cant get past the green juice

[memphthol]

i can get to making the green juice and am at a point where i produce 20/5sec and finish all the green and red juice research but i just cant figure out how to set myself up to automate the military and science(?) research

[Fel]

There is a tip for new players that should help.
When you want to automate something new, start from the item you want to produce and go backward one recipe at a time.

Let me give you an example with the military science packs to make it clearer.

For military science packs, you need grenades, red ammo (piercing rounds magazine) and walls.
For walls, you need stone bricks.
For stone bricks, you need to smelt stone.
With that, one of the ingredients is already good to go.

For grenades, you need iron plates and coal, you should already be producing both of those.

For red ammo, it's a bit more complex but we continue the exact same way.
Copper plates you already have.
Steel plates are smelting iron plates (5 at a time for 1 steel plate so you'll need plenty of iron ores).
Yellow ammo (firearm magazine) just needs more iron plates.

As you can see, none of the steps are all that complex, all you need is to route items to machines making each thing.


If you follow the other new player tip which is to leave a lot of space between machines making different things for future expansion (adding more machines with the same recipe to speed up the production) and belts then you should have very little issue automating things.

It's similar for the blue science packs but they require that you extract and process oil, which will be your first time playing with fluids (outside of the very basic water and steam for power).
But it's not really all that much more complex until you get to the advanced oil processing and its 3 products from the same recipe.

[Ages]

Could you share a bit more about what is holding you back?

Later in the game you will get construction robots which can quickly tear apart and rebuild large swaths of your base. Feel free to experiment and make a messy base. Once you unlock blueprints you can save designs you like and copy/paste on the fly.

[Chindraba]

I've heard many times that there is no wrong way to play the game. I often try proving them wrong by doing all sorts of stupid, crazy, or slow stuff. My way of figuring out how to automate something is to first figure out how to make it without automation. I use the machines, I just don't make the "factory" for it.

Taking the military science mentioned earlier (the black juice), here's how I did it my first time. (Saying I 'built' something means I took it out of my inventory and placed it on the map. Saying I 'made' something means I used an assembler, or other machine if that's what's needed, and set the recipe to that. I do very, very little hand-crafting, even when not doing the Lazy Bastard achievement.)

I build one assembler (ASM) and set the recipe to the black science. It gives me spots to fill with everything it needs to make that. Hovering over the recipe it tells me how many of each I need, and how long it will take. For each thing it needs, if I have it in inventory I fill the little box with it, a whole stack of it. So, for the black science I probably already have walls in my pocket. I add a full stack of walls. I probably don't have the red ammo, and I haven't gotten the habit of using grenades, so I won't have any of those either.

I build a second ASM and have it make the grenades. The little boxes show coal and iron plates. Both of those I usually have a few of, just because I'm always doing things the weird way anyway. I add a stack of each and watch it make my grenades. I get to see that the darn thing is slow as tree sap in the winter, and that it's a hungry beast, using up the coal 4 times as fast as the iron. (Don't anyone correct me here, I said I load by the stack. 1 stack of iron last as long as 4 stacks of coal in the grenade ASM.) I'm only getting about 4 per min out of the ASM. I peek at the science ASM again and see I only need 1 grenade for each pair of bottles, so I can make 8 per min of black science out of one grenade ASM. Science always gets used one-for-one, so if I've got 20/5sec of green, I'll need 20/5sec of black, and that means 10/5sec of grenades. Holy cow, I'm going to need 30 ASMs of grenades! Well, maybe I'll cut that way back for a bit and make it bigger later. I'll figure, maybe 5 grenades, I can always make it bigger after I know what I'm doing. So now I'll try using 20/min as my thinking for the rest.

Then I do the walls. I can't keep taking them out my pocket forever. I build an ASM and set it for walls. It only needs bricks, but I don't carry those. I don't make roads or paths because I never use them anyway. Ok, so to feed that I'm going to need an ASM for bricks. Oops, that's a furnace, ok, I build a furnace in my little experiment area and add some rocks. It's taking 2 stone per brick, and since I'm using the steel furnace (got tired of the wasted space for the stone furnace at half-speed) I'm only getting around 36/min of bricks, and the walls take 2 each, so I can get about 18 walls/min. Another peek at the black science ASM and I need 2 walls per 2 science. The grenades limit me to 40/min (2 sci per grenade) so 1 wall ASM ought to work for now.

I repeat that for the red ammo, which ends up at 10/min per ASM, so I need 2. The red ammo needs 1 yellow ammo each and that ASM gives me 30/min, so 1 ASM there is more than enough. The red ammo also needs steel and copper, but I can steal those for now.

So, I make a line of 8 grenade ASM and 2 grenade ASM on opposite sides of a belt going to the science ASM. Another belt with 2 walls on the side going there as well. I'm already making bricks for my walls to build, so I just add a splitter and steal some of them for this. I add a splitter to the coal belt, going everywhere anyway, make it load one side of a belt and feed that past the 8 grenade ASM. I tap into the iron belt and put it on the other side of the coal belt. I go back, and add a splitter to that iron feed and run that to the one yellow ammo which I set up to feed directly to both red ammo. I steal some copper and steel and make that go to the red ammo, and I start running the whole thing.

Oops, it's all backing up. Oh, forgot, the black sci is only running 6/min and I'm feeding enough for 40/min. Dang it, 7 ASM on black! Glad I only used the 8 grenades. Ok, rework the two belts so I can run between 2 lines of 3 (only 6 since this is all an experiment anyway) black sci ASM. Each sci ASM just goes to a chest for now - I'll figure something else out later.

I watch it run for a bit, keep making changes until I'm kind of satisfied with it. Tear it all down, now that I know what I'm doing, and find a spot where I think I can make it fit (always fun with a spaghetti junction base.)

Rinse and repeat. Looking at the list of things I want that need black sci, I might just go slow on those and keep it the way it is. Or, I get impatient for something and double it, or more. Then try to make the new belts and ASM fit where I didn't leave room for them.

YMMV

The Factory Must Grow.