I remember trying something else from ElderAxe and being pretty happy with it. I like the idea of adding different pieces as I go along: maybe I want Military Science early on, before other blueprint pieces. This modular system looks like it lets me do this.
On the one hand, I really like this mall. The layout makes sense to me, and the way it intersperses feeder bus and production columns is straightforward and clean.
One the other hand, it doesn’t have accumulators or solar. It does have nuclear power pieces, but I haven’t gotten into nuclear power. Yet another resource to mine, which also means setting up transport in and subsequent refining. I’d rather do solar.
I like this one because there is oil near (enough) and the biters are far enough away that I get some time to build defenses before they go full on constant attack mode.
• Inputs: 1.5 belts of Iron Ore, 0.5 belts of Copper Ore, 1 belt of Stone and Coal (one belt of Coal is enough to power the base*, smelters and produce all coal-required items); Petroleum Gas and Water (on either right or top side);
• 45 of Red, Green, Grey (Military) and Blue Sciences per minute (with circuit conditions countering the distance from the labs to insure no expensive science packs excess production);
• A (sorta spread-out) mall with all items you need early to pre-mid game including a big military wing with multiple Flamethrower Turrets/Explosive Cannon Shells factories and one Cliff Explosives factory;
• 15 Labs to fit the Lab Research Speed 2 research speed requirement;
• Only four Red Underground Belts needed at the very later stage of base building (Blue Science and Explosive Cannon Shells factories), no Red Belts needed up to that point;
• An empty 4×4 zone in the middle of the base for a Roboport to be placed later, covering up most of the chests with produced materials;
I recently found a new mall blueprint that I like reasonably well. illHam’s Starter Base. It was in the Factorio School’s most recent list instead of the most popular list; but there were things I liked about it. Mostly, I liked that it did all three: red, green, and black science, and, it includes solar panels.
The only thing I don’t really like about illHam’s Starter Base is that the chests are limited by inventory slots and not by inserters controlled by circuits. In other words, each chest has a maximum number of slots enabled, so what limits the count of items produced is the inventory capacity getting full. The problem with this is that sometimes I have too many items in my personal inventory, and stuffing them back into the production chest is denied when the maximum-number-of-slots scheme is in place. So now there are 58 chests that need to be retrofited with red wire to the inserter, and the condition set on the inserter to stop when the count of items in the chest hits the limit. If I have too many items in personal inventory, I can shove them all into the chest with a trivial ctrl-click.
Next, have the robots build red circuits, so I can build roboports. 😉
Lastly, I fight biters really poorly. I’m old, so my brain does not go as fast as young people’s brains. I’m sure doing combat with biters and eliminating their nests is much easier for brains that think quickly. For me, I just die a lot. It is frustrating. But with illHam’s Starter Base and the production of piercing rounds magazines, I can put a perimeter of turrets up and not have to worry so much about biters.
It does have the snap-to-grid option enabled, which means it would have been nice to have done those on the first city blocks. But still, it works fine.
I tried one belt each, of what I need to get to purple science. But I goofed, and didn’t extend the Stone belt where the Stone Bricks belt went, so I had to squeeze it in. D’oh!
So, at this stage of the game, I have (from left to right):
Low Density Structures
Blue Circuits
Batteries
Sulfur
Iron Plates (this belt should probably be four belts wide)
Copper Plates (this belt should probably be four belts wide, or perhaps two)
Green Circuits
Steel Plates (this belt should probably be two belts wide)
Stone Bricks
Stone Ore
Coal
Plastic
Red Circuits
So, in order of appearance, they went like this:
I should note that as I laid down my template of which resources would be in which belt lane, (when the research let let) I created Constant Combinators with the item to go on the belt. Factorio did not display which item, until I went to Settings –> Interface –> Show Combinator Settings in alt-mode
Iron Plates
Feeds green circuits
Feeds red and green science
Copper Plates
Feeds green circuits
Feeds red and green science
Green Circuits
Feeds red and green science
Steel Plates
Feeds Big Mall by SwaggoFlamingo – although I think I would like a more complete mall
Coal
Turns out Big Mall by SwaggoFlamingo needs stone bricks, so I built a smelter nearby, which needed coal
Next up was black science, which needed coal and stone bricks, too
Later, Plastic will need coal
Stone Bricks
Feeds black science
Plastic
Feeds red circuits
Red Circuits
Feeds blue science
Sulfur
Feeds sulfuric acid, which is needed for batteries
Batteries
Feeds yellow science
Blue Circuits
Feeds yellow science
Low Density Structures
Feeds yellow science
Stone Ore
Feeds purple science
Build order
starter Iron mining and smelting
starter Copper mining and smelting
starter Stone drilling
Starter base with red science, yellow belts and green circuits
Electricity generation
Boiler
Offshore pump
Steam engines
Burner inserter
Wooden box to store coal in, until a belt of coal can be delivered
Small electric poles
Iron mining (electric miners)
Copper mining (electric miners)
Coal mining (electric miners)
Iron smelting
Copper smelting
Steel smelting
Lay out main bus
Green circuits
Red and Green science
Research Electric Energy distribution 1 to get steel towers
Science labs
Bolster electric mining and attach output to main bus
Black Science
Do not us Mike’s Mall – Yellow – I started with this, only to find that the factory that builds Medium Electric Pole and Big Electric Pole was missing the iron stick ingredient, and there was not a good space to add a factory which reached the iron plates belt line.
The other thing I did was combine the Unload 4 red train station by Nilaus with a medium buffer by Shaderon (which I doubled to do four lanes). The blueprint is here:
This task has a bootstrap problem; the blueprint calls for Medium Electric Poles, but those come from Electric Energy Distribution 1 below. 120 green science needed
Not because I want it, but I’m probably going to need it.
Now it gets a little difficult. The number one goal is to get to robots. That requires all of (MSTR) – Science 1.5 – Chemical Science – but Chemical Science has prerequisites. Namely:
Oil (pre-req to plastic)
I’m using Oil Processing which says This blueprint is part of the “Base-in-a-Book” Tutorial series by Nilaus
Plastic (pre-req to red circuits)
(MSTR) – Chemicals – Plastic with red belts
Red Circuits
(MSTR) – Green/Red/Blue Circuit Designs – Red Circuits 1
(Although I did Blue Science first, I probably should have done Sulfur production first).
The other thing blocking me from my number 1 goal (robots) is that I am running out of resources.
To that end, I had to build rail, a station, a locomotive, ore cars, and I used Autotorio to build a smelting setup for an iron patch.
Now I’m running out of coal.
Nilaus suggests that I should have built Utility Science (Yellow) before building Chemical Science (Blue)
(MSTR) – Science 1.5 – Chemical Science
This gets me blue science, which lets me research:
Advanced Oil Processing
Advanced Electronics 2
Lubricant
Electric Engine
Low Density Structure
Robotics
Logistic Robotics
Yellow Science
(MSTR) – Science 1.5 – Utility Science
A prerequisite is Blue Circuits
This gets me yellow science, which lets me research:
Logistic System
I really like Autotorio, but that means researching Brick Walls is high priority.
Don’t you just hate getting run over by a train and respawning without your blueprints?
Four belts for a 4 lane bus:
Underground belts spaced across, to tunnel under a 4 lane bus:
Split off the left most lane (let’s call it Lane 1) to the right:
Split off Lane 2 to the right:
Split off Lane 3 to the right:
TDB
Split off Lane 4 to the right:
TDB
The Factorio community is amazing, and the guys at Wube should be applauded for an amazing job. One of the particularly insightful things they did was to build an import/export function into the game (not surprising) but then make that available to the community. Perhaps that comes from it’s Minecraft beginnings. Either way, it was a fundamentally wise choice. In the spirit of open source, the community can share their ideas with each other.