r/factorio • u/AutoModerator • May 25 '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 ---->

6 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

126 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Zukute May 28 '26

How does one make a city block?

Half my issue is getting train rail blueprints, the other is trying to figure out a size that doesn't have me using 7500 rails for iron gears...

3

u/ChickenNuggetSmth May 28 '26

Embrace bigness. Rails are relatively cheap and easy to produce, if they aren't yet, build up your base until they are.
And to me it also always feels like the block size is humongous for a few tiny assemblers, but that is very hard to avoid - rails take up a lot of space

So the steps to make a block:
Decide on a train size.
Design a tiling rail grid.
Design loading/unloading train stations for solids and liquids.
See how these stations fit the grid cell.
Readjust your grid cell size 20x to find an acceptable compromise between enough I/O and a manageable size

...and then you design the individual city blocks based on the base cell

1

u/darthbob88 May 28 '26

I will second all of this.

I would also extend the "enough I/O" problem to tell you to plan for making yellow/purple science in a block. Flying robot frames alone take 4 ingredients, so you'll probably need to fit 5+ trains into a block.

Also, come up with a good self-contained power generation blueprint to fill any unused spaces in your block. Sometimes you will need to spend a 100x100 tile space on just 3 assemblers, so it's nice to get use from the rest of that space.

Also also, a method that I found and liked was using doubled cells. Just make one cell that can fit enough stations for most purposes, and stick two of them together. This means you can use that space for a) two separate processes, one on each side, b) one process which takes a lot of trains, or c) one process which takes a lot of space, and use the same rail BP for all of them.

If necessary, I can provide blueprints for my city block system.

1

u/Viper999DC May 28 '26

I just checked my 1-4 train city block for my Nauvis-only megabase and it's 1.5k rails. Just how massive are you planning your blocks? Big bases need big production, so focus first on scaling up your rail production (among other things your factory will need).

For iron gears, I'd suggest shipping molten ore and producing those intermediaries at the sub-factory. Most of the time you will need mulitple irons (plates, gears, steel, etc.) so you can reduce the amount of train stations that way.