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In what situations did this mantra help? I am the same as your friend, I have like 100 hours and I have never reached the endgame, always unsatisfied with my fa

In what situations did this mantra help? I am the same as your friend, I have like 100 hours and I have never reached the endgame, always unsatisfied with my factory.

leetcrew 5y ago
as you unlock more technologies, it becomes increasingly easy to refactor/maintain a large factory. ex: bots are a major inflection point in the game. you could scale up petroleum processing and red circuits before getting bots (you need these two things to make them), but that involves a lot of manual effort. it's usually better to do a barely sufficient (but tileable!) petroleum and rc setup, then immediately fix it after making a few construction bots. more general tip: clean interfaces are more important than massive capacity up front. in the long run, you will always need more steel/circuits/etc than you can serve with a single production line. but even if the internal layout is a mess, a functional unit with a clean interface can be scaled horizontally forever.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Cleanliness doesn't really matter, because space is infinite. ----------- So long as you've unlocked enough military (ie: shotgun in the early game, or tank in the mid-game), you can just clear out more room and then build there. (Shotgun has significant pierce-damage, enough to kill the alien bases. Tank also has significant pierce damage and impact-damage, allowing you to win against small / medium aliens through the midgame rather easily and cheaply) Don't even "tear down" your oldbase. Just fully abandon it and move elsewhere. Even without bots, there's no penalty to "just leaving". --------- Bots / deconstruction planner is more of a thing if you're tired of cleaning out biter-territory and want to "recycle" your old areas.
  - storyinmemo 5y ago
    Hi, it's me your local site reliability engineer. I care about things like latency, monitoring, and being able to understand the overall moving pieces. Scaling things in appropriate ratios is also relevant to me. I'd put you in a storage box and nuke if I could, but let's go have this conversation standing on these train tracks.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      > I care about things like latency Good luck bootstrapping your first Kovarex U235 units! A properly done Kovarex U235 takes about 2-hours to bootstrap itself. By this point in the game, you need to be able to "predict" how the factory will work in 2+ hours of latency and make sure things work as expected. (Or I guess you can blueprint copy/paste from an internet forum... but I find that "my own designs" are what make Factorio fun) ------ Once you're able to "predict" how the factory works in 2, 3, 4 hour scales, a lot of good designs open up. You focus on throughput and *eventual* designs... willing to wait 3 hours to get things done. And by "wait", I mean go play somewhere else for those 2 hours. There's always more work to do, a design that takes 3 hours to complete _AUTOMATICALLY_, but only 5 minutes of manual / human input is superior to a design that takes 10-minutes of human effort but completes in 15 minutes. The #1 resource in Factorio is player-attention. You should be laying out designs, and then _LEAVING_ in most situations. You let the bots complete the area and come back to "verify" when they're done.
  - leetcrew 5y ago
    maybe we are talking past each other, but I'd say clean interfaces and bots are very important even if you don't want to tear down the original factory. you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. can't really do this if you have some gnarly IO setup. I agree clean layouts inside of functional units is unnecessary. land is cheap; just make something that works and cp it everywhere.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      > you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. In my experience, no. Any high-volume production needs to be built from the ground up from smelters (or even miners) on downwards. If you have 1-belts of iron feeding your factory and then want to expand, the easiest way to do so is to build a parallel +1 belt of iron (including the 70+ smelters and 50+ miners somewhere else) somewhere. The terrain and issues of that other area (ie: water, cliffs, trees, etc. etc.) will be different. You can only legitimately "copy/paste" designs if you have an advanced set of terrain modifiers: landfill to erase water, cliff-explosives to erase cliffs, and flamethrowers to erase trees. (Chopping by hand takes too long. Even bots take too long in many situations to erase trees, especially at low-bot speed levels). ----------------- If you try to "logically" add it to your factory (originally designed for only 1-belt), you end up with non-obvious starvation points everywhere. Its far easier to declare the entire "logical belt" region to be a cohesive design (from mines to smelter to assembly machines to science to labs: beginning to end of the entire process). There's an additional bonus to this: belting the "end-product sciences" is very easy and low-throughput. Instead of "moving your factory" around, it makes far more sense to "move your science belts" around. ------- Its very hard to turn a "1-belt of iron + 1-belt of copper" factory into a "2-belt of iron + 2-belt of copper". Very very difficult, you really shouldn't be trying to find space for the extra belt or smelters. Just "soft abandon" the base, and build your 2nd belt of iron + 2nd belt of copper elsewhere. Then build 2-belts of your red+green+blue+purple science (or whatever outputs your old base were doing) to lead to the new science center. "Abandon" the old science center as well (since the "old science" center won't have the extra science to advance forward). "Abandoning" the science center means that all that space opens up for you to move your science-belts to the necessary location towards the new science center. Maybe you need to plow through some old areas but it'd be easier to do this from an "abandonment" mindset rather than a "cleanup" mindset. --------- The only way you "cleanly" have room for that 2nd line of copper or iron, is if you magically remembered to leave room for the 70-smelters before you built the base. This is unreasonable. EDIT: I guess you use yellow/red belts in the early game. 24-smelters per yellow belt of production. 48-smelters per red belt of production. 72-smelters per blue belt of production. How do you grow 24-furnaces into 48? Doubling the size if you upgrade from yellow to red? (Or upgrading from 1x yellow to 2x yellow?). Its non-trivial to run that many lines through the middle of already-built factory areas. And unless you planned for it, 24-additional furnaces is a non-trivial amount of space.
dragontamer 5y ago
Construction Bots can automatically "tear down" your trash areas, and unlocks the "copy" and "paste" buttons, meaning you rebuild the areas much faster. Bots are roughly blue-science, or the ~halfway point of the tech tree. --------- So everything "Before" construction bots can be basically seen as a "prototype" or "throwaway" factory. Everything "after" construction bots is also a prototype, because you can just hit the "deconstruct planner" and tear everything down automatically and reconstruct from scratch whenever you want. If everything is a prototype, then perfection doesn't matter. Instead, you're "pursuing" perfection, teardown whenever you think you have a better grand plan, and copy/paste the design back if you make a mistake (or Ctrl-z / undo your decisions as needed. Etc. etc.)

In what situations did this mantra help? I am the same as your friend, I have like 100 hours and I have never reached the endgame, always unsatisfied with my factory.

leetcrew 5y ago

as you unlock more technologies, it becomes increasingly easy to refactor/maintain a large factory. ex: bots are a major inflection point in the game. you could scale up petroleum processing and red circuits before getting bots (you need these two things to make them), but that involves a lot of manual effort. it's usually better to do a barely sufficient (but tileable!) petroleum and rc setup, then immediately fix it after making a few construction bots. more general tip: clean interfaces are more important than massive capacity up front. in the long run, you will always need more steel/circuits/etc than you can serve with a single production line. but even if the internal layout is a mess, a functional unit with a clean interface can be scaled horizontally forever.

dragontamer 5y ago
Cleanliness doesn't really matter, because space is infinite. ----------- So long as you've unlocked enough military (ie: shotgun in the early game, or tank in the mid-game), you can just clear out more room and then build there. (Shotgun has significant pierce-damage, enough to kill the alien bases. Tank also has significant pierce damage and impact-damage, allowing you to win against small / medium aliens through the midgame rather easily and cheaply) Don't even "tear down" your oldbase. Just fully abandon it and move elsewhere. Even without bots, there's no penalty to "just leaving". --------- Bots / deconstruction planner is more of a thing if you're tired of cleaning out biter-territory and want to "recycle" your old areas.
- storyinmemo 5y ago
  Hi, it's me your local site reliability engineer. I care about things like latency, monitoring, and being able to understand the overall moving pieces. Scaling things in appropriate ratios is also relevant to me. I'd put you in a storage box and nuke if I could, but let's go have this conversation standing on these train tracks.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > I care about things like latency Good luck bootstrapping your first Kovarex U235 units! A properly done Kovarex U235 takes about 2-hours to bootstrap itself. By this point in the game, you need to be able to "predict" how the factory will work in 2+ hours of latency and make sure things work as expected. (Or I guess you can blueprint copy/paste from an internet forum... but I find that "my own designs" are what make Factorio fun) ------ Once you're able to "predict" how the factory works in 2, 3, 4 hour scales, a lot of good designs open up. You focus on throughput and *eventual* designs... willing to wait 3 hours to get things done. And by "wait", I mean go play somewhere else for those 2 hours. There's always more work to do, a design that takes 3 hours to complete _AUTOMATICALLY_, but only 5 minutes of manual / human input is superior to a design that takes 10-minutes of human effort but completes in 15 minutes. The #1 resource in Factorio is player-attention. You should be laying out designs, and then _LEAVING_ in most situations. You let the bots complete the area and come back to "verify" when they're done.
- leetcrew 5y ago
  maybe we are talking past each other, but I'd say clean interfaces and bots are very important even if you don't want to tear down the original factory. you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. can't really do this if you have some gnarly IO setup. I agree clean layouts inside of functional units is unnecessary. land is cheap; just make something that works and cp it everywhere.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > you want to be able to double production of high volume products with a couple copy-pastes. In my experience, no. Any high-volume production needs to be built from the ground up from smelters (or even miners) on downwards. If you have 1-belts of iron feeding your factory and then want to expand, the easiest way to do so is to build a parallel +1 belt of iron (including the 70+ smelters and 50+ miners somewhere else) somewhere. The terrain and issues of that other area (ie: water, cliffs, trees, etc. etc.) will be different. You can only legitimately "copy/paste" designs if you have an advanced set of terrain modifiers: landfill to erase water, cliff-explosives to erase cliffs, and flamethrowers to erase trees. (Chopping by hand takes too long. Even bots take too long in many situations to erase trees, especially at low-bot speed levels). ----------------- If you try to "logically" add it to your factory (originally designed for only 1-belt), you end up with non-obvious starvation points everywhere. Its far easier to declare the entire "logical belt" region to be a cohesive design (from mines to smelter to assembly machines to science to labs: beginning to end of the entire process). There's an additional bonus to this: belting the "end-product sciences" is very easy and low-throughput. Instead of "moving your factory" around, it makes far more sense to "move your science belts" around. ------- Its very hard to turn a "1-belt of iron + 1-belt of copper" factory into a "2-belt of iron + 2-belt of copper". Very very difficult, you really shouldn't be trying to find space for the extra belt or smelters. Just "soft abandon" the base, and build your 2nd belt of iron + 2nd belt of copper elsewhere. Then build 2-belts of your red+green+blue+purple science (or whatever outputs your old base were doing) to lead to the new science center. "Abandon" the old science center as well (since the "old science" center won't have the extra science to advance forward). "Abandoning" the science center means that all that space opens up for you to move your science-belts to the necessary location towards the new science center. Maybe you need to plow through some old areas but it'd be easier to do this from an "abandonment" mindset rather than a "cleanup" mindset. --------- The only way you "cleanly" have room for that 2nd line of copper or iron, is if you magically remembered to leave room for the 70-smelters before you built the base. This is unreasonable. EDIT: I guess you use yellow/red belts in the early game. 24-smelters per yellow belt of production. 48-smelters per red belt of production. 72-smelters per blue belt of production. How do you grow 24-furnaces into 48? Doubling the size if you upgrade from yellow to red? (Or upgrading from 1x yellow to 2x yellow?). Its non-trivial to run that many lines through the middle of already-built factory areas. And unless you planned for it, 24-additional furnaces is a non-trivial amount of space.

dragontamer 5y ago

Construction Bots can automatically "tear down" your trash areas, and unlocks the "copy" and "paste" buttons, meaning you rebuild the areas much faster. Bots are roughly blue-science, or the ~halfway point of the tech tree. --------- So everything "Before" construction bots can be basically seen as a "prototype" or "throwaway" factory. Everything "after" construction bots is also a prototype, because you can just hit the "deconstruct planner" and tear everything down automatically and reconstruct from scratch whenever you want. If everything is a prototype, then perfection doesn't matter. Instead, you're "pursuing" perfection, teardown whenever you think you have a better grand plan, and copy/paste the design back if you make a mistake (or Ctrl-z / undo your decisions as needed. Etc. etc.)