build and organisation question

[Gigawatts_2]

Hello, i would like to ask a few question here about building a factory

first point i would know how you know and plan your factory building and how you upgrade it because im struggling to do some clean update like transforming a basic steel factory into a steel/industrial beam, in fact it's really simple but i struggle to make it clean

second point how do you organise you're stockage to be efficient and accessible and what i have to use, Drone ?, Truck ?, Train ? i never do superfactory beaucause i don't know how to do it so i make plenty of little factory around the map

last point how do you organise you're power plant and you're power pole placement (may sound very dumb but i don't care)

i got 400 hours to play like ♥♥♥♥ but i want now to do some clean factory and i know there is some very nice guide on the internet for my question but i want to know how the community do.

hope i'm understandable if not tell me

[Fenix]

Plan? You are suppose to have a plan, why didn't anyone tell me?

Making neat... make blueprints that can be linked easily

Drones and Trains is the way I get things where they need to be

what power poles? (other than the power towers) I use wall outlets with platforms
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3164517271

[Danger Mouse]

Belt Spaghetti all the way.

[Zak]

Planning is very hard in this game. Making things look good takes talent, time and is very tedious. Only the best (or most patient) players make really neat looking factories. If, after 400 hours, you still can't make neat factories, you probably just can't. I still can't after 1200 hours :(

Yes, blueprints are one way to achieve clean looks but even then my factories turn into mess.

As far as transportation, you have to find what works for you. I did a save where I ran belts across the map, no vehicles. It took a lot of time and resources but it was my best running/functioning save probably. In most saves though I start with tractors, then trucks and then I move to drones. I avoid trains because I find them to be PITA to set up. I mean, if I'm gonna run rail across a long distance I might as well just run couple of belts and it works out better than a train. But some people build amazing train networks. My fav transport medium are probably drones for the reason that they can pick up and drop off at the same port, as opposed to trucks. You can have two drones per route and they make up for low capacity with speed. I just keep wondering why the hell they use batteries if they have jet engines, and I'd like to ride them, but whatever...

So, nobody can tell you what works for you. There is no single, definitive, ultimate guide to how to build great looking factories in this game. You can watch YT videos to no end and never build a good looking factory.

I even tried a full "creative mode" with everything unlocked and no build cost I could not manage a great looking factory. Sad.

Single super factory versus scattered small factories is also a choice. I tried both but I always end up with smaller factories all over simply for the reason that finished products take less bandwidth to transport than ore or ingots. My central factory usually handles more complex stuff, this is where I make things like Computers or Radio Control Units for instance, but things like AI Limiters or Circuit Boards are usually made closer to the resources and then transported to the main factory.

[Lawn-Mower]

'Clean' and 'organised' are kind of subjective terms.. Technically, as long as the factory is efficient, it's organised ;) Clean could be all factories hidden from view, it could mean all logistics are hidden from view, it could mean the factory's easy to navigate on foot, it could mean just straight lines everywhere (inc the buildings) and no aesthetic pieces to break up the monotonous look, it could mean all of these, or perhaps something else..

It probably helps to think of factories as you would think of designing something in the real world - function and form. Concentrate on function and get that good, before moving to form. Only with a lot of time and experience do both start to blend together in the planning phase.

Experiment a lot with architecture. Don't be afraid to do a lot of building and tearing down, then rinsing and repeating to figure things out, but hopefully not all that much involving machines/logistics - as they can be really time consuming to redo on large scales. So for machine layout, if there's going to be a lot of them doing the same thing, experiment small with just a couple of machines, before scaling it once you've decided on the layout.

You should have enough experience now to have a feel for dimensions and how much space you'll need for your goals. There's many ways to plan, but it comes down to your goal and allowing that to guide you. Just step through from there. Sometimes the terrain/node placement is what forms that goal. Sometimes it's that you need a certain amount of a certain product - so you start with the recipes and machine numbers, then you need to consider the nodes and terrain secondary to that. And that's just the start of the planning...

There's no real right or wrong way to solve the little challenges. And that includes transport.. The way you do it, assuming you're happy with the result, is the right way.

As for upgrading, until you've run through and unlocked everything and used it all at least once, you can't possibly plan well for upgrades. But once you know what's in store, it's easy to plan for... But even without planning specifics, as long as you're simply allowing space to expand, you can save just about any factory for future upgrades - power shards can help here too.

There are online tools that can help a lot:
https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/wiki/Satisfactory_Wiki
https://www.satisfactorytools.com/production <-very helpful if you find number crunching during planning boring.
https://satisfactory-calculator.com/

[kLuns]

Core question for any factory:
How much do you need?
If you don't know the answer it's 2 machines making the item. Plan back to the resource from there.
Core principle for any miner:
keep space for an extra splitter

How do you want to make it? Favorite rercipe? Most items out of minimum resource? minimum buildings? Low power consumption?

Manifolds are easy to expand. They take time to fill but you can manually fill them up when one item has made it into the machine. This rules out a forgotten belt so that's why I always wait for one item to enter the machine.
I Prefilled a packager not so long ago and it ran out of resources because I forgot a belt.

Vertical manifolds can cause you to make very high buildings on a local place, always ready to put another floor on top. Carefull with weird shaped rocks, trees and the blue flying thing. Or don't care about those and clip as much as you like ;)

Power connections, either ceiling or floor, always wallmounts
On the floor you will need a beam/ pillar to be able to mount a wall socket to the foundation, but it's blueprintable and from there I drag it straight under the floor through the foundation.

Storage locally or centralized? I prefer centralized.

[greyworld]

Hello, just thought I'd throw my two cents into the ring on this.

So first off, let's start with the foundation, the floor. What I like to do is figure out the largest conceivable footprint I anticipate ever needing for some factory in its most developed state, even if I'm not going to implement even a small fraction of that initially, I'm thinking about it right away. So whatever that footprint would be, what I want to find is where that floor's elevation would sit at so it's above the ground at all points. Generally this is going to have some overhangs involved, which is fine (more on that later, for transport stations). For now just try to make it a point that along each north/south/east/edge of the largest-ever-version you're imagining, there is some overhang area where your workspace will end up at least 15m-20m ( 4 or 5 x 4m tiles stacked up) up above the natural ground level. That space is eventually for truck stations.

So make sure the floor is at a good place because moving it later is a pain. Then go ahead and shellac a bit plot of floor tiles out to get that started.

Second, I'm thinking about the primary 'highways' of resource movement within the factory. IE 'ore starts here, it needs to eventually get over here, at which time it becomes ingots, and will then split into however many paths that need to go here here and here', etc. Give that some consideration a while and try to factor in things like the resources nodes you already know about and also somewhat the ones you don't know about yet, because they sit at currently (but not forever) inaccessible locations. If there is a neighboring area you haven't fully explored yet, maybe keep enough pathway space open to and from that area that you could implement it later when you get up there and find out 'oh wow look at that, there was coal right nearby the entire time and I was belting it in from 3 miles away'.

So with highways carefully considered, layout some main north/south running belt line holders (the stackable belt mounts, but without actual lines on them yet), and east/ west. The idea for those is keep the belts, and pipelines too, setup to keep stacking more on top of these major lines, as you expand the factory. They should eat up the least amount of usable floor space possible (hug walls but not so close you have to put weird bends in these, these should be mostly straight shots). These stacked line highways should define large basically rectangular flat regions to build within.

At this time I"ll setup a basic power grid, with the poles situated very close or right next to, say... every other stackable belt mount stack, and connected so they form a ring of power around but not into the build space.

So at this point you should have, basically, a big empty chunk of floor with a nice set of belt stack mounts and power around the perimeter, form a clean rectangular region to work within. There should be plenty of available space to grow that foundation in any direction. Get your basic starter factory stuff in place there, and try to position the units so they're generally close to the edges and over time you grow that mess inwards towards the center of the region, as you add more.

I feel like this big long ol post here probably gives a decent enough starting point to think about, so I'm going to break it off here for now but if you want I'll follow up later with how I organized stuff like coal generator lines and fuel generator lines, which both end up being fairly similar, and largely determined by their fluid delivery pipelines.

[K'senia]

Consider separate buildings for different stages of product. I generally put a smelting building right near the mine. It's size is simply big enough to produce all the ore into ingots. Then I have a T1 building near by that uses ingots to make the base products. So that building would produces plates, screws, and rods for instance. Those are then shipped to other 'buildings that produce ever increasing complexity products. As for inside the buildings, I use splitters to feed into each machine while the rest of the product goes to the next splitter, the outputs feed a merging line.

[raichudoggy]

I never built any factories to be Upgrade-able EXCEPT power plants (I left room for more Fuel and Coal Generators in case I needed them, and I did.). My goal for most factories was 1 100% machine for the end product, and I never, ever needed to upgrade them to clear phase 4. The next time I'd needed to make the part, I just built it again from scratch (For Plastic, Rubber, and Smelted Bars I had Blueprints which helped a ton)... The way I built factories made me confident in doing Load balancing for many of them since I knew I wouldn't be tearing it apart to expand it.

I never organized all of my personal stock in one place... I just used a Hypertube network to connect my factories to grab items as I needed them. Efficient? Not really, but some planning of needed materials minimized trips.

I just let my power lines and poles clip through anything, I just try to keep them spaced out. I don't let power towers clip though my glorious boxes though, I have to have SOME standards...

[Zak]

Originally posted by kLuns:

Manifolds are easy to expand. They take time to fill but you can manually fill them up when one item has made it into the machine. This rules out a forgotten belt so that's why I always wait for one item to enter the machine.
I Prefilled a packager not so long ago and it ran out of resources because I forgot a belt.

I postpone connecting the output belts until all the machines on the manifold are filled up. I check them, one by one, if they're full (both inputs and outputs) and only then I start adding the output belts. Would that be the same as prefilling them manually? It seems to work.

[kLuns]

It seems like good working method as long as you stay under the belt limit.
Else the items won't leave the machine on the end of the line.

[Zak]

Originally posted by kLuns:

It seems like good working method as long as you stay under the belt limit.
Else the items won't leave the machine on the end of the line.

Oh yeah. I try my best to calculate the ins and outs :)

[kLuns]

even when you are making 779,75 per minute in a row of machines it will eventually empty out into the next produciton line :) (assuming mk5 belts)

[mackster]

For me, I always plan what I need by working backwards. For example:

I need Smart Plating. The assembler that makes them spits out the plates at 2 a minute. I need to be making a lot more than that, so lets see how many I can make easily.

Smart Plate recipe needs:- Reinforced Iron Plates: 2 per minute + Rotor: 2 per minute.

OK, for RIPs, I can make 5 per minute in one assembler for 30 iron plates per min and 60 screws per min. If I could make 10, then that would provide 50% of the needs for 10 smart plates per minute.

So, first factory is an RIP one. To get 60 iron plates in the RIP factory (30x2) i just need one section to spit out 60 iron plates, thats 3 constructors with the IP recipe, being fed with 90 iron ingots. For the screws, I need 120 per minute. Thats another 3 constructors with the screw recipe, but this time they are fed by iron rods, of which I need 30 (for 3 constructors). To get those 30 iron rods, I need 2 constructors, fed by 30 per minute iron ingots.

So, for the RIP factory (using base recipes and a basic factory (no shards):
- 8 constructors: 3xIron plates; 3xscrews; 2xiron rod
- For iron ingots, I need 120 per minute: 90pm for the plates; 30pm for the rods

So just need to get on an iron ore node that gets me 120pm ore, bang those into smelters and then feed into the constructors.

Thats the RIP done, now do the same plan for the ROTORs etc.

How you put them all together, either spaghetti, doing each construction on different levels or building a creative looking factory is entirely up to you

Hope this helps a little

EDIT: I doubled up there for some reason - its corrected now.

[Shawn]

Lots of good info here.

[jamiechi]

I let the people on Youtube videos do my planning for me.
And I have never used the Trains or Trucks. It's belts all the way for me.