Fast-paced Bobs/Angels Guide

[Koartz]

Hi everyone, I'm being a bit lazy and wondering if anyone knows of a good, fast-paced guide to just get you an idea of how bobs and angels work. I'd like to get into them without having to watch a video or read for a couple hours haha. Thanks!

[Lady Naween]

Lazy and want to learn bobs/angels. Pick one of the two ^^

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6sgvqp/bobangels_beginners_tips/

there are some tips

[fractalgem]

Ok. First, Bobs...COMPLETELY rearranges how you make circuits, and gives you just plain old a ton of ore you need to work with to get to the point where you launch rockets. Your basic circuits are split between brown and blue boards; brown boards just need some smoothed-out wood (not too hard) and some copper cable; they're not terribly difficult. Blue boards need iirc solder and basic electronic components, which require you to mix tin+lead, and carbon (processed from coal) respectively.

ANGELS mod makes getting at your basic ores much more complicated, and often forces you to use a more complicated method just to turn those into plates.

For your initial ore processing, you should have 1 of each of the 4 starting ores: bobmonium, rubyte, saphirite, stiratite. I recommend starting with really rich fields. You will want to crush each of these and smelt them early on; don't really worry about setting up your "main bus" until you have a somewhat expandable setup for each of these. (you should not need more than 4 rows of 10 furnaces for each of them; if you REALLY need more you're probably ready for the smelting phase anyways.) The exception is bobmonium; you'll want to start "sorting" crushed bobmonium fairly soon in order to get quartz for glass, which is needed for tree farms (tree farms let you automate wood).

For your base layout...well...

Make an entire BUS just for all your circuits and circuit components; it'll be about 50-100 tiles wide and 200 or so tiles long when all is said and done, depending on how you try to lay it all out. I recommend having it be perpendicular to the "main" bus where science, gears, and other random things go.

Get plastic by turning wood into fiber, into methene/methanol(bleh I can't remember the names, I think you'll go through both those steps in the end), then eventually into liquid plastic which you cast.

In-depth expirimentation with petrochems is quite optional, and perhaps even a waste of space in the long run; if you DO wish to play with it for whatever reason, you'll want an entire fluid bus for it. leave yourself plenty of room (20-50 tiles for the bus itself)

You'll need an area for dealing with byproducts. Most byproducts require sulfuric acid to deal with; in bobs+angels, your best source of sulfur is "clean coal to coke".


You'll need a production area for lime and it's variants near a shore, starting with the deep sea pump; this is both necessary for some essential recipes, and highly useful for many of the plate-multiplying angels smelting recipes.

Finally...your end-game method for obtaining ores will be based on crushing, floating, chemically refining, then thermally refining ores as needed, then combining them with brown catalyst to make a pure-ore. I recommend using trains to manage this, as otherwise you're likely to end up with a big mess. However, other setups are possible. Note that you can create slag ex-nihilo with "dirt water electrolysis", so you are not dependent upon lower-tier sorting methods for your slag.

[Lady Naween]

Originally posted by fractalgem:

Get plastic by turning wood into fiber, into methene/methanol(bleh I can't remember the names, I think you'll go through both those steps in the end), then eventually into liquid plastic which you cast.

wood -> cellulose fibre -> methanol gas -> propane gas -> liquid plastic -> plastic bar.

This cant be stressed enough, you can get plastic really early and that opens up so many things. Long before you have to tax your brain with the petrochem. Such as batteries and resistors for the circuit boards.

Listen to fractal OP :) He knows his stuff.

[Koartz]

Originally posted by Linda Hartlen:

Lazy and want to learn bobs/angels. Pick one of the two ^^

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6sgvqp/bobangels_beginners_tips/

there are some tips

Hahah wellll more like interested but with not a lot of free time, thanks for the response!

[fractalgem]

Originally posted by Koartz:

Originally posted by Linda Hartlen:

Lazy and want to learn bobs/angels. Pick one of the two ^^

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6sgvqp/bobangels_beginners_tips/

there are some tips

Hahah wellll more like interested but with not a lot of free time, thanks for the response!

If you don't really have a lot of free time, I recommend bob's on its own rather than angels+bobs, or else angels on its own (which does currently support vanilla in that you can use much more complicated ore processing methods to eek out a little bit of extra efficiency). Bob's alone can stretch a game of factorio out to 50 hours, easily, and both together...well...the Bobs+Angels server I've been playing on took about 120 hours to get a rocket launched, and that's with a bunch of players who have been through several bobs+angels playthroughs before.

[Koartz]

Originally posted by fractalgem:

Originally posted by Koartz:

Hahah wellll more like interested but with not a lot of free time, thanks for the response!

If you don't really have a lot of free time, I recommend bob's on its own rather than angels+bobs, or else angels on its own (which does currently support vanilla in that you can use much more complicated ore processing methods to eek out a little bit of extra efficiency). Bob's alone can stretch a game of factorio out to 50 hours, easily, and both together...well...the Bobs+Angels server I've been playing on took about 120 hours to get a rocket launched, and that's with a bunch of players who have been through several bobs+angels playthroughs before.

Yeah thanks for all the tips, thats what I've ended up doing, just doing bobs alone for now.