Factorio - a factory building game - now with Space Age expansion

[Kruyurk]

Belt weaving is like cutting your spaghetti. Just pick another pasta shape if you can't handle the spaghetti.

 

[Average Manatee]

Man I feel really stupid. See if you can spot the mistake in the previous image.

Belt weaving is like cutting your spaghetti. Just pick another pasta shape if you can't handle the spaghetti.

If there's one thing I truly love about space age, its that it lets you do all the factory paradigms simultaneously. My Nauvis base is a belt-fed base (just got stack inserters, throughput will be through the roof). My Vulcanus base is a city block design. My Fulgora and Gleba bases are bots, except for the mining in both which are unique (fulgora space-constrained, Gleba just awkward). My spaceships are total fucking spaghetti with every tile saved that I can and stupid belt magic to make everything work. Just about to visit Aquilo and see what's up there.

EDIT: Ahh, just got lucky and rolled my blue Mech Suit on Fulgora. 12x14 equipment space, +288% movement bonus, jump right over anything

 

[Average Manatee]

Lol, landed on Aquilo expecting to do another fresh start from nothing. Well, aside from the blue mech suit of course. Turns out you can't do that there. At the least you want to load up like 1k plates/copper/stone/fuel and various numbers of circuits. I reloaded and went there with a nuclear reactor. Also bring Holmium plate and superconductors for very specific reasons.

In other news spiderbots are pretty good for Gleba patrol. I wish you could have them permanently patrol around your pollution cloud though.

 

[Hellraiser]

Lol, landed on Aquilo expecting to do another fresh start from nothing.

The game specifically warns you not to do that in the Aquilo briefing

I came prepared and even then it turned out I that the one thing I forgot to pack were turbines for the reactor. Ended up slow smelting metals in a single electric furnace with far less solar power energy than I needed for a long time before I could handcraft one on the spot (in hindsight I could have hand crafted efficiency modules to speed it up by lowering the power draw). It took the ship even longer to make a round trip to bring a turbine from Fulgora. In hindsight maybe a reload would be faster, but oh well.

 

[Average Manatee]

Space logistics question. Say I want a freighter that arrives, tops off resources, and leaves. I can do "inactivity 30s" to kind of do this. The problem is:

1. If the resource is being used constantly by the planet, the freighter just constantly drops off a small amount in the 30s window, resetting it and sitting there forever.
2. If there's too many drops going on at one time, the freighter might be stuck in line waiting to drop, which means it counts as "inactive" and leaves before dropping anything. This could be very bad for production.

I can't really see a good way to get around this, aside from some really complex circuit stuff to set some kind of range of quantity requests for each item.

Lol, landed on Aquilo expecting to do another fresh start from nothing.

The game specifically warns you not to do that in the Aquilo briefing

You mean that thing which popped up for 5s 10 hours ago when I was just going through the research list while doing real work?

I came prepared and even then it turned out I that the one thing I forgot to pack were turbines for the reactor. Ended up slow smelting metals in a single electric furnace with far less solar power energy than I needed for a long time before I could handcraft one on the spot (in hindsight I could have hand crafted efficiency modules to speed it up by lowering the power draw). It took the ship even longer to make a round trip to bring a turbine from Fulgora. In hindsight maybe a reload would be faster, but oh well.

I think you have to use solar to jumpstart there, how else do you melt ice into water to make steam?

In any case I've just set up a round trip of ships that bring in supplies. The planet requires you to ferry in stuff from the other planets anyway, might as well have them smelt your plates and make your concrete as well. It's not like cargo bays are expensive to carry it. The only cost is in rocket launches which I have plenty of now.

 

[Jaedar]

Just did a preliminary landing on aquilo (going to have to make a better space platform to go there reliably back and forth). Seems like a pretty challenging planet.

I'm a bit annoyed at how the SE spaceships somehow had better QoL than SA platforms. Really missing the ability to set lower speeds than max, and how SE turrets would be intelligent about their targeting.

 

[Average Manatee]

Warning: Don't combine stack inserters with quality. The stack inserter waits till it is carrying a full stack of items, which means if a different quality item blocks it the machine is now fucked till you fix it manually. I guess you could have different inserters filtered to each quality level but this fucked me.

Stack inserters are amazing btw. It's steroids for your belts. Up to 240 items/s solves most any throughput problems. Almost a reason to go Gleba first. Almost.

Things I've come to appreciate Quality on:

Armor/Vehicles/Equipment: Still the highest priority. Not that you need everything max quality, I barely use shields and mk3 batteries are insane even without quality, but why not?
Artillery: More range means more doing what artillery is there for. Annoying ingredients to get quality so just craft the final product and recycle till you get what you want.
Beacon: Huge advantage from quality, especially with how stacking beacons is less effective now, so that first beacon does the most for the least power hit. Also very easy item to make Quality if you're farming your base ingredients since there's no weird ingredient like level 3 modules have, just run a bunch of resources through furnaces and EM plants and you can have tons of rare and uncommon beacons.
Substations: Actually really useful to have around if you're doing complex builds on Aquilo, or trying to tile some blueprint.
Asteroid collectors: These scale insanely well with quality.
Crushers: These are weirdly super high power draw. Even if you module them to -80% they can suck up a substantial portion of your energy budget. Faster working speed is effectively a power decrease, and maybe you want to use a module or two on them.
Tesla Turrets: Substantial range increase, damage scales with better fork chance per jump, stun of the attack helps slow waves. Best and most convenient defensive weapon for Gleba farming or artillery stops on Nauvis which both have to deal with huge aggro. Really wish I had invested in these from the start.

Things that are notably bad with quality:
- Any turrets on your ship. You want consistency with turrets. Range means they'll be wasting their ammo shooting shit way off to the side that wouldn't even hit you. At least for me, my issue has been overall ammo starvation, not a lack of time to shoot things down. If you have the right weapon and ammo asteroids die in a blink of the eye once they get in range.
- Modules. Its not that they aren't useful but its an absolute hell making a build that does quality on all of them (you end up needing to do builds for every individual stage), the 3rd stage is annoying with weird ingredients, you're left with a shit ton of random mid-quality modules and not enough high ones to really use everywhere, you have to manage shipping them across multiple planets, and managing and replacing modules with higher quality ones across your bases is tedious and annoying and fuck it. Quality Quality modules is acceptable since you'll only need a few of them on the final stage of crafting equipment but everything else is not worth the effort if you just want to finish the game. Quality beacons provides you half the value with 1/10th the effort.

I'm a bit annoyed at how the SE spaceships somehow had better QoL than SA platforms. Really missing the ability to set lower speeds than max, and how SE turrets would be intelligent about their targeting.

You can have turrets set certain targets as priorities or to only go after certain things. And with the way asteroids are balanced its pretty easy to see the "right" way to set them for each turret.

 

[Jaedar]

You can have turrets set certain targets as priorities or to only go after certain things. And with the way asteroids are balanced its pretty easy to see the "right" way to set them for each turret.

Yeah, I have set my gun turrets to only shoot small ones, and rockets only on big ones.
What I mean is that in SE the turrets would not waste ammo on rocks that are in no way going to hit your ship. In space age they fire at everything that is in range. Not so bad for gun turrets since their range is limited, but for rocket turrets its kinda annoying.

I forgot to bring nuclear fuel to kickstart my aquilo base (I'm hoping it's possible to get a positive electricity loop going by making and burning rocket fuel, but it will take a while to get there), so now I need to sit around and wait for an hour for the platform to recharge its weaponry enough.

 

[Average Manatee]

What I mean is that in SE the turrets would not waste ammo on rocks that are in no way going to hit your ship. In space age they fire at everything that is in range. Not so bad for gun turrets since their range is limited, but for rocket turrets its kinda annoying.

Ahh, yeah. That's why I don't like extra range on them. I keep my missile turrets a bit away from the corners for this reason.

It does still provide resources from the destroyed asteroids though so assuming your damage and processing tech is up to snuff it becomes a net positive.

I forgot to bring nuclear fuel to kickstart my aquilo base (I'm hoping it's possible to get a positive electricity loop going by making and burning rocket fuel, but it will take a while to get there), so now I need to sit around and wait for an hour for the platform to recharge its weaponry enough.

Solid Fuel is better for your electricity loop. Also this is where always having 100 level 1 efficiency modules in storage comes in handy.

I haven't had any problems with space ship resources since getting the asteroid reprocessing and a few asteroid productivity techs. Those should suffice to keep your ammo belt fully loaded. Still haven't gone to advanced asteroid processing yet, will need to do that for the trip to solar system edge, right now I'm only using yellow ammo and rockets. Fusion Power it should simplify things a lot. Did anyone use anything other than solar power for all of their ships up to Aquilo? I feel like managing water is too tricky to use boilers, and sticking efficiency modules in things is easier than making a nuclear setup that will still fail if water runs out because you messed up a connection or had some weird circumstance.

Funny enough while Aquilo has some amazing tech, the repeatables for it seem kind of shit. Rocket part productivity is kind of meh, at this point you've probably got like 10 rocket silos on all the other planets able to sling rockets out constantly and doing that on Aquilo is as simple as dumping 1k resources every time they visit. Meanwhile railgun upgrades seem kinda pointless, it already shoots fairly quick and should kill everything other than Demolishers in one shot. So there's an argument that you don't even really need a ton of sustained production on Aquilo unless you're doing the research productivity research. My ships bringing back 5k Aquilo science feel wasted.

 

[Jaedar]

It does still provide resources from the destroyed asteroids though so assuming your damage and processing tech is up to snuff it becomes a net positive.

That assumes my collectors are in range, and that I'm not currently throughput blocked (which I often become during journeys, since your collection skyrockets).

I haven't had any problems with space ship resources since getting the asteroid reprocessing and a few asteroid productivity techs.

If I actually designed a properly big platform, it probably wouldn't be a problem. But I only have one of everythng.

Did anyone use anything other than solar power for all of their ships up to Aquilo?

Nope. I think you could use nuclear, because the asteroids around aquilo are almost all water ones. But at the same time, it seems pretty annoying.

 

[Average Manatee]

If I actually designed a properly big platform, it probably wouldn't be a problem. But I only have one of everythng.

Fair enough, I prioritized building bigger and bigger over time for this reason. Lots of space for smelters. I definitely overbuilt my initial freighters though because I expected that the way to do it was through lots of solar panels powering lasers but that's clearly not the case. So with that initial overbuild of space components and launching infrastructure I just kept going with bigger ships.

Nope. I think you could use nuclear, because the asteroids around aquilo are almost all water ones. But at the same time, it seems pretty annoying.

I meant did anyone use non-solar power previous to unlocking fusion on Aquilo, not for the Aquilo journey itself. While there's plenty of ice out there I want all my ships to be able to travel anywhere even where there's little ice because they all eventually get put on a rotation back to Nauvis. I guess with reprocessing it's probably never a problem if you make a good build.

I have problems making a good space build though, the lack of chests means everything you want to check the quantity of with circuits has to be fed into your space platform hub which is incredibly awkward. It's really annoying that you can't load and unload from cargo bays, I kind of expected that.

 

[Jaedar]

Fair enough, I prioritized building bigger and bigger over time for this reason. Lots of space for smelters.

I have 2 forges for iron plates (one for molten iron, one for plates), so that's fine. But to double my rocket production I'd need to add like 4 more chem plants, and redesign large parts of the platform.

meant did anyone use non-solar power previous to unlocking fusion on Aquilo, not for the Aquilo journey itself

I also meant for aquilo surface. You can put a permanent platform there to make ice. How else are you getting water there after you mine the sparse amounts on the surface?

It's really annoying that you can't load and unload from cargo bays, I kind of expected that.

Yeah, it's really annoying. Especially since if you click them it makes it seem like they share inventory. But in practice inserters can't interact with them at all. Kinda forces you into making ugly builds with them, since inserter space around the platform core is the primary limiter on build complexity. Stack inserters would help since you can fit more stuff on belts, but the space requirements to actually use both sides of a belt also feels bad most of the time.

I preferred spaceships from SE, even though circuiting them to work was a major pain.

 

[Average Manatee]

I also meant for aquilo surface. You can put a permanent platform there to make ice. How else are you getting water there after you mine the sparse amounts on the surface?

Ice is a byproduct of ammonia separation and you need a ton of it just to build the platforms in Aquilo. Are you confusing planets? If there's anything you'd want to make in Aquilo orbit its plates, not ice. Ice would be for Fulgara (that is the one planet I have an orbital mining platform for now).

 

[Jaedar]

I also meant for aquilo surface. You can put a permanent platform there to make ice. How else are you getting water there after you mine the sparse amounts on the surface?

Ice is a byproduct of ammonia separation and you need a ton of it just to build the platforms in Aquilo. Are you confusing planets? If there's anything you'd want to make in Aquilo orbit its plates, not ice. Ice would be for Fulgara (that is the one planet I have an orbital mining platform for now).

I'm still trying to figure Aquilo out, didn't get far eneough to notice you get ice from ammonia. I have no problem with water on fulgura, I chuck most of what I get from the recycling into the void. But ice asteroids also seem to be the rarest type in the inner solar system?

 

[Average Manatee]

I'm still trying to figure Aquilo out, didn't get far eneough to notice you get ice from ammonia. I have no problem with water on fulgura, I chuck most of what I get from the recycling into the void. But ice asteroids also seem to be the rarest type in the inner solar system?

I may be mishandling Fulgura, there's a ton of recipes where I'm breaking down one thing if its too high next to assembling that same item if its too low. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some kind of destructive loop in there somewhere eating my water, probably related to oil cracking or sulfuric acid. Like a true techpriest, I'm not touching that circuit monstrosity so long as its sending rockets of the finished products I want out constantly. The Blessed Circuits currently give forth level 3 quality modules, supercapacitors, electronic science, and holmium aplenty.

 

[Jaedar]

I'm still trying to figure Aquilo out, didn't get far eneough to notice you get ice from ammonia. I have no problem with water on fulgura, I chuck most of what I get from the recycling into the void. But ice asteroids also seem to be the rarest type in the inner solar system?

I may be mishandling Fulgura, there's a ton of recipes where I'm breaking down one thing if its too high next to assembling that same item if its too low. It wouldn't surprise me if there's some kind of destructive loop in there somewhere eating my water, probably related to oil cracking or sulfuric acid. Like a true techpriest, I'm not touching that circuit monstrosity so long as its sending rockets of the finished products I want out constantly. The Blessed Circuits currently give forth level 3 quality modules, supercapacitors, electronic science, and holmium aplenty.

My glorious solution to fulgora:

Spoiler

Don't think it is optimal in any way, and I've had to do some kludge modules to keep it going at high speed, but it works (tm), and took like 10 minutes to set up.

Honestly my only problem with it is that it can't really be expanded to fit quality. But the island I picked for my base is probably too small for that anyway.

 

[Average Manatee]

Listen I told you, I'm not touching this:

Spoiler

Surprisingly it only requires about 200 active logistic bots

 

[Leonard]

1. If the resource is being used constantly by the planet, the freighter just constantly drops off a small amount in the 30s window, resetting it and sitting there forever.
2. If there's too many drops going on at one time, the freighter might be stuck in line waiting to drop, which means it counts as "inactive" and leaves before dropping anything. This could be very bad for production.

I don't think there's a good way to handle it, but each cargo bay adds one extra spot for cargo drop capsules (landing pad by itself only has three), so if you spam enough of them you will have enough room regardless of how many items are dropped.

 

[Average Manatee]

Ohh, shit, I didn't realize cargo bays worked on land too. That is indeed a solution that handles #2. Not sure about #1 still but if everything can get dropped quickly you can lower the inactivity timer to something much smaller. This also would seem to make space mining a viable option if throughput is uncapped both ways. And it makes logistics a lot easier, I was using a bunch of inserters removing specific things to be put in different provider chests and circuiting them up to track counts.

 

[Average Manatee]

And finished, behold the megafreighter

Spoiler

Coming in at 94 hours of gametime, getting the achievement by 6 hours. Took a few tries to get there, I was unable to keep up rocket production a few times and died to that. Eventually the secret was realizing that railguns should shoot both big and medium rocks since they kill a whole line of medium rocks in 1 shot while missiles take 3, so add on extra rail guns and rely more on them. I did have to hack together a lot of modifications with modules and stuff but it worked fine, though it obviously could have been better if I spaced and expanded everything a bit better.

There's actually a cool upload feature, you can see my base and all the stats here: https://factorio.com/galaxy/Sulfur IV: Iota6-5.F5V7

Aquilo was cool (pun intended). Heat is a bit annoying since it doesn't travel well, limiting the size you can make the base without really annoying routing of fuel to multiple places. So being forced to make a big base here would suck, but you don't need to. Just bootstrap enough to get fusion power then slap that baby down and you can milk level 3 modules in Cryogenic Plants and beacons to speed things up beyond belief. A bit annoying that you don't really need that so much though, like I said the cryo science packs are a bit underused. The bot nerf felt very fair, its just enough that you don't want to spam logistics bots for everything but you can still use them for low-quantity items and construction bots still work if you have good equipment.

In retrospect I feel like my bases were allowed to be a bit too small, resources were too prevalent. For example I never had to kill medium or large Demolishers on Vulcanus or expand beyond two islands in Fulgara. It must be super easy on regular research costs rather than the 4x of marathon. They really nerfed marathon by removing the expensive crafting recipes, if I play again I might do 10x research but cut enemy expansion to 60 mins minimum because that's really the most irritating thing. If it was possible to only disable enemy expansion on Gleba that'd be the best option because Nauvis is pretty well conquered and defended by your choice of artillery/high level lasers/tesla turrets/spiderbots, but Gleba enemies are kind of always hard for defenses if you're producing a lot of pollution and summoning big waves.

I think that, assuming you feel safe there, Gleba is the best place to put your research labs to minimize spoilage. Gleba packs were what kept slowing my down late game.

Vulcanus and Fulgara feel kind of... empty. Like its annoying to have to pay attention to Gleba but there's literally nothing to do on those two except to come back to build a train to a practically infinite resource deposit once you've exhausted your starter deposit. The Foundation research came so late and required such annoying materials to construct that I didn't even consider going for it, it should come earlier.

 

[Hellraiser]

In retrospect I feel like my bases were allowed to be a bit too small, resources were too prevalent. For example I never had to kill medium or large Demolishers on Vulcanus or expand beyond two islands in Fulgara.

It could be my seed, but it seems all coal deposits but the starting one on Vulcanus are in medium Demolisher turf. I just had to kill one because I mined all the coal in the starting patch. Not sure if I had extra resource deposit richness set just on Nauvis or everywhere) which blocked launches of science to my Vulcanus freighter (still haven't finished Quantum Processors.

Probably the next time I start a new game (in a year or two) I would decrease patch size/increase richness to force more expansion.

In Fulgora I had 2 scrapping outposts outside of the main island, looting specific components (chips, copper etc.) from two vaults each. Probably mined 8-ish vault deposits total recycling them at 3 sites including the main base.

 

[Tyrr]

It could be my seed, but it seems all coal deposits but the starting one on Vulcanus are in medium Demolisher turf.

Are the medium ones harder to kill? I just fought the small ones so far and they die so fast against my tank with uranium shells.

 

[Average Manatee]

It could be my seed, but it seems all coal deposits but the starting one on Vulcanus are in medium Demolisher turf. I just had to kill one because I mined all the coal in the starting patch. Not sure if I had extra resource deposit richness set just on Nauvis or everywhere) which blocked launches of science to my Vulcanus freighter (still haven't finished Quantum Processors.

That seems really unlucky, I have multiple deposits with millions fairly close. Do you know about the way to check for resources on the map? Ctrl-F and search for coal and it will point out coal deposits, it can be difficult to see them there.

In Fulgora I had 2 scrapping outposts outside of the main island, looting specific components (chips, copper etc.) from two vaults each. Probably mined 8-ish vault deposits total recycling them at 3 sites including the main base.

*eight*? I think I've only mined about 500k from each of these two vaults that have tens of millions

It could be my seed, but it seems all coal deposits but the starting one on Vulcanus are in medium Demolisher turf.

Are the medium ones harder to kill? I just fought the small ones so far and they die so fast against my tank with uranium shells.

Little over 3x the HP and 3x the regen. Near endgame levels of research should let you overcome their regen with uranium shells but its a lot of HP to work through.

 

[Andnjord]

Getting to the End Game, or why I left Biological Science Until Last:

With Energy, Astronomic and Material sciences up to lvl4, it was time to finally make my way through Biological Sciences.
Good news though, Zombie, our iron and copper planet also has a healthy supply of Vitamelange, the ressource required for it!

Bad news though, once I started researching biotech and making tiers 4 to 6 productivity modules I realised just how massive the demand on the vitamelange is going to be and how short the lifespan of some 30 million vitamelange would be if I increased production to match. Soooo off I had to go and travel for the first time to a different solar system and build it again on a vitamelange planet.

There is no solar power in deep space between the systems, so I had to make this nuclear powered spaceship to get there. As a bonus it was able to power the initial setting up required to mine uranium, since delivery cannons don't work on planets beyond your system for the first time I had to actually mine everything there. On top of it it takes 250 000 liquid rocket fuel for a cargo rocket to fly there (compared to the typical 50 000 within the same system), so I need to make everything there as much as feasibly possible.

But once that was done, there was nothing stopping me from reaching Biotech lvl4.

For biotech I decided not to worry about keeping things compact since I can shit out space scaffolding like it's nothing and instead decided to embrace the sprawl, hence why it's so much bigger than all the other sciences. And while high tier productivity modules are insanely expensive, the productivity on the science labs has now reached 120%! Well worth the cost when higher level techs can cost thousands of each lvl4 science!

And finally, the main research area is filled with all its colours!

 

[Jaedar]

And finally, the main research area is filled with all its colours!

Congratulations. Now you can start on deep space science, the one that requires gigabrain