Its so f****** hard to make a good assembly line.

[Penguol05]

Each time I try to make one it starts decent but ends up looking like some italian pasta and most importantly, it requires manual labor because it clogs it self. Any tips? thank you in advance.

[The Chaotic Coder]

You can look around on Google or YouTube for some setups other people have done. I'd start by searching "Main Bus" -- that's a really good way to organize everything. Or if there's something specific you're having trouble with try searching something like "Factorio Red Circuit setup".

Definitely check out KatherineOfSky's tutorials on YouTube. She's a moderator on these forums, and her videos are probably the best way to learn for new and intermediate players alike.

[Fel]

The main bus is a great way to have an organized factory but if you don't like that approach for whatever reason it's not like it's a hard requirement either.

The main thing is leaving a lot of space between various parts of your factory to account for an increase in scale of each part.

If you have not done so yet, try to go all the way to the rocket launch even if your factory looks like a mess and is very inefficient.
Seeing all of the steps required for the late game recipes really helps a lot when trying to arrange your future factories.


For example, if you mostly play the early and mid game you might focus on iron plates but as you get to the late game stuff you will see that the demand in steel and copper plates rises sharply and that you need quite a lot of all of the plates.

This helps because it allows you to remember that you need a lot of space for furnaces to feed the rest of the factory and you are less likely to take iron from an existing line to make some steel, going for a new line that makes iron plates exclusively for steel and preserving the supply of iron plates for the rest of the factory.


Similarly you will notice that late game recipe tend to demand a significant amount of green circuits, especially if they require red or blue circuits.
Your subsequent factories will leave a lot of space specifically to make those large amounts of green circuits.


Something that can be very helpful is separate the things required for research, the things required for rocket (can be thought of as research if you continue to play after the rocket launch but it's still a pretty big portion of your factory) and the things required by you (and your construction robots) to expand the factory and/or fight.

There is no magical advice that will turn your spaghetti base into a clear and clean setup because there are many approaches, each with their pros and cons.


Something I personally don't like but that helps with the belt nightmare is transitionning towards logistics robots when you unlock the requester and provider chests.
You can use construction robots to quickly deconstruct and rebuild your base into something that doesn't care too much where each machine is located because flying robots handle the item transfers so it's easier to align buildings in a neat format.

[Penguol05]

The *main bus helped me tons*, now its 100% funtional but it still looks like italian pasta but like Fei said, there will be time to make it look pretty

[PuffTheMagicDragon]

Originally posted by Penguol05:

The *main bus helped me tons*, now its 100% funtional but it still looks like italian pasta but like Fei said, there will be time to make it look pretty

I know how you feel. I'm trying to transition into trying to make science/military packs and its such a mess currently as is. I feel like ripping everything down and starting over.

Screenshot for reference.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2136248026

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Originally posted by PuffTheMagicDragon ಠ_ಠ:

Originally posted by Penguol05:

The *main bus helped me tons*, now its 100% funtional but it still looks like italian pasta but like Fei said, there will be time to make it look pretty

I know how you feel. I'm trying to transition into trying to make science/military packs and its such a mess currently as is. I feel like ripping everything down and starting over.

Screenshot for reference.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2136248026

Bound to be a bit messy and need unclogging when you have more than one product on the same side of a belt. And you might want more than one belt of iron plates going out, you have more than one belt's worth of furnaces.