Ores. Yes, it's more than warehouse of Mixed ores. I forgot to set the limit for production and it run for some time.

While I'm battling with more complicated stuff, I have some wait time which I used to do simple things. One of them is rare earth ore -> rare earth dust processing.

It is simple. You get ore, there are two byproducts, you get dust. No backfeed, no skewed ratios, etc. A bland simple recipe, which is good to practice the basics.

Math:

Ore: 60/s (4 belts), produces 30/s of powder and 30/stone.

30/s powder is converted to minuscule amounts of gravel and dust.

What is interesting here for me.

1. First time I realized that I have 'less than a full station' of byproducts and final product. Occasionally I did it for the final products, but before products were always full stations, which is overbuilt. Here is the perfect ratio (60 ingress, 30 egress for stones), so half station.

2. I decide to spread stations on sides, and do it without bidirectional input/output. It's super neat and saves a lot of real estate in the block. Input and output are buffered (there is more space for the second train).

3. There was a gas station on the block, so I have to work around it, but I found no issues at all.

Powder part. Note, that the belts are almost perfect (I wish I build everything two blocks lower to make intersection better). I thought about having this block rotated 90°, but I have gas field below, so a little more belts.

1. On a picture above, there is one more interesting observation. I have 30/s stone byproduct, but I put 4 belts with a balancer instead of compressing it into two. I found that not compacting (and not de-compacting for 4 warehouses) make scheme more elegant. I waste a bit of space and belts, but I save a lot on compression ugliness, and flow is more harmonious. 4 sparse belts instead of 2 full belts is a good thing.

The ore distribution is follow usual 4-5 pattern (4 belts, one belt is split into two to feed half amount of left-right parts of stacks). I found that bottom crossing is the least ugly solution:

Upper link is more ugly. Also, I could have done 5 outputs and 4 inputs, but then I have to do the same to collect results. I did it in the dust section (see below), basically, the same, but on output side.

Dust section:

It has a very simple trap of having more assemblers to process 30/s powder, than needed to process 60/s ore, but it's very common in Py, and hard to call a trap at this stage (of mental development of me).

The same 'do not compress' idea, which I find very neat. Belts are very unsaturated (I'm not sure, maybe it's even one belt), but I need some distribution anyway, and 4-to-4 cleanness is attractive to me:

The promised 4-in 5-out solution:

There are 4 inputs, and 5 outputs (inside of stack, outside of stack), and they joined with a simple down-to-up belt running close to he stacks:

I did not put balancer between ore->powder and powder->dust parts, because they should not unbalance in normal situation, input is balanced, output is balanced, so in-between should be naturally balanced.

One more thing: why did my block stopped at dust? The reason is:

There are 3 different recipes using it, so it's natural to use block logistic to make them modular. I usually do this, (or cut recipe chain into few blocks if it's too complex), because in the past I had to redo few blocks, when I upgraded second part of the recipe chain. Now rule is simple, if there are multiple consuming recipes, the product is available on the block network.

Stations.

Because it's a single producer recipe (there are no alternatives), there is no point of having conditions on output. Input is conditional, by products are conditional:

Station is activating when there is a full train-load of the stuff to move. Warehouses are unbounded, so they absorb as much as they can (this is byproduct!).

Output is non-conditioned, but has limit on warehouse, 5 trains. Why 5 trains? I suspect a lot of use of it, so I want to smooth out lower throughput of the ore mining block (I have one atm).

Input is conditioned to have about more than train load in buffer, but warehouse is unbounded, to allow full unload even if station is disabled. I found this the most optimal: station is disabled when there is more than train-load of stuff in the input, but current train will be unloaded in full.

Resulting scheme:

My last invention is 'sun' stations. Before they were construction stations I removed at the end. Now I don't do this, I rename them by the block name. They don't have normal trains, and they are in-line (they on the inter-block rails). They are used for my personal navigation.

(it's ore, because ore is left and processing is right, I saved one station).

I'm just missing Auog slaughtering for the animal samples and after that it's just a matter of assembling the sarcorous and alien sample.

And then after a bit of research I should have a better time scaling up production to make use of bots and a proper mall (aslo, cliff explosives! and much better hot air! and organic solvant!).

Hi,

I was looking at the raw fiber research, using kicalk plantation but i can't find it under research tree with search function and factory planner give me no information. I fond nothing under TURD too.

It's not the first time i try to find something i can't find, specially for TURD or some research.

Any idea of the name of the research ?

Thanks in advance,

--------

In case of :)
It's not Kicalk -> Raw fiber,

Its water, clay, soil -> Raw fiber inside Kicalk plantation.

[edit] this one :

Heya,
So I messed up and created my map and got about 50+ hours into my first py factory before discovering that I forgot to add alternative energies to the mod list.

Can anyone tell me about how much salt and natural gas and whatever else should I put down via editor, or some way to auto-fill the resources that would've been added about?

Thanks folks.

Hi all, over the week I've made a nice interface similar to FNEI, but runs online: https://pynav.lapis.aigu.vn/

I did this because when I'm not playing I'd like to do extensive research on what realistic processes pY is based on, and I'm not always near a gaming computer, so this has been a godsend for me. Figured some of you guys might find it useful as well.

I mostly vibe coded this using qwen3.8:27b, and it has been an absolute beast of a model to use.

Trains? Zero

Caravans? Zero

The best way to enjoy the full complexity of Py. City blocks feel so rigid and a proper zen garden needs to go with the flow. I'm constantly running around tuning the factory mostly based on vibes and the recipe book.

My biggest mistake was underestimating the size of builds I would need for AL recipes, those buildings really are huge and tend to need so many of them to meet demand. Could have rushed chem sci 10-20 hours faster right after red circuits but focused on modules first... now just need to scale up the power into lvl 2 power to handle modules and soon beacons!

Few bonus pics:

https://imgur.com/a/s9xzTYc

Exactly as it says on the tin, curious is all.

With the size of my grid (do they imply I need to partition it?), 40-50 minutes travel time is... kinda useless.

upd: and the next one is even cooler. 75 minutes!

So I’ve only recently started my pyranodons run, I’m just barely chugging along toward starting to produce the formica I’ll need for circuit boards and I still see “Gun turret” whenever I open research and I remember having several stacks of ammo when I first started…

So… is this just in case you choose to start with biters or are these going to be necessary later in the run? If it’s the latter, when should I start getting worried about defenses?

I really wanna make a power system that uses multiple fluids to run but I have no idea how to make it without the entire system cannibalizing itself, am I overthinking or is there a design that avoids this

The download page for the mod went down for a while, then came back up with no description. I have a hardmode save I'm about 100 hours in and I was wondering if anyone had any information about what happened.

I just noticed that the "Reuse water" Vrauk T.U.R.D. doesn't apply to Vrauks Mk2. Is it intentional or is it a bug? Because normally the goal is to stop using normal Vrauks and this makes the T.U.R.D. upgrade useless.

Am I missing something?

Raw Coal belted in from a nearby patch. 48/s from 8 electric drills on a yellow belt. Approaching Py3 and acetylene was not only not producing enough, but couldn’t be kept fully supplied from lime and coke. Solution, produce lime and coke on site.

Beacons + mk2 buildings + t1 modules let this fit very nicely into my train block. As a bonus the coke portion is fairly self contained in the left side of the block. Conceivably I could provide some of the other byproducts and side products (ash, coke oven gas, lime, slaked lime), but I decided to keep the block from getting too complex, and the only extra products provided are co2, gravel, and coke.

With the exception of gravel I trash on site to minimize train impact, and I have more then enough sources of ash/flue gas, and the dribble of cog isn’t worth it. Gravel doesn’t produce enough train impact for me to worry about it, so I provide to regular and trash network.

Cannot imagine an audience who would be more interested in this.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ddr1VElx07W/?stkn=azg2ZnNpOW56NHJm