Got told off about City Blocks and I'm wondering if they are correct to use or not

[Liwet]

I'm using City (Island) Blocks to handle large scale movement of items on Fulgora. I was told by someone in the community that City Blocks are the worst strategy EVER. It's ugly, gross, and a gimmick to get YouTube views.

[Shurenai]

Is it the most efficient design ever? Nope. But, It is a very simple design that makes designing things and routing trains around the factory fairly simple and straightforward. It has benefits and drawbacks like any other design.

Does it work for you? Do you have fun using it? If yes to both, Then who cares what they say. It works for you- And you have fun with it. Let em seethe.

[Felinewolfie]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

Is it the most efficient design ever? Nope. But, It is a very simple design that makes designing things and routing trains around the factory fairly simple and straightforward. It has benefits and drawbacks like any other design.

Does it work for you? Do you have fun using it? If yes to both, Then who cares what they say. It works for you- And you have fun with it. Let em seethe.

It's like toothpicks.
Hate 'em? Don't use them.
Love 'em? Then use them ^_^

More than one way of doing things. I love this game :D

- Let them eat... CAKE!

[knighttemplar1960]

City blocks can be made to work but by their nature they are restrictive. I prefer a less restrictive set up. I design a subfactory that is as tight as I can make it but the criteria is units of end product produced per minute so size of the sub factory varies by product type and I just connect the various subfoactories with rails.

Bottom line it doesn't matter what other community members tell you if your set up works the way you want it to. I have often been chastised for my rail intersections. I've had people say my rail intersections won't handle the traffic and then they do but that's because they are wanting me to build intersections that can handle 200 trains/minute when I only need an intersection that can handle 50.

If they want you to play the game their way they should have bought the game for you.

[Felinewolfie]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

City blocks can be made to work but by their nature they are restrictive. I prefer a less restrictive set up. I design a subfactory that is as tight as I can make it but the criteria is units of end product produced per minute so size of the sub factory varies by product type and I just connect the various subfoactories with rails.

Bottom line it doesn't matter what other community members tell you if your set up works the way you want it to. I have often been chastised for my rail intersections. I've had people say my rail intersections won't handle the traffic and then they do but that's because they are wanting me to build intersections that can handle 200 trains/minute when I only need an intersection that can handle 50.

If they want you to play the game their way they should have bought the game for you.

"they should have bought the game for you." = +1

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/01/intensive-parenting-village-child-care-incompatible/681113/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

You can micromanage your kid’s life or ask for community help with child care—but you can’t have both.

[Fel]

City blocks is very flawed but "worst ever" would be a rather major exageration.
What I particularly dislike about it is that the blocks are too small and too close to each others, making trains a bit mediocre with intersections everywhere and too close to each others.
It means that it will struggle when the scales grow into mega factory but if you never intended to go for such scales it's not a concern to you anyway.

Something to keep in mind is that there isn't such a thing as one design being better than all others in all cases.
Organised spaghetti is great for speedruns when you plan ahead for the exact scale you want to reach but it is not great otherwise (particularly bad at scaling and becomes a mess if you "wing it").
Main bus is great for learning how to scale up but it takes a lot of belts, space and starts to struggle once the scales reach a certain point and your initial belts can't feed the whole factory (you need to refill more and more frequently, to upgrade the belts and so on).
...

City block gives you clear space indications but it was created more for the visual aspect than for its usefulness to the player.
It is a derivation from the concept of splitting the factory, that has quite a few different versions even if most are based around trains.

But if it works for you, then that's fine, it's the same for logistics networks across the whole factory, that's not the intended use of logistics network, it is atrocious in terms of efficiency (it is a brute-force method where you instead keep adding logistics robots until it works somewhat well) but many people still use it because it works and it tends to be convenient.

[MoDon]

Who cares what someone else thinks?

This game is awesome simply because there are so many ways to solve a particular production issue, and you get to choose what works best for you.

Chances are reasonably good that your critics aren't as good at the game as you.

[Chindraba]

There are surely hundreds of 'experts' with hundreds of opinions. Some of them like city blocks, and even use them. Others 'like' city blocks yet build something else anyway. Some of them don't like them. The same could be said about 'roundabout' train junctions, 8x8 beacon builds, efficiency modules, flamethrowers defenses, dragons teeth, and even main bus designs.

Plenty of these experts even have 'facts' to support their claims. Often such 'facts' are about efficiency or optimization, or both. Even efficiency and optimization are actually subjective, or rather just opinions. What 'they' are trying to optimize for might not be what you optimize for.

There is a Discord server dedicated to the game. Often someone will pop in and ask how to make something optimized. Most of the time the first response is "optimized for what?" and seldom is there a target, other than 'optimized'. The other very common event is for someone to post a screenshot and ask "is this good?" That is so common that there is even an answer built into their FAQ bot.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3401017828

City blocks are good, for anyone who uses them, if the results are 'good'. If the goal is to make the factory 'better' then there has to be a target for what is 'better'. More production in less space? More output for less input? More output for less pollution? 20 trains per minute (TPM) through a junction? 100 TPM for a junction? There is no perfect way to make a factory, a base, or even a simple smelter.

The benefits, for those who like them, of city blocks include that they provide an overview structure to the base layout. The layout, for the chosen grid size, removes one more decision the player has to make each time they add something new. That's also one less decision the player gets to make as well.

If you want to use city blocks, use them. If you want to follow some other design principle, do that. If you want to 'build' it and not worry about any design, do that.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3401030566

In short, one of the very few "wrong" ways to play the game is with the monitor turned off. Otherwise, if it's good (see above) and you have fun, it must be 'right'.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Fel:

City block gives you clear space indications but it was created more for the visual aspect than for its usefulness to the player.
It is a derivation from the concept of splitting the factory, that has quite a few different versions even if most are based around trains.

It was actually created to promote decoupling, modularity, and the ability to slot and expand with a new build basically 'anywhere' in the block grid -- because all space taken is regular.

Originally posted by Fel:

What I particularly dislike about it is that the blocks are too small and too close to each others, making trains a bit mediocre with intersections everywhere and too close to each others.

Heavily depends on how big you make them.
Given the first passage I quoted where you mention the visual aspect; maybe you are considering Nilaus' particular flavor? He sets them up with concrete pathing inbetween and aligns them 100x100 to the roboport grid. (And yes; falls for the trapping of building a global logistics network.)

But there's many other flavors possible. Including ones that use much larger blocks and don't align to a global roboport grid.

[Evilsod]

City blocks tend to end up with a lot of wasted space as you're spreading things out a lot, since you're usually assigning entire blocks to one build no matter how small.
But it's also a very clear way of organising and setting things out.

There's no right or wrong ways for laying out your base, just pros and cons.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Evilsod:

City blocks tend to end up with a lot of wasted space as you're spreading things out a lot, since you're usually assigning entire blocks to one build no matter how small.
But it's also a very clear way of organising and setting things out.

There's no right or wrong ways for laying out your base, just pros and cons.

Precisely.

Where space usually isn't really at a premium in Factorio.
You just whack a few more biters and claim more domain.

But now to double back to the OP's original situation:
Space actually IS at a premium on Fulgora.
Even after you unlock foundation and can start paving the oil ocean. Because foundation is stupid expensive to make.

So doing city blocks on Fulgora might not be the best solution possible.


That said; creating free-form 'city blocks' on islands and basically dedicating each single island to a single product, and then shipping them around by (elevated) train -- would probably be one of the best and most easily scaled strategies possible for tackling Fulgora.

And it seems that this is more what the OP is referring to. In which case they might be using the wrong term to describe what they're building.

[CasualGamer]

OP- It's your game, play it your way.

[Evilsod]

Originally posted by RiO:

So doing city blocks on Fulgora might not be the best solution possible.

Yeah, that was my thoughts too, because of the cost of tiling it, but it's hard to say without any context/info from OP.

My Fulgora is just substations covering the entire area, so its a city block-esque design in the sense that all my builds are between the grid, but since that grid is much smaller, I don't have much wasted space.

[Fel]

Originally posted by RiO:

But there's many other flavors possible. Including ones that use much larger blocks and don't align to a global roboport grid.

I agree, but "city block" is a coined term pretty much for the specific way Nilaus does it.

I don't particularly like "blocks" in general (because they limit what I can do with my designs) but there are a lot of variants, including some specifically designed around trains, with enough space between intersections as well as enough space for better cross intersections (even more so now that we have elevated rails).

[Fletch]

"city blocks" is probably not a good idea on Fulgora simply because you don't have the space to build them on Fulgora. Better idea is more modular approach where you create sub-factories specializing in whatever is needed on the islands. City blocks are great on Nauvis where space is unlimited, however city-blocks biggest downside is that they waste tons of space and that's why its not a good idea on other planets that are space limited.

[königplatzen]

The biggest advantage of city blocks is the modularity. You need something more, just add a city block. It has a lot of framework to care about, but then looks somewhat tidy.
It's a bit like modern software development. It looks nice with lots of framework, but not very efficient. But it's great at handling huge complexity.