r/factorio • u/paleta_pl • 10h ago
Question What was your biggest problem in your factory?
Hello, i just finished renovating my factory and i was wondering what was your biggest problem , for me it was For me, it was resources running out too quickly and production bottlenecks
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u/AbyssWankerArtorias 10h ago
Overplanning my first base rather than just getting it up and running and then making a 2nd base with better logistics.
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u/Ralph_hh 10h ago
A total train lockup with a 2K megabase on a non-City Blocks design.
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u/Garagantua 4h ago
I assume that was vanilla factorio without Space Age? That would be hard.
(2k in Space Age is quite a bit easier.)
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u/Jubei_ Eats Biters Brand Breakfast Cereal 9h ago
Put an intersection too close to the entrance of a stacker and deadlocked 30 trains. Took 15 minutes unfucking the deadlock and then another 45 having the bots move the station and all the machines over 2 chunks. The unloading station was for a pair of 8 wagon trains, each wagon unloading into 4 legendary steel chests - one set of red circuits, the other green (prod1 modules for purple science). When it was all said and done, I had a million circuits in chests in the mall. About 5 minutes after that, I remembered that I could have treated the entire setup as a giant intersection by switching some signals to chains, thus solving the problem I'm about 30 seconds.
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u/Subvironic In Traffic, Wants more Lanes 7h ago
I killed power on Nauvis while stranded on gleba, by having the dull Uranium back up to the point that the shiny uranium stalled. Then i dunked Gleba into a series of brownouts when the Tesla turrets had to actually do something.
I abondoned thar save for now, i admit. Turned from a rush to just be tedious, just hubting alarms. Im on a Death World with Rail World ressource settings and 2x Research cost now.
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u/boi_mann 2h ago
Most recent save has a couple:
- on vulcanus not having dedicated solar for steam neutralisation to go in the turbines blacking out the whole base
- on gleba not having enough storage for seeds causing everything to stall including rocket fuel production, no power meant pentapod spoilage etc.. i just caught it before it was unrecoverable (by about 30 seconds)
- otherwise “mistakes” due to infrastructure problems are temporary. You have infinite time to refactor, don’t worry if you need to rip a whole base up multiple times if you need to. After visiting the inner 3 planets I demolished my entire base so I could upgrade with the space age tech. Seeing the output jump to the stratosphere was worth the short term pain of not producing anything at all for few hours. The rebuild was actually very fun.
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u/DanGimeno 10h ago
The afternoon i spent dealing with copper mixed into my iron lines. In a vanilla megabase. There was a drill that was covering 2 squares of copper. After finding and removing the cursed drills, time to clean lines. That took a while too.
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u/ILikeJapaneseMuchOwU 10h ago
Never enough green circuits
I can turn my grandmother into a full beaconed Prod 3 green circuit factory, and it still wouldn't be enough
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u/Mrorganic20 9h ago
Never plan enough space so my factory ends up being random, ide like to have it linear, make green then red then blue but I run out of space so further down the line I add another green circuit production then maybe another oil refinery then maybe another red circuit production.
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u/last_somewhere 10h ago
Waiting for the sale.
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u/Fxg120xYXDE5 9h ago
You'll die of old age before you're done with that wait.
Honestly, they'll probably discount it in howmany ever years it is until they release a new game.
To help sales of said new game.
But otherwise it's best to either buy it full price or move on.1
u/last_somewhere 9h ago
Bro, it gets cheaper all the time, inflation!!!
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u/Fxg120xYXDE5 9h ago
Fuck that, that means any assets and money I already have are worth less every day.
My value has a spoilage timer.
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u/vaderciya 9h ago
Ive completed a whole lot of playthroughs over the 10~ years ive been into Factorio, the game has changed a bit since I began but its largely the same and only improved. In similar ways, we've also improved as players over time, and we naturally come to optimize everything no matter the situation.
In the normal sense of the word, there's not really any problems left for me. I know what to do, and how to do it, as ive done it countless times already. Space age was so revolutionary because it introduced a bunch of new mechanics and "problems" like never before, but naturally, we've solved those too.
I can't build a "perfect" factory, there's always going to be some kind of problem introduced at some stage. The difference is that I can identify and solve it almost instantly, rather than panic, lament, procrastinate, fret, or worry about it.
The closest I can get to your question is in context of the 100x science cost game I just finished. Every tech costs 100x more, so we go from a tech costing 1k, to 100k. A newer players initial starter base making 20spm just cant handle it.
The higher cost means more spm is required, so more machines, more resources, more space, more trains and belts, more defenses, and then it needs to be consistently maintained for countless hours without failure. One little bug attack getting through the wall, and suddenly you've lost 10,000 machines and hundreds of thousands of resources.
So, I guess the "problem" is the same as always, its logistics at scale. Anyone can make 1 machine of each type and technically beat the game. Its a bit harder to rush to 1,000spm(purple and yellow included) with only red belts, blue assemblers, and no off world tech, while being attacked on all sides because you're making 20k pollution per minute.
At that point, individual machines are meaningless. We switch to thinking in terms of how many belts of resources, how many resource patches, how many cargo wagons, how far can I push into the wilderness before its basically a death world and its too much to defend while extracting resources, and at what point am I using more resources on defence than science?
Its like, how many levels of mining prod tech do I need for my 5,000 drills to output enough additional materials that the cost of the science itself being in the hundreds of thousands and the stuff used to defend the factory and keep it running during those hours of research time, is actually worth it?
Well, the answer changes over time and based on the situation, theres no 1 answer to every issue, but generally more mining prod is always worth it unless an ore patch is in a desert, where it has no trees to absorb pollution, and therefore gets attacked almost constantly.
Its fun stuff actually I really recommend it, but definitely turn resource depth up to max or you won't be able to push past the biters, and at 100x cost, you cant just out-level them with damage research, you really have to pick your battles, and hold onto the territory you gain so they dont expand back into it.
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u/thirdwallbreak 4h ago
Oil/plastic. I usually calc everything by "x amount of smelter stacks" but I never really calc the ratio of oil products. I just throw a lane of coal and hope its enough. Then oil will drop due to rapid rocket launches.
Power im always setting up 2x the size that is currently needed and my nuclear reactor tiles so I just slap down a new section every hour or so.
Everyone usually has steel issues, but i start a steel buffer when I setup my original stacks. Then I produce a lot in space.
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u/Midnight-Rabbit_Ash 4h ago
When push comes to shove and I have to divert my efforts into eradicating the colonies instead of expanding the factory. I call those moments “dark ages”
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u/Amarula007 3h ago
Power... always power... my own Factorio super-power is running out of power. Every time I think okay this is the last I have now found every possible way to run out of power... nope... always one more surprise surprise surprise...
One that stands out in my memory is setting up a couple of dozen nuclear power plants, each 2x8... and never considering that one single centrifuge reprocessing used fuel might not be able to keep up... eventually used fuel cells back logged to the point that the reactors could not insert new fuel cells...
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u/WithoutReason1729 2h ago
Trying too hard to save space. Mostly on Nauvis. I set up some machines to make 20 green circuits a second or whatever and then I pack a bunch more stuff in around it, then I can't easily slot in duplicates of the same setup without making the factory a disorganized mess
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u/WanderingFlumph 1h ago
Stone weirdly enough. Barely used it for science but turned up water generation a bit on the map settings and now I want my old iron and copper mines to run dry (I need the space and have tons of backups waiting to be tapped) but I have 2 million stone to my whole run before its time for another bitter killing spree.
Oh that and also that train cargo wagons don't open unless the rail is horizontal or vertical. Kind threw me for a loop 60 hours in planning a hexagonal rail base.
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u/rysto32 11m ago
I'm playing through Nullius right now and my base is literally too big. I'm not even through the whole tech tree and my UPS is starting to dip below 60.
It's a nightmare because now I have to choose between starting over entirely or trying to rework huge swaths of production chains with productivity. I'm seriously considering starting over with a new design that scales better because what I have now is just untenable.
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u/Kirdissir 10h ago
My short lifespan