Transitioning from 'big base' to 'mega base' questions

[Crayon Delicatessen]

Hello,

I'm curious how folks are making these tremendously huge bases.

I think they're using cells? Like, one grid handles green circuits then transports it via trains to another area etc. How do you do that?

[malogoss]

I think you got the general idea.

What you could do is have one site that makes item A, another that makes item B, etc. Do this for every item in the game, move everything by train between sites and scale it all as much as you want.

Now if you decide that it's a bad idea to have a site dedicated to copper cable only, it probably is. It's up to you to decide what needs a centralised production and what should be made on site.

The "cells" you have in mind are just sites that make one or some specific items, which are then transported to another cell to make something else.

[knighttemplar1960]

I make sure I have enough power. For a mega base that means either nuclear power or huge swaths of solar panels and accumulators.

Then I make sure I have enough ore production and smelters. Late game ore patches that are far from the start area provide enough ore for 8 ore trains and that makes enough plate for 4 plate trains.

Then I build an outpost to make mid tier or finished products. With beacons and modules my ratio of iron plate to copper plate for green circuits is all most 1:1 and to make sure that I always have enough supply I assign 2 of each type plate train. That produces 2 trains worth of green circuits.

Red circuit production requires 2 green circuits per red circuit produced so that means that I need another green circuit subfactory to supply the red circuit subfactory (and enough power and plate for the additional green circuit subfactory). Then I need enough plastic either from a dedicated refinery or a dedicated coal liquefaction plant that can keep supplying 2 trains of plastic.

For blue circuits I need an additional green circuit factory to supply a red circuit factory, a red circuit factory to supply the blue circuit factory and 2 more green circuit factories to supply the blue circuit factory plus all the additional plate, power, and plastic plus the sulfuric acid.

The vast majority of your megabase resources go into producing all the various science packs in large amounts. Perhaps as much as 90% of the mid tier resources go to science pack production the rest goes into producing the machines required to build the subfactories, rails and trains, and power plants.

For a 2.5k science per minute base that means I wind up mining as many as 20 of each copper and iron patches. 4 or 5 oil refineries, 10 oil patches, 4 coal liquefaction plants, 8-10 coal patches (mostly for plastic and explosives), 2 stone patches for rails, land fill, bricks, walls, and concrete, and 4 uranium patches for nuclear power, nuclear train fuel and uranium rounds for gun turrets. A base that size will use as much as 20 GW of power.

My nuclear power plant is designed to produce 1.1 GW so I wind up building 20 of them. When my UPS starts to drop I start filling up all the open spaces with solar panels and accumulators and dismantle nuclear plants every time I set out 1 GW worth of solar panels and accumulators.

For my infinite researches I usually speed up robots, increase artillery range, increase flamethrower damage, gun turret damage, and laser turret damage to the point that my perimeter can kill a behemoth biter in 1-2 seconds. Then all of my research is thrown into mining productivity.

When my UPS drops to 30-45 I start up a new factory on a new map.

[Khagan]

Originally posted by CrayonDelicatessen:

I'm curious how folks are making these tremendously huge bases.

I think they're using cells? Like, one grid handles green circuits then transports it via trains to another area etc.

That partly depends on what you mean by 'megabase' or 'huge base'. The standard definition of 'megabase' in the Factorio community is a factory capable of producing at least 1000 science per minute (1 kspm). While many people do use cellular designs to reach that level, it is perfectly possible to do it with a monolithic factory that takes in raw materials (ore etc.) and does all the processing to science on one site.

But that is (IMO) close to the upper limit of a practical monolithic design. For _really_ huge factories (multi-megabases) some sort of distributed processing is going to be more manageable.

[Halko]

As people have said here the issue with scaling toward late game is that you dont want to have to deal with manually creating setups for making something anymore. That is why pretty much all of the megabases at the end tend to use blueprints designed to produce one thing and distribute everything via rail or in some cases bots. When you have to make your 12th iron mining setup you dont want to have to sit there and make it by hand after all. Same thing when you have to expand green circuits for the 4th time. Its easy to make one setup you can copy and paste that you can just slap down and connect some rails into. You just template everything and figure out what gets broken between slapping them out.

This is also exactly where i generally lose interest in the game and quit. I never got into the "make number go higher" gameplay loop that the current "endgame" offers. I launched the rocket and built all the tech so making more white science for the sole reason to make more of it doesnt really appeal to me.

[PunCrathod]

The train network does not have to be a uniform grid. Our last 2.5kspm had just one straight main track(one train lane each direction) and then we had a lot of intersections on that leading to mining outposts and all kinds of different factories that were all kinds of different shapes and sizes. we could have increased the spm a lot more with the design but my friends that were playing with me got bored so we stopped there.

[brian_va]

you'll certainly want dedicated areas of production. i don't really calculate anything out aside from the science modules, the one i have been using is designed to run at 2k spm using plates, circuits, fluids and rocket components as inputs. the production of the plates and circuits and whatnot are scattered a bit, but they aren't calculated. when science slows down, ill back track it to the shortage and drop another production "cell" as you called them or several to clear that up. its usually a fair bit of correction needed when dropping another science module to keep things running steady.

obviously youll be doing trains to make this all happen, so youll want to try and start with a good foundation of a rail network and be sure to leave yourself room to correct mistakes and expand to help ease throughput issues on the rails.

[Crayon Delicatessen]

these are all very helpful thank you

[Ghost]

i do everything by hand, no robots no blueprints, and spaget everywhere. made my first rocket silo, nothing feeding into it yet tho, but it has been PLACED! im having loads of "fun" LOL

[brian_va]

Originally posted by PunCrathod:

The train network does not have to be a uniform grid. Our last 2.5kspm had just one straight main track(one train lane each direction) and then we had a lot of intersections on that leading to mining outposts and all kinds of different factories that were all kinds of different shapes and sizes. we could have increased the spm a lot more with the design but my friends that were playing with me got bored so we stopped there.

With everything branching off a single main line, did you not run into throughput issues on the track, or were there bypasses where they made sense?

I don't do a defined grid pattern like city blocks, but there is a grid of sorts with many alternatives connecting all the mines and subfactories together. It has worked pretty good so far, but in an effort to reduce the numbers of chunks as part of the overall idea of being UPS efficient, I've been thinking about not spreading as wide and keeping things tighter.

I'm thinking about a new game before the dlc, and the game plan was to just head south until the patches were in the 100s of millions and build the mega base down there instead of the usual plan of the base closer to the start and then miles of rails to the good deposits. 10k spm would likely be the target, so that's a fair bit of train traffic. Just curious how a main line worked for you.

[Crayon Delicatessen]

Originally posted by piper.spirit #DeathToUkraine:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2843094265

Not helpful.

Originally posted by brian_va:

Originally posted by PunCrathod:

The train network does not have to be a uniform grid. Our last 2.5kspm had just one straight main track(one train lane each direction) and then we had a lot of intersections on that leading to mining outposts and all kinds of different factories that were all kinds of different shapes and sizes. we could have increased the spm a lot more with the design but my friends that were playing with me got bored so we stopped there.

With everything branching off a single main line, did you not run into throughput issues on the track, or were there bypasses where they made sense?

I don't do a defined grid pattern like city blocks, but there is a grid of sorts with many alternatives connecting all the mines and subfactories together. It has worked pretty good so far, but in an effort to reduce the numbers of chunks as part of the overall idea of being UPS efficient, I've been thinking about not spreading as wide and keeping things tighter.

I'm thinking about a new game before the dlc, and the game plan was to just head south until the patches were in the 100s of millions and build the mega base down there instead of the usual plan of the base closer to the start and then miles of rails to the good deposits. 10k spm would likely be the target, so that's a fair bit of train traffic. Just curious how a main line worked for you.

DLC's a long way off lol.

I'm going to do a cityblock system like Nilaus and see how bad the bottlenecks get, I wanted to try something where every aspect of the belt is managed by trains moving cargo from Furnaces to individual cells which manage components modularly. Yeahhhh, heading a long way from base is a pretty cool idea to be honest.. I've gotten a ways out but without nuclear weapons clearing the nests is insane.

[brian_va]

The dlc is a ways off, but my last save was pushing 300+ hours, so that's a fair bit of time plus other stuff I want to play and real life stuff means there isn't a ton of time for me.

City blocks has always been a passing interest for me, I like the concept and modularity, but it's too rigid for me. Plus I have an inability to build even tracks over ore patches, so there's that.

[PunCrathod]

Originally posted by brian_va:

Originally posted by PunCrathod:

The train network does not have to be a uniform grid. Our last 2.5kspm had just one straight main track(one train lane each direction) and then we had a lot of intersections on that leading to mining outposts and all kinds of different factories that were all kinds of different shapes and sizes. we could have increased the spm a lot more with the design but my friends that were playing with me got bored so we stopped there.

With everything branching off a single main line, did you not run into throughput issues on the track, or were there bypasses where they made sense?

I don't do a defined grid pattern like city blocks, but there is a grid of sorts with many alternatives connecting all the mines and subfactories together. It has worked pretty good so far, but in an effort to reduce the numbers of chunks as part of the overall idea of being UPS efficient, I've been thinking about not spreading as wide and keeping things tighter.

I'm thinking about a new game before the dlc, and the game plan was to just head south until the patches were in the 100s of millions and build the mega base down there instead of the usual plan of the base closer to the start and then miles of rails to the good deposits. 10k spm would likely be the target, so that's a fair bit of train traffic. Just curious how a main line worked for you.

The only major throughput issues we got was for a smelter that had a lefthand turn(crossing over the oncoming lane) and we solved it by making all intersection larger. Split the lanes into three(one for each exit direction) a full train length before the intersection so a single train waiting to turn left didn't prevent the train after it from going into another direction. And by making separate intersections for incoming and outgoing trains for both loading and unloading stops for the smelters.

Sometimes there were some minor traffic slowdowns when multiple modules happened to run out of stuff at the same time but because we had at least one trains worth of buffers on both loading and unloading stations those slowdowns didn't even interrupt production before they sorted themselves out on their own.

Also we had parking stops for before and after each loading station big enough to park all trains visiting that loading station. With the exception of mines where the parking was on the unloading side on the smelter module.

We also moved the modules around a couple times so the smelters were at the edge so ore trains didn't have to go through other traffic and the modules were sorted so the ones that consumed the most plates were next to the smelters and the ones that consumed less were further away. The moves were also the perfect time to design larger smelters etc

Developing the technique on how to move modules was a fun experience. In the end we settled to setting up temporary trains stops for taking stuff to our construction module(we built modules by having a train deliver stuff to the construction site automatically based on what was set on the under construction stations constant combinator) and first deconstructing everything except big power poles and roboports. Waiting until all construction bots were idle and then deconstructing the power poles and roboports with the help of a remote controlled spidetron that then delivered the stuff to the construction module.

[brian_va]

Good info, thanks

[Crayon Delicatessen]

Aside from some bottlenecks I think I've got a strong start here...

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3067809926

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by CrayonDelicatessen:

I'm going to do a cityblock system like Nilaus and see how bad the bottlenecks get, I wanted to try something where every aspect of the belt is managed by trains moving cargo from Furnaces to individual cells which manage components modularly. Yeahhhh, heading a long way from base is a pretty cool idea to be honest.. I've gotten a ways out but without nuclear weapons clearing the nests is insane.

You can't automate atom bombs. Its all manual (or semi manual if using spidertrons and you don't mind the self immolation aspect).

You can safely and remotely clear large nests with a group of spidertrons using explosive rockets.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2946901120

Or better yet you can use spidertrons to build military outposts that are then automatically supplied by train. You can ship ammo for gun turrets and best of all artillery shells. Increased range and firing speed for artillery makes clearing (and keeping clear) large swaths of territory quick and easy.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2602877677
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2602877802