So.... Factories

[Utildayael]

So are factories still broken? Trying to search about and see about 500 issues. I have not made one yet as they weren't in EA when I played prior to release [there was gap between when I stopped and release] but it sounds like...

Make a room. One floor only. Toss a controller thing in. 20x20 room max size. Place machines in. Magic blue line. Yay?

Rest seems like it is supposed to work like Portia more or less with quantity and # machines you wanna use for it?

I just cleared the whole Duvos/rocket storyline and saved the town so it's kind of fluff-time right now as I'm cruising fine on my machines as-is but MTAP wasn't really much different in that regard by the time you got factory there I suppose.

[Dimensional Traveler]

Apparently one controller inside and one outside.

[Utildayael]

Originally posted by Dimensional Traveler:

Apparently one controller inside and one outside.

Sounded like outside is optional as you can control from inside too.

That aside, I got the gist overall and is it as buggy as folks seem to make it sound?

[Belrathius]

I'm not sure about buggy, especially after all the fixes done recently, but the space limitation makes the factory pretty weak. The room is not 20 x 20 but rather 15 x 15, which limits space considerably, especially if one prefers a layout with room to walk around as well as the control panel. As a result, if you have a lot of machines, you are stuck leaving most of them outside of the factory. Personally, I followed someone else's suggestion in another thread and just use it for recyclers.

[DiamondsDroog]

One device makes a room a factory, and it can be controlled from there, the other device is just a remote controller.

Right now, it works almost the same as the Portia factory, the only difference being there is a hard cap on how many queues you have. So if I were to stack so many furnaces that I have 30 units of furnace queues, it will only run 20 queues at a time.

So because of this hard limit on queue space, the best way I found to handle it is queues with large stack amounts that get made over time, if you just want to have materials. And multiple queues of low stack amounts of items you need immediately. So I have 10 queues for materials making 99 each so I get a steady supply every day, and then use the other queues for items for commissions so they'll get done really fast. So let's say there was a commission for 10 steel pipes, I can run 10 queues of 1 steel pipe that would finish very quickly.

[Shaitan]

Never much liked Factories. Ran one for a short time in MTAS until I then pulled all my machines out and dismantled it. Don't like how it has been implemented at all. Could have been something far superior to what we got.

[Dimensional Traveler]

Originally posted by Belrathius:

I'm not sure about buggy, especially after all the fixes done recently, but the space limitation makes the factory pretty weak. The room is not 20 x 20 but rather 15 x 15, which limits space considerably, especially if one prefers a layout with room to walk around as well as the control panel. As a result, if you have a lot of machines, you are stuck leaving most of them outside of the factory. Personally, I followed someone else's suggestion in another thread and just use it for recyclers.

Re: room size. The release notes for a very recent patch said the maximum room size had been increased to 20x20. Have you tried making a new room since that patch?

[Utildayael]

I have a 20x20 after seeing that but it does not recognize any recyclers. Furnaces and whatnot are fine and get the blue line when placed but not recycler no matter where I put it. 🤨

[Rooty Tooty]

Man reading a lot of this I wish It was more like Portia. Sandrock has a lot of quality of life changes that make the factory not as wanted. Thankfully but it would still of been nice to do the old way.

[Belrathius]

Originally posted by Dimensional Traveler:

Originally posted by Belrathius:

I'm not sure about buggy, especially after all the fixes done recently, but the space limitation makes the factory pretty weak. The room is not 20 x 20 but rather 15 x 15, which limits space considerably, especially if one prefers a layout with room to walk around as well as the control panel. As a result, if you have a lot of machines, you are stuck leaving most of them outside of the factory. Personally, I followed someone else's suggestion in another thread and just use it for recyclers.

Re: room size. The release notes for a very recent patch said the maximum room size had been increased to 20x20. Have you tried making a new room since that patch?

Didn't notice that, but my house hasn't changed in structure since I completely re-did it after the 1.0 release. Frankly, I don't see changing from 15 x 15 to 20 x 20 to be enough to make the factory worthwhile. I would have preferred multiple 15 x 15 rooms over one slightly bigger room.

[tmaddox]

Originally posted by Rooty Tooty:

Man reading a lot of this I wish It was more like Portia. Sandrock has a lot of quality of life changes that make the factory not as wanted. Thankfully but it would still of been nice to do the old way. :portiapoop:

It was not that bad. I was dreading it based on what I read here.

1. Go to Construction Junction

2. Use the Construction Junction catalog to create a new room/building. I made mine the max size. Also put on a roof if you want.

3. Go to the Construction Junction shop

4 Buy a Factory Information Panel and Control board. The Control Board is placed inside the factory and the Information panel outside (mine is next to the door). You need both.

5. Move your machines inside the factory. Place them however you want but there is no reason to not just condense them as much as possible.

That was it. Only thing I noticed is that sometimes the jobs did not actually start until I exited the interface then it would pull resources. It will pull resources from any owned chest or your inventory. There is no need for a "factory" chest in this game.

Sure there may be a few more steps here but they are not that bad and give you leeway on what style you want to use or how big you want to make it.

[tmaddox]

Originally posted by Belrathius:

As a result, if you have a lot of machines, you are stuck leaving most of them outside of the factory.

Just how many do you need to be efficient? In my factory I have three Furnaces, three grinders, three processors, two recyclers, two blenders,one forge, one tailor machine and one jewelry machine and I still have about 50% of the space left empty.

[Mushtaree]

I tried to use the Sandrock factory for material management and had many of the issues folks talked about above. For now, just made the smallest room, put a controller inside and out and use the factory interface for the automatic assembly on my Advanced Assembly Station.

[Gute]

I just built a factory and either I don't understand how it works or it's just really useless. have to search all materials manually? What's the point, was easier in the field. Portia had storage and ore ---> material conversion. I don't even play Sandrock at this moment because of this. I was waiting so much to build a factory and it's so bad.

[VeraelHasta]

Originally posted by Gute:

I just built a factory and either I don't understand how it works or it's just really useless. have to search all materials manually? What's the point, was easier in the field. Portia had storage and ore ---> material conversion. I don't even play Sandrock at this moment because of this. I was waiting so much to build a factory and it's so bad.

The point is to put all of the machines inside. And if you tell the factory to craft something, it will craft all of the intermediate products as well. Without you having to prepare for example pipes, sheets, leather manually.

Another useful thing is setting up a lot of crafting at once. You can set it to smelt 99 bars in one or more queues without having to click it 5 times on a few furnaces. You can click "make me 10 dew collectors" and the factory will handle the rest (if you have raw materials and required machines inside)

Quest items are a separate tab that shows at the end if you are confused about that.

But yeah, it is a little underwhelming, especially without a search box to quickly find what you want to make.

[Iyasenu]

The thing I miss when using the factory is the lack of a split between item types when producing items.
Like when using the Tailoring Machine, you had a separate tab for materials, like cloth and thread, and another for equipment like hats and clothing.
When using the factory, there isn't a separation, so it's just one long list.
The only sort of filter is the tab for "you have a commission to make this item".
It can lead to more scrolling than necessary.

But other than that, and that shared cap of 20 production queues active at one time, it's pretty similar to MTaP's factory.
Just with the modular building system in mind, I suppose.
It does mean that you don't need very many duplicate machines to "max out" potential production.
Might not even need the max allowed size of factory if you just cram all the machines together.