This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/SWeini on 2024-10-03 18:26:50+00:00.
Such a great name. It really feels like defeat.
18 months ago I embarked on a crazy journey to play Pyanodon’s Alternative Energy (PyAE). I managed to finish in 235:13:28 hours of playtime. This is my base at the very end:
Just another boring train cityblock base, right?
Some Stats
Let’s start with some of the important milestones. Trains at 15 hours. Construction bots and logistic science packs at 25 hours. Logistic bots and cliff explosives at 50 hours. I continuously made progress towards the next science pack. The longest stretch were the 50 hours between logistic and py2. In general I tried to reach the next science pack within 30 hours.
And here is the full list of milestones. It’s the preset from back when I started, plus a few selected milestones that I added.
Some of you might expect some huge numbers after a few hundred hours, but actually it’s quite the opposite. I tried to build small, only do the bare minimum. And at the end I was limping towards the finish line.
Here is the production graph of science packs. So small that you can’t even see the what’s going on. That whole base made roughly 1 space science pack per minute in the end, plus corresponding amounts of the previous science packs (Py has that uncommon scaling of previous science packs). But not for long, buffers for some bottlenecks were running low and I could not sustain space or utility science packs for any longer.
In the last few hours I disabled science packs with enough buffer, so that more resources could go to space science.
Not a megabase when looking purely at the science pack production.
Surely, from a mod called “Alternative Energy” you can expect some challenges in power production. Power in the early game was rough, but with beacons it entered a whole new level. The coal powerplants (blue) did not scale indefinitely, and I added nuclear power (orange) to the mix, and finally oil powerplants (green).
The only good thing about beacons is that their power draw doesn’t fluctuate - unlike some other buildings with 1GW, 1.5GW or even 5GW that are constantly switching on and off. I had a few GW of buffer for those.
The obligatory victory screen.
I never used grenades against the real enemy, but my car hit a few.
And some stats from the Py Codex.
Mass murder approved. Rest In Pieces.
But Why?
While playing PyAE I was hanging out in the Py Discord and realized that many new players were asking the same questions, and many made the same mistakes (mostly by building too big and then burning out very fast), so I wrote a beginners guide. Also, there was so much outdated or exaggerated (negative) information about Pyanodons floating around, which I wanted to correct. It took quite some time, but it helped many new players get into Py. Later it was even linked from the official mod page.
But the true way to guide other players is to show them how. So I decided to record the early game up to logistic science. It’s a full recording with edited voice-over, some would say quite boring - and by now some numbers and builds are also outdated. If you are interested, take a peek here.
Later I stopped doing the full recording and instead made summary videos, showing all the builds but without much explanation. Just showing what a “properly sized” base could look like. Currently I’ve made videos up to py3, maybe I’ll add one or two for the late game.
And then there was always someone around who motivated me to go further. The Space Age release date gave me the last push - finish now or never.
The Journey
And so it started.
I’m a notorious no-QoL player, here is my modlist:
- PyAE with all of its dependencies, of course
- Milestones, it’s the best way to celebrate all the little (and big) achievements along the way
- Stats GUI, to show the playtime in the recorded videos
- Nothing else, how else could it be an universal guide?
- Later I added Orphan Finder, because I couldn’t stand an uneven amount of underground pipes in my inventory, though at some point I gave up
- And even later I added Factory Search, which stayed until the end
I used the Py recommended map preset (no biters, annoying cliffs, fewer ore patches that are very rich, normal amounts of water and trees).
I was quite happy with the map seed from my previous run, so I reused it. I knew that most required ore patches were nearby. Geothermal was a bit off, but I knew which direction to go.
Reddit doesn’t allow me to add that many pictures, so you have to read up here:
Speedrunning Quirks
As you might have noticed by now, this is not a normal playthrough of PyAE, it is the first finished attempt of a speedrun. Therefore the base and the strategy doesn’t look anything like what you have seen from other players. Almost half of the tech tree is still not researched, I’m missing out on a lot of QoL things (e.g. train braking force, robot cargo size, nexelit power poles) and upgrades. I spammed low-tech infrastructure for a long time - mk1 buildings with lots of mechanical inserters. I always beelined to important milestones: vatbrains and lab research speed, highest productivity bonus via modules and upgraded buildings, of course the next science pack, and a few selected technologies that solve huge bottlenecks. This means that the rest was left behind, e.g. I started using diet beacons when I could already make the big-boy beacons from a pure science level.
Doing a speedrun (or actually any run) over such a long period of time is a bit awkward because the mods were updated several times. Sometimes I could use that to my advantage, sometimes I could time the update to have less impact. Several times I swore to stop updating because I didn’t want to adapt my whole base, but I still gave in and bit the bullet, because the potential gains were so huge.
Some items in Py are ludicrously expensive. The general strategy was to reduce buffers. Trains of low-throughput items only transported a few stacks at a time, some were even allowed to transport less than a full stack. The general city-block design prevented huge buffers on belts. In general I allowed all items to buffer in the chests of the loading train station, but for some expensive items that buffer was removed/reduced as well. Everything late-game was made in the bot-based center with very low request amounts (1x ingredient amount) and output inserter limits (normally 10, sometimes 1 for the very expensive items). I built a mall for mk1 buildings, but only quite small, and handcrafted almost all mk2 buildings and all the mk3 buildings.
Also, for the speedrun it was important to balance player attention with overbuilding. Neither did I want to go to the same place every 15 minutes and add 1 more building, nor did I want to build too big in the first place, needing time and precious resources without a real need. Which brings me to the next topic.
Planning
As is normal for a speedrun, the actual time playing might be low, but the total time invested is huge. Vanilla speedrunners exercise the run over and over again, which isn’t feasible for Py. Instead, once I had personal construction bots, I prepared blueprints in editor mode and then simply used them in the real game. So sometimes I was preparing the blueprint for 2 hours, and then playing for 10 minutes, quickly handcrafting the buildings, waiting for the bots to finish building while helping out with large sections of belts. That was also one of the reasons why I stopped recording everything, it would just be boring to watch. In addition I did spend countless hours in YAFC, trying to optimize build size, build order, research order. I also made a small spreadsheet to help me calculate research costs considering vatbrains and a script to read the required science packs to…
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