What limits are you hitting when megabasing?

[9_bravo]

Greeting fellow engineers!

I'm a new('ish) player to Factorio, and I'm working the megabase angle. I'd like to push the game to its limits and build out a minimum 10K SPM. I'm currently sitting at around 6.8K SPM sustained.

I'm starting to see the game struggle with FPS/UPS. Still running in the low 40s, but the drop in rates is becoming really noticeable as we approach 10K.

I'm running with no biters, pollution turned off, a handful of QoL mods, but one "cheaty" mod for nuclear power. I built around 350K solar panels, but after hitting around 25 GW, solar is more of a test of one's patience and endurance...it brings no extra value to gameplay and frankly becomes nothing but expensive busywork.

I run the NP nuclear mod that basically shuts off all steam turbines and associated fluid calculations. You still have to process uranium via Kovarex and craft all necessary components you would for the reactor setup - including the steam turbines that are essentially built-in to the reactor entity. I've added 16-6 reactor entities, and am producing around 38 GW of power from relatively tiny real estate compared to the massive solar farm that I dismantled and used for satellite creation. I don't feel bad about this "cheat", as the water to steam ratio for the steam turbines are beyond stupid at 1:1. Steam has a 1700:1 ratio (at sea level atmosphere pressure), so I should get 1700 parts steam for every part water, but not in the game. I do use a water cheat with the nuclear plant and my coal liquifaction facilities so I don't have to build them on an island. The biggest gain is that I can use nuclear for the megabase instead perpetually dealing with not enough solar, and, save tons of UPS relating to fluid dynamics.

The point to all of this is that I'm trying to optimize the best that I can, even up to using mods that really cover many of the things that kill one's UPS/FPS.

So my main question to the community: if you are doing > 10K SPM with stock entities, what little tricks/optimizations are you using? I'm now going back and cleaning up things where I can, use robots minimally, limit trains as much as possible, and the like.

As for robots, I don't have that many for a megabase - about 33K construction and 33K logistics. I have about 200 trains and just over 600 stations. I do use circuit networks extensively everywhere so I can keep a running total of needed vs available resources. I'm currently launching 9 rockets per minute, but will be bumping that to 12 here shortly.

Trying to get to 10K seems to be non-linearly more difficult as you approach it. Getting to 2K was cake, getting to 5K seemed much more difficult, and approach 7K seems to be just as challenging as the jump to 5K.

At any rate, I'd be interested to hear your optimization ideas.

[Fel]

Productivity modules and beacons with speed modules help drastically reduce the amount of entities in your factory, if you haven't been doing that already.

You might want to avoid huge logistics networks and favour smaller ones instead.

[knighttemplar1960]

To reduce the tedium of solar panel placement you can create a blue print with a large field and use a group of spidertrons equipped with personal roboports and a remote control. YOu can place the blue print from the minimap and use the remote to paint the area with the spidertrons and let them do the building.

[Arcane]

I am also using similar Nuclear mod. The one I am using is not changing water or steam, so Nuclear power plant is running exactly like it should in vanilla. It just multiplies energy generated and also fuel consumption.

I also feel like adding fields of solar do not add anything to the game. While using sophisticated Nuclear setup feels satisfying and like a proper endgame energy.

I am noob tho, I only got to 2.5k SPM.

[Shadowreaper]

Originally posted by Arcane:

I am also using similar Nuclear mod. The one I am using is not changing water or steam, so Nuclear power plant is running exactly like it should in vanilla. It just multiplies energy generated and also fuel consumption.

I also feel like adding fields of solar do not add anything to the game. While using sophisticated Nuclear setup feels satisfying and like a proper endgame energy.

I am noob tho, I only got to 2.5k SPM.

If only wube would would optimize or better rewrite the laggy ass fluid mechanics.

[Sneaky_Bugger]

Solar >> Nuclear in terms of FPS/UPS but that´s it about solar.

My biggest base produces around 13k SPM but that was not fun anymore. I had trains for pretty much all my logistics and barely used bots but still it was near impossible to enjoy. Was pre 1.0 so maybe things changed since then.
Currently planning out a 5k plus SPM base on a deathworld since no biters becomes boring pretty fast and while my largest megabase brought the game down to 5FPS in the center, it was more fun than a megabase where you don´t worry about biters. Just the start with biters is a bit tedious but once you reach midgame it´s fun - to me at least.

[Purpleganja]

I like this topic, but it's really hard to get to a better answer than "you need to have less active entities at the same time". It's also very very small gains reproduced a huge number of time that matters, so it's not noticeable before having settled into a standard way of building for a long time.

From what I gathered, fluid entities are always active and never idles no matter the usage intesity.

Less buildings with more prod/speed boosts is better.

Synchronizing large number of inserters to have them do less swings with not full hands and less searching items on the belts can help a bit.

Doing direct insertion and local production to avoid unnecessary operations on each items like loading and unloading and balancing belts and stuff like that can help too.


Keeping belts packed since long stretch of items together are one entity but becomes many when spaced out.

Since we all play different settings on different machines with different loads we will probably hit the ups limit at very different times.

Did you try to shut down unnecessary apps to lighten your machine load too?