We take some stacks of electric furnaces with us, as well as a BOATLOAD of other building materials, and yet another BOATLOAD of stuff hidden in the crafting queue... It is Time... To Build our New Base!!! In case you were worried about my shiny green rocks, we took a third sulfuric acid delivery trip off cam, and have already amassed more than 40 Uranium-235 again, as well as 2 full chests of Uranium-238! We won't need any of that for a long time though! Anyway, OUT with the coal-burning Steel furnaces, and IN with the shiny new Electric furnaces! And while you're looking at this quick temporary setup to produce 50 beacons for later, I'VE laid out this full furnaces setup! Well... full... You might think this is quite a small furnace array for a real base... And that's because it is! The cold hard reality is, we don't even have enough resources to feed even THIS small furnace array, let alone a normal sized one! We have barely enough miners to supply 2 yellow lines of copper and 3 yellow lines of iron... yes, yellow belts!
While I did used the double speed red belts with a vision for the future, each of these 12-high furnace stacks are only enough to fill up a yellow belt! But indeed, this setup is expandable in the future. We will need to expand out once more though, both for the required space and in order to gain access to more ore patches. This expansion will get the northern wall out of the way to make space, and only THEN we will make the furnace stacks twice as tall to suit red belts, or even thrice as tall for blue belts, if we choose so! For the foreseeable time though, this setup is large enough! Ok, so please don't look at the elapsed time between this clip and the last... I totally did NOT spend waaaay to much time thinking and tinkering with the base layout to finally decide on this awesomely neat buffer area! I am quite proud of it though, so there! Then, after questioning whether to use efficiency modules or productivity modules for the base and furnaces, I've decided to go full dirty productivity modules to extract the most out of every last piece of ore we can! This decision comes at the price of massive pollution output, fiercer attacks and faster progress towards behemoth biters though! I've also determined the starting place for the bus and designed this weird looking, but somehwow still modular setup which can be supported by a few speed beacons here and there those speed beacons will offset the production speed penalty of productivity modules and thus reduce the number of assemblers needed for each product. So, let's switch on both setups, and see them in action! Nice! Actually, let's also switch on some lights, so you can see the actual buffer chests! Now, you may be thinking I'm also building my Main Bus the small size it is now, to match our current small furnace array, but this is not the case though! My main bus will have 2 lines for copper, 2 lines for iron, and 2 lines for green chips, and ALL of the other resources will do with just ONE single belt for the entire game! Now, with logistics bots already being available, I'm not sure yet how many products I'm gonna add to the bus, But we make sure to leave plenty of space between the current bus and the walking path Now if you've watched any of those main bus tutorials this small setup may surprise you, but I like to keep it compact, and I have a different strategy to supply the late game requirements.
Lategame I intend to outsource the mass production of steel and green chips to elsewhere in the base, which frees up the full 2 belts of iron and copper for all the other purposes! By going for productivity modules instead of efficiency modules, after switching on all of this, our power consumption has seriously spiked up and we're using about a quarter of our nuclear reactor's capacity right now! At the moment the reactor is not consuming fuel as you can see, which is a good indicator that the idea behind the 100% fuel efficient reactor is working: it won't get new fuel until all of the buffered heat is fully transformed into steam on an as-needed basis! If you're thinking, Dude, but still, 2 belts only? There's just no way that's enough! Well, perhaps you're right, perhaps you're wrong. Let's play on and see how it plays out! Alright ready for the next concept? I understand many folks hate the mess that the yellow storage chests make, but are not quite sure how to get the best performance out of the green buffer chests, so I'm going to go through the concept of how I use them to basically make a fully automated sorting system in factorio. Don't worry, this explanation is going to be much simpler than the nuclear plant one! The short version is to think of them as "Passive provider chests with an attitude" as they'll request back the stuff you try to take from them This is actually pretty easy to set up, but there's a decent amount of fiddly work involved to get it all done.
The core concept is to connect a wire from the inserter to the chest, and telling the inserter to stop filling up the chest at a certain point. Here we go with 4000 copper plates, which leaves 800 copper plates worth of space empty. Now the inserter stops after inserting 4000 plates by itself, we can delete the chest limiter which formerly had the same function, and then we set a request for the bots to fill the chest up to 4800 copper plates! This means, should copper plates become available anywhere else in the base, the bots will automatically bring them to THIS chest here, instead of some random storage chest! Only when all the green buffer chests are full, they will bring it to a random yellow storage chest, but, and here's another key element, once the buffer chest starts distributing plates and emptying out, the plates in those yellow storage chests will automatically be transferred back to the buffer chests again! And only when the storage chests are empty and the buffer chest drops below 4000 plates, the inserter will activate again! The key point is to avoid using yellow and red chests at any production site which is producing items we have the green buffer chests setup for, as buffer chests will request their stuff. The green buffer chests do NOT request from other green buffer chests though! Now, we'll not only use this concept on the plates buffer, but also on the intermediates buffer, and indeed, are going to do so on just about everything! And here's our first manufacturing block, indeed again using the green buffer chests! When using this system, you want to check the "request from buffer chests" tickmark on the blue requester chests, to ensure your items get made! To illustrate this, let's start simple, with the yellow transport belt.
We simply shift-right click the assembler, then shift-left-click the reuqester chest, which causes the requester chest to automatically request the required ingredients! Handy! We then limit the output inserter to stop inserting yellow belts in the chest whenever there are more than 2000 yellow belts in the chest. This will stop yellow belt production before the chest is even half full, so that the bots have plenty of space to bring back obsolete yellow belts to this very buffer chest here. The next assembler will make underground belts. Again we copy and paste the recipe from the assembler to the requester chest, and behold: it requests the yellow belt we've just set up! This is why you need to check that checkmark by the way, so that the bots can grab belts from the yellow belt buffer chest below to provide to the underground belts! Now we set the request for the buffer chest so that all obsolete yellow underground belts will be brought back to this very chest, for example when the bots deconstruct them or when I move them from my inventory into the logistics trash slots. OK, now we just need to set up about a hundred more of these guys, right... It will be a lot of work, but it's worth it hands down, as we'll greatly benefit from it for all the rest of the game without giving it any thought.
By using this system everywhere in the base, every single bot-transported entity is going to be automatically sorted, all the way from the hyper-expensive nuclear reactor, down to the very last belt and green chip. As the bots return the machinery to the same chests they'll take them from, not only will it prevent our storage from becoming a complete mess, it will ALSO prevent severe overproduction of any said machinery! Anyway, NOW is not quite yet the time to set that all up, so let's reset those two examples I just made until we're ready to set up the full block! There's a few more things to take care of first, before we enable the logistics network! Now, we may want access to some rocket fuel soon, so let's quickly set it up in the old base before... the oil runs out, believe it or not! We're starting to see the bottom of the oil tanks... At the height of oil storage, we had over a cool million of oil... Well, our oil buffer has been decimated since! This is why we've been trying our hardest to keep oil production going all game long, even though it meant adding ridiculous amounts of buffer tanks everywhere! In the mean time, we have finished all blue technologies, except for braking speed...
There's just something too epic about a... specific type of train grinding down to a halt ever so slowly, TSSSJJJ!!! So we'll save this for last! With all blue technologies completed, that means the old base has stopped producing almost completely now, as also all of the buffer chests are nice and filled up. This is great news, as we can use all this stuff to kickstart the new base! And now that the old base is fully idle, the full resource flow of the copper and iron mine go to the new base...
That means we need a second iron belt to bring ore to the furnaces here! Now that I've got like 6 legs in my armor, and I can outrun anything, let's finally make.... a CAR??? Indeed, we don't need the car for the speed bonus, but it's nice to have a second inventory to reduce the number of trips for the upcoming work of transfering all the highly valuable buffers over from the old base to the new base. I bet YOU though I made rocket fuel for a soon to be train network! Yeah... something about hitting the ONE single object
in an otherwise empty parking lot... Anyway, we're going to gather all expensive stuff from the old base, and bring it over here! I want to get all the transfering done now, beacuse this is the LAST time we can use our logistics trash slots as free inventory space... Logistics bots are coming soon! Let's drive more carefully this time... Good! avoided the roboport! Sigh... Would you believe me if I told you I was once was a professional truck driver in real life? Yeah... me neither...
Finally we brough over all the stuff... That took a fair few trips, I tell ya. Anyway, we're gonna give the future bots access to all of those, except the expensive things in limited supply, most notably the red and blue chips.
given we aren't producing new ones at the moment. I'll supervise the distribution of those myself, to prevent that we end up consuming all red chips making 800 substations or something stupid like that! Then at last, it is finally time to say hello to our logistics network! Now, let's test it out! We put some gears in this chest.... and indeed they are returned to their proper location! Now let's put these green chips in our logistics trash slots...
Divided equally over the 8 green chip buffer chests... Nice! Now, I am standing right here, and I COULD transfer those thousands of gears and green chips in mere moments myself... but why would I? Let's add some construction bots to the network, and give them a test as well... Awesome... Of course, they don't have access to the machinery just yet! We add a couple more manufacturing blocks, but before we start setting them up, not all end products are best located in the manufacturing block.
So, we set up concrete at the iron mine, as it's the only item in the game requiring raw iron ore And it would d be a little silly to have bots fly over 100.000s of raw stone to make landfill, so let's draw stone for landfill straight off the stone belt! Now we can use the trash slots in another way! Given that we stand near the destination chests, the bots can transfer the concrete evenly over the chests faster than we can by hand! NOW we're ready to set up the manufacturing blocks! Before setting up any requester chests though, we first spent some time puzzling out to what goes where... Aaaannd it's done! We've got a row with train stuff, a row for power related stuff, a row for modules and beacons, a row for production facilities, a row for the map management section of power poles, roboports and radars, opposed by cliff explosives and all the different chest types! The next lane contains the physical item and fluid management, including all inserter and belt types, and the last column consists of military and military science related stuff. The far right column is still empty for future needs! Lets start by setting up the walls... As soon as we dedicate this buffer chest to walls, the bots start transferring walls from the general storage area to these dedicated chests...
Now we just gotta make sure the inserter doesn't fill up these chests completely, and voila, all future obsolete walls will now be brought back to these chests! NOW we just gotta set up ALL of the other requests! Let's see... request 2400 yellow inserters, while production switches off at 2000... switch off red inserter production after 2000, request all red inserters to this chest, switch off blue inserter production after 2000, request all blue inserters to this chest, etcetera etcetera The only item we want to use a regular yellow storage chest for are the repair packs... A green buffer chest requesting repair packs here, would also draw all repair packs out of the roboports, which you may want to keep available in the roboports directly at the walls! Fortunately we can repair packs as a filter on the storage chest, which prevents any other items than repair packs being delivered to this chest. Alternatively you could instead, OR additionally, feed repair packs straigth into a roboport. Remember at the old base, we had to keep an eye on the number of robots in the network as they were getting killed by literally friendly fire? Well, we can automate that too now! We can automatically manage the amount of robots in the network by simply connecting a wire from the inserter to the roboport, then select read robot statistics, and you'll see that the signal Y carries the total number of logistics bots in the network.
So, when we set the inserter to insert logistics bots ONLY when Y equals LESS than one thousand, the inserter will automatically keep adding logistics robots until there are 1000 in the system. It's that easy! We repeat that for construction bots, which are represented by the letter T, and now the roboport network will automatically top up construction robots back to one thousand, you know, just in case some construction robots decide to expore the path less travelled and subsequentially are reported... missing... Now, there is ONE big issue wth lategame enemy expansions... Their big worms easily outrange any turret we can put up, so when one spawns exactly in the sweet spot.... yeah.... So we need to make an appearance on the scene ourselves...
Luckily I'm carrying some extra legs just for these kind of long distance occasions, so it's more of an annoyance than a really big problem, but still... Something to think about "automating" in the future! On the way back, we happen to see the delayed fuel distribution in action... The fuel passes the blue inserters, who insert exactly one fuel cell in each chest again! Eventually, I DID manage to set up all the requester and buffer chests in the manufacturing blocks, and we can watch the bots flying...
And the furnaces working full steam, trying their hardest to keep up with the resource demand... And when we check back at our general storage center, we can see that the bots are sorting out all the stuff we've set up buffer chests for! Perhaps we can also add the different turrets to the block though! We'll manually feed the laser turrets some batteries, as we're not producing those yet! Now, copper wire and iron sticks are a little annoying... I prefer to hide them away in the main bus somewhere...
Now the automatic sorting for all desired items is complete, lastly we set up a new general storage area with the yellow storage chests! Only the items that we have NOT set up buffer chests for will be brought over here! Now let's reap the fruits of our labor... Let's set up some personal logistics requests, so that we never have to manually scrounge around for base building materials! The logistics bots are gonna deliver me ALL the things! As well as get rid of all the things I don't want anymore, which they'll deliver right back to the correct buffer chest! YES! It was quite a chore to set up, but as we're probably looking ahead to a long long game still, it was well worth the effort! And with all of that logistics fiddling out of the way, it's finally time to continue working on the main bus, not only to work towards getting Science going again, but also many of the hardware in the manufacturing block require ingredients more advanced than green chips and iron gears... like engines, red chips, plastics, basically the whole series of intermediate products! For that, there is a time and a place... The place is right here, but the time is...
Next Time!
2022-08-22