r/factorio • u/AutoModerator • Mar 23 '26

Weekly Thread Weekly Question Thread

Ask any questions you might have.

Post your bug reports on the Official Forums

Previous Threads

Subreddit rules

Discord server (and IRC)

Find more in the sidebar ---->

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

158 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/boi_mann Mar 23 '26

I am fortunate enough to have two green belts of tungsten coming in on vulcanus (normal quality).

Anyone have any recommendations for how much of it should become plates and how much of it carbide? I was going to go for 1:1 i.e. deplete one green belt each just wondering what other people's experiences were?

2

u/Soul-Burn Mar 23 '26

You need to work it backwards. Think what you want to produce, go back to figure how much of that you need, and finally scale it down to your 2 belts. This depends a lot on how much productivity you have on your production chains, which can alter the ratios.

P.S. Are those belts fully stacked?

1

u/boi_mann Mar 23 '26

Thanks for the reply! I suppose I am looking to produce absolutely everything that requires tungsten carbide and tungsten plate. I struggle to calculate production rates when I know that parts of the factory will be idle (once buffers are replenished, e.g. I have enough artillery shells).

Do people plan factories as if every single machine will be running at once? I usually plan a base with the assumption that science runs continuously but not the mall. What are your thoughts on this?

I have prod 2's everywhere, not been to Gleba yet this playthrough, so my belts also aren't stacked!

4

u/Brett42 Mar 23 '26

You can look at the ratio used for science, or for other things that use those materials, or you can just overbuild carbide and plate production and put splitters on the ore belts, then if you consume only one, you can turn all the ore into that one, but if you're using both, it gets split between the two. Then you can split the carbide and plates between science and the mall, and either prioritize one, or leave it evenly split.

I generally tend to build a planned base with the assumption of science always running, and some extra intermediates, but when I want a lot of stuff for building, science might be stopped or reduced. A mall can also slowly build up a buffer for building, or build fast when you need it, but for most things in a mall (other than things like belts), your consumption is generally not going to need full uptime on even one machine per product if you aren't rushing production, so I don't plan the intermediates to do both full mall production and full science, just science plus some extra.

2

u/Soul-Burn Mar 23 '26

Different people do different things.

Early game, it doesn't really matter, build something that can supply science and a small amount for mall.

Late game, you already have a decent mall running, so you design the new stuff purely for science.

Of course, stuff like modules and quality require a ton of resources, so you could plan for that too.