Why build the 'Storage Facilities' building?

[『 』]

Is there any reason to build the 'Storage Facility' over a factory full of storage devices?
Thus far it seems buildings are better than factory devices by a variable margin; the Energy Plant for example provides 48 power vs 42 from some stacked up small generators in a factory (at least with my Tetris skills).

A Storage Facility only gives 200 storage (that you can't micromanage) vs a factory with 9 large storage devices giving you 972 slots and you can adjust each device separately.
That's a whopping 772 more storage slots than the facility. Hell you can even squeeze in a few extra small storage devices to take it over 1000.

It is such a huge difference that I feel like I'm missing something extremely obvious.
Am I? Or is there literally no point at all to building the Storage Facility? Considering it costs credits to unlock and costs more resources to build (considering the space) it shouldn't be pointless.

[Satoru]

There's going to be more gameplay elements added to make it such that factories are not as efficient as their equivalent buildings.

Before you could spam fuel inside factories for infinite fuel

The devs are aware that in many situations 'factory spam' is more efficient than their corresponding building. They're adding gameplay layers to address these concerns.

Though its minor, it is more efficient to move things over roads via storage facilities because the worker doesnt have to 'walk' to the storage device ni teh factory

[『 』]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Though its minor, it is more efficient to move things over roads via storage facilities because the worker doesnt have to 'walk' to the storage device ni teh factory

Awesome thanks, I should've made mention of the fact that I understand it's an early access game.

I guess a nice way to manage it would be to have storage factories push their supply into storage facilities and have the facilities next to important areas. It would be nice to be able to designate certain storage to only be moved to specific places.

Somewhat like how Rimworld let's you push meat from say a butcher table to a refrigerated stockpile and set up stockpile priority to prevent your food spoiling.

[Satoru]

You can add filters to your storage facility or storage containers. For example I like to filter storage containers inside my factories to only hold Tier1/2 minerals/isotopes so they are quickly moved between processors. But Tier3 resources are moved outside the factory. Or by having a storage facility next to my smokestacks that only stores waste, so that transporting waste to the smokestacks is basically instantaneous.

in the early game if you're drowning in waste and are mega-ultra desperate you can allow waste to be stored in storage containers, as this is normally filtered to not be allowed.

[『 』]

Originally posted by Satoru:

You can add filters to your storage facility or storage containers.

Yeh it's what I meant by the Storage Facility doesn't let you micro. You can filter it but having several different storage devices in a factory allows you more fine control.
For example you can set a storage facility to only hold isotopes T1 but you can instead set a factory to only store isotopes in different boxes. Basically means you have separate storage for T1, T2, & T3 inside the one factory so you never get bottlenecked.

To do the same with facilities would require 3 separate facilities that would take up 3 entire building spots. Hard to recommend using the storage facility, ever. At least in it's current form.

[Eagle_of_Fire]

I use a single storage facility for just that: storage. More like a storage overflow if you prefer. I place it about midway between my two mines and anything which isn't send for conversion end up there.