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The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/KuuLightwing on 2024-04-07 14:50:49.

I’m not a beginner player anymore, but I always built my starter bases the same, and frankly they all had the same pitfalls due to me using a bus design, and honestly not planning properly or expanding it properly. So I wanted to try something different.

Recently I made a post asking about base designs and main bus, and how to approach designing a base without it. So here’s my attempts at deviating from main bus. This base was meant to research all the science up until infinite research, and provide the materials for the further construction and expansion. It took me probably too long to build it, but here’s how it went.

Part #1 - Starter science and mall.

This part of the base tracing back to the very start of the run - I just set up a little bit of science, and started the mall - namely everything that took only gears, circuits, iron and copper. I automated combinators early because I wanted lights, and considering that circuit network components take the same ingredients, I fit them here as well. The rest of the mall is fed by the second part of the base, which is

Part #2 - Steel and military science -> Chemical science

This part of the base has separate furnace stacks feeding it, and the goal of it was to produce robots, advanced construction materials such as substations, stack inserters, roboports, logistics chests, as well as explosives and battery products (lasers accumulators and solars, which honestly weren’t utilized much)

Part #3 - Advanced science and endgame materials.

Again built a separate furnace array, this time using electric furnaces. Also a new production line for green and red circuits. I was a little bit surprised just how much steel would actually be needed to feed purple science. Here I also added the production for nuclear reactors and beaconed factories. Blue belts and atomic weaponry were added later as well.

Part #4 - Advanced modules factory.

This one I designed in a lab and I miscalculated the ratio for red circuits - there’s about 50% more than it really needs, but nevertheless I like the footprint. It produces 3 of each modules per minute, and has been chugging along quite happily. You can also see beaconed iron and gear factory that feeds the blue belt production to the left. Before I built it, the entire base was just using yellow belts, and 90% of it still does.

Part #5 - Power.

For the most of the base’s lifetime it was powered by a simple steam powerplant, nothing unusual, currently switched to Nuclear

Two 800MW reactors. I like the rectangular footprint and they also can be built on the shore. No steam storage and no circuit control, because I like simpler design and don’t want to switch reactors on and off all the time. At the moment base doesn’t need two, quite frankly, but I built a second one for future proofing.

Uranium processing is done at the mine itself, and at 2.5M uranium patch, I have my doubts that I’ll ever need to move it. Well, unless I’d be too overzealous with atomic bombs.

Conclusion:

I’m kinda satisfied with the result. The approach of building essentially a new furnace stack for each new section of the base helped me to avoid the pitfall of having not enough materials for ever expanding demands of higher tier sciences, which was inevitably what happened to all my other starter bases. It’s really nothing special, the final SPM was like 45, but at the same time I think it worked much better than any of my previous starter bases. The only part of the base that was starved for resources in this run was the initial modules production line, which I expected as I essentially designed it to utilize the leftovers from advanced sciences production. I don’t know if it could be really classified as “spaghetti base” as I still bus design through several parts of the base - namely feeding malls and some parts of advanced science. I don’t think it’s as compact or as chaotic as “true” spaghetti bases.

No rocket launched yet, I’m planning to develop this save into some sort of a megabase unless I give up again. This base now essentially produces materials for the megabase and other general supplies, like fuel, atomic bombs, artillery shells and so on.