This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/s_m_w on 2024-11-04 21:06:53+00:00.
After 155 hours, I beat the game by proving that I can escape into the distant reaches of outer space whenever I like. It’s been a journey and I figure some of you may be interested in my experience. While I did not start completely spoiler-free, I mostly knew of Vulcanus and Fulgora from the FFF, and did not look at any guides or content creators. Spoilers ahead, obviously.
Nauvis
Standard settings, main bus base, we’ve all been there. I aimed for 60 SPM as a completely arbitrary goal and in general enough infrastructure to expand Nauvis massively and quite soon. After about 20 hours, I was rocket-ready. I could’ve been ready a lot sooner, but I spend quite a bit of time experimenting with trains as soon as I unlocked them (more on that later…), properly secured my borders and generally made sure everything would work for a while without me there. Honestly, I just spent a long while smelling the flowers. It’d been a while since I played Factorio. The expansion isn’t going anywhere. It was nice.
Space, the first Frontier
Designing Space Platforms is something I struggle with just as much after 155 hours as I did with the first once. Your inputs are naturally mixed and don’t arrive in the ratios you need them. They also naturally come from every direction. First instinct is to put everything into a box to buffer, then pull out what you need. Discarding or rejecting items you have too many of is easy. It works, but the limitations of this led me to solutions that worked, but felt and looked a bit off, i.e. filling both sides of a belt in tight spaces by using single underground belts and such tricks).
Smart Trains and You
I cannot stress how much time I sunk into playing with trains. For Nauvis, I decided very early to eventually transition into a train-based city block design. I also decided on some basic design principles (without knowing if all of them were even possible yet).
- 1-4 Trains. I wanted pretty large and pretty slow trains compared to my usual 1-1 shenanigans.
- Convenience over everything. All trains use the same schedule. Provider stations that need 0 setup. Requester stations that need minimal setup (i.e. only setting the item it needs, nothing else).
- Narrow stations, including unloading.
I ended up coming up with a system that checked every box and learned to love the Selector Combinator along the way. In simple terms, each requester sends a negative circuit signal of how many train loads of an item it has space for (the selector combinator determines the stack size of each item, no need to adjust any numbers!), i.e. “-3 Copper Ore”. Any Provider station with enough copper ore to fill a train in its inventory turns on if “Copper Ore” is negative. Trains travel to Provider, unload at requester. Signal goes to “-2 Copper Ore”, rinse repeat until it is 0, Provider with copper ore turns off. Hooray!
Except that when there is a Copper Ore demand, ALL provider stations with copper ore are turned on and trains are sent out to each. Dang. Well, the requester only has a train limit for how much it actually needs, so those redundant trains end up in a Depot. Each parked train sends its contents to the circuit network, i.e. “+1 Copper Ore”, such that if there is a copper demand, the providers only turn on if the demand exceeds the already filled trains in the Depot. Over time, this system balances out perfectly and I never bothered fixing the “bug” of too many trains being sent to providers. It turned into a feature instead, filled trains ready to fill demand immediately just waiting in my Depots.
Walls and Wall Accessories
I usually just make one big robot network and supply my perimeter walls that way, but I really wanted to have separate networks supplied by train this time. Just because, really.
The first iteration was a 1-2 train, one wagon filtered to contain every type of item used by my walls, one fluid wagon with oil. Wall supply request stations turned on whenever they weren’t full on something and the little train went and refilled it. That part worked just fine, but loading it was an issue.
Initially, I used the most cursed way possible: Loading via a nearby identically-filled wagon with a bunch of long-handed inserters. I occasionally refilled the wagon by hand and fixed the inserters whenever they got stuck with stuff. Which they did a lot.
Don’t do this. You think you do, but you don’t
You see, an inserter is smart. A bunch of them however are really, really stupid and prone to all attempt to insert the same item at the same time, even if there’s not enough space. The easy solution of course is to just use a single requester chest and a single inserter (or requester chests/inserters with a different item each), but that’s slow and also too easy.
So I ended up with this: A row of requester chests, each requesting some of every item (set via wire so I can have a central location to set the wagon’s target inventory from, a constant combinator). I then wire up every chest’s inserter with a combo of a Selector Combinator set to “Select Input” mode with each combinator set to a different index (0, 1, 2, 3…), and a decider combinator to turn the item returned by the Selector Combinator into the signal S. I could then set each inserter’s filter to the Selector Combinator and their stack size to S.
That’s a lot of hard to understand text. It means: No inserter will ever attempt to insert the same item as any other inserter and they will never insert more items than the exact number of what’s missing. It’s great! Technically it has the limitations that all inserters need access to all possible items to be inserted, and also makes it pretty bad in case you want to insert a lot of the same item.
My design also had a combinator bulge at the top to take out items that exceed the inventory targets, but that really wasn’t necessary once I figured out this stuff anymore.
Anyways, space…
Smmetry is essential to space travel
While my Space Science platform ended up very vanilla-looking, I quite liked my first proper ship which I dubbed Planet Express, creative genius that I am. It ended up symmetric and clean-looking.
Planet Express (Trademark pending)
It did not arrive at Fulgora undamaged. Quite frankly, that was a wake-up call. Before this point, I thought I had completely over prepared with significant amounts of projectile damage science and all that, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Power was an issue despite quality solar panels, fuel production was very slow. All in all… I was surprisingly excited about my failures and shortcomings here. There were problems to solve and they were interesting! It worked, but it could work better. Understanding of this Space Platform stuff was arriving. Fulgora was just waiting there and I was stuck. I had to build from 0 and fix my ship. Onwards!
Fulgora
Fulgora was an obvious first target, mostly because I already knew a bit about it and between it and Vulcanus, it just seemed like the more interesting choice at the time. It was very strange to drown in piles of blue and red chips immediately. I wanted to hoard them, sleep on them like a dragon. You never had enough of these, I knew, conditioned by hundreds of hours of Factorio. And so I… mostly did that, delaying the inevitable recycling of one of the most coveted ingredients by trying to figure out how to sort through all this scrap.
A sushi belt of some sort seemed like a solution, but it really wasn’t. Sushi was the input, not the goal. My mind, of course, immediately went back to trains (and would get back there eventually), but space constraints and lack of production for elevated rails made that a non-starter. And bots seemed… too easy. So I built a belt-based Sort-o-tron.
Each column is a scrap input, each row one type of item. Easily scalable. Overflow is easily solved by priority splitters, with any overflow sent into more recyclers with their outputs going back into the Sort-o-tron.
And then… I mostly just put stuff back into boxes and let the bots handle things after all. No, I am not entirely sure why either, but I was producing science and things seemed to work alright. I had developed an idea how to combine my Sort-o-tron with trains later down the line, started producing Electromagnetic Plants (50% productivity blew my mind after thinking I knew everything about Fulgora already…) and called that good enough. The plan was always to return and iterate later.
My first impressions of Fulgora were very positive. I took some time to just take in the atmosphere after landing first, looked at various ruins. The problems to solve were very fun. “What if you had infinite high-tech ingredients, but no raw resources?” combined with “What if we force sushi into your mouth Sort-o-tron?” were peak Factorio.
Vulcanus
Vulcanus was next, about 40 hours in. I knew less about Vulcanus than Fulgora, but still too much. In fact, I was on the exact line of knowing enough to think I knew everything (and therefore…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1gjpab2/just_beat_space_age_a_summary_and_retrospective/
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