Steam tells me I have slightly more than 3,000 hours played. You could say I like this game. 😉
My favorite jumpstart iron miner and smelter:
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My favorite coal jumpstart rig: Early Coal Mining Rig by paelleon:
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One nice thing with Factorio: Space Age is that all belts can immediately have a circuit connection: Read belt contents: Hold (all belts). This makes sushi belts way easier. Hence, my current favorite science lab setup is this:
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It is simply a sushi belt with (up to) eight labs. As I research a new science, I hook it up to the sushi belt with an inserter on an enable/disable circuit based on the count of packs on the belt.
I still like Tileable Science – Early/Mid Game v0.17 by Christoffer Ramqvist. So far, I haven’t created a base so large that I need to tile these production facilities. With that, I will reverse the output belt so the layout has inputs on one edge and output on the opposite edge. And then I can drop the parts that exist only to extend tiling.
If the resource fields are mixed, my favorite sorter is 4 Ore Sorter v2 by Reece Silba. That will feed into buffers: Buffer 1B – [Two Middle belts][Ore buffer] by Shade Centurio
And what to do with the ore? Out of the ore sorter and into a snippet of Smelter Book by Noel Puldon:
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Which brings me to the point that prompted me to write this post. I need a better mall than Kitch’s Totally Practical Strip Mall – 3.0 (0.17 Update)
I really like the layout of this mall. I like the design. I like that it does not have interleaved belts. 3,000 hours in, it is my favorite mall.
However, it was created 7 years ago, and no longer fits with the changes in Factorio: Space Age. Specifically, three of the power transmission recipes now use copper cable instead of copper plate. This is a recipe change that makes sense to me; previously we were pretending that inside the power pole factory was a small copper plate-to-copper cable factory. Externalizing it is fine. A factory and a belt getting the copper cable output sets up a whole production line. Copper cable and iron bars should share a belt and feed medium electric poles and big electric poles.
But yeah, Kitch’s blueprint doesn’t (easily) have room for one more factory and one more belt. Sigh.
I’ve already got twenty small projects on my plate. Looks like I’m going to be adding another one. At least this one will be fun. 🙂