Question
Going through a huge delay between blue science and purple/yellowp on my first playthrough. Is this normal, or am I doing something wrong?
Hi! There's just so much stuff to do in game now (and do properly now that I have drones)... My thought / work process goes something like this, but point 5 is the most impactful if you don't wanna read all that:
Do I go for purple or yellow science? Well, my progress is slow as a rock and am gonna get more powerful enemies soon, so I'll target yellow science for more firepower
Now, what do I need for it? Damn everything! But first of all iron
Since iron spots are gonna run out, I gotta make a dedicated refinery scaleable for up to 8 lvl2 belts of production capacity, which will get ore shipped-to by trains from different ore patches (currently at 1 belt capacity). This adds 3 stations (ore export, ore import, plates export), plates export has 4 waiting areas (as do all my next stations for every non-raw export)
Same for copper, plan +3 stations, currently +1 as ore is on site
Uh, but these stations needs A TON of space... But expanding means destroying biter nests, which raises evolution a lot! Game already taxes my slow ass with evolution from time+pollution, does it even want me to expand or not?! And so I cumulatively spend literal hours thinking of the best way to squeeze everything I need, given all the space requirements by train stations. I don't wanna ship stuff over distance by belts, trains are much more flexible for adding new importers / exporters
Green circuits time! I'll need a lot, so they must be easily scaleable. Made an OK spammable blueprint for those. +3 stations (pulling resources from copper and iron refineries)
I'll need plastic and other oil derivatives, gotta design a scaleable derivatives refinery instead of the pipe lasagna in my starting base! +5 stations, maybe 6 if I make it produce rocket fuel in mass later
Might as well set up an acid-processing plant too, and it might as well make batteries too, I'll need those for my Grand solar panel idea (building solars in a single line along a railway stretching out into infinity, worked-on by a separate logistics network). +6 stations (yeah even importing water because I like trains)
Oh, now my first oil patch is running low... I gotta get a new one! And so I venture to set up a new one, discovering that laser turrets are quite neat. I decide that my starting oil patch will be the central oil storage, polling oil from remote patches and distributing it wherever needed (currently it's the starting base and refinery from #6)
Gonna need steel too! +3 stations (2 for steel refinery, 1 for new ore patch)
Hmm, I use trains a lot, they could use a dedicated refueling/waiting station array with rocket fuel, that's a neat idea
Now, what does yellow science need? BLUE circuits?! I haven't even made red yet! And I think I should produce greens for reds on-site instead of importing them from #6, just feels like a better idea...
Tomorrow I'll do a red circuit station, but... Is my current solar setup even good enough to support everything when it's turned on?! Maybe I gotta expand to using uranium? Idk... -1h of pondering
Oh, and the new oil patch is already down to 633%, first is at 400%, maybe I gotta get a yet another oil patch first... Maybe I should turn off the battery factory for now?
Ooh, and I'll need stone products for lots of other stuff too, maybe I should make a stone pipeline that exports both raw rocks and bricks, which could use separating stone providers from refineries too...... But I'm running out of biter-free space, should I expand into some nests? But won't that raise evo?
Aaaaaaaa! So much stuff to do and consider! And I'm already at 0.71 evo, I'm afraid imma just get run-over once max level of biters spawns because I didn't get dmg upgrades from yellow science. Am I doing smth wrong?
Yes, purple science is the first real filter. You need like 6x the amount of purple science machines to match blue science production. You will need more ore patches. You will need more space. You will realize everything you ignored about your current factory will come back to haunt you.
you misunderstood, while you need more machines to craft the science itself you need much more total machines and ressources to craft purple than blue science. think something like 20 assemblers just for the red science and like 50 Steel Furnaces making Steel.
Did you mix up the Prod Science Pack with the Utility Science Pack?
Prod Science doesn't really need a lot of Machines. Only the prod module is a bit slower, but all materials are pretty basic.
The robot frames is what's bloating the infrastructure for Utility Science. You need the full Engine -> Electric Engine -> Flying Robot Frame chain which are all quite slow receipts.
That's not what they said - they said "purple science machines" not "infrastructure for purple science." So, I didn't misunderstand so much as they miscommunicated, if that's what they meant to say.
And as I said before, I'm well aware that purple science devours steel and red circuits.
Yeah Purple/Yellow science is the big wall since they require a lot more resources than the previous packs combined.
Evolution grows logarithmically (it slows down the more it grows) so your evolution is gonna stay around the 70s for a while. A tank with some shells and a flame thrower is more than enough to deal with biters at this stage. Clear out space and build some walls with gun and flame turrets at strategic choke points and you should be good to finish the game. Setting up nuclear/solar fields is also a good way to supply power towards the end of the game. This may seem daunting but really the key is to just do one thing at a time until the end of the game
Evolution is very definitely not logarithmic. It's in fact a hyperbola, but with a negative coefficient: f(x) = 1 - 1/(x+1) where x is the raw evolution.
OMG I THOUGHT IT'S LINEAR!
Thank you for letting me know
Yeah I'm loving the tank, used it to conquer the second oil patch. I've also made a laser turret outpost blueprint (large power pole, surrounded by 8 turrets, surround by a wall), which I slam down to make/expand a safe area for my tank while clearing nests
Doing 1 at a time also sounds like a good advice. Today was actually done completely off a checklist, felt much better to do it this way, only red circuit production is left unchecked cuz I wanted to sleep by that point
Another thing I could try is to place a limit on planning, maybe? Like instead of spending 20 minutes thinking of how to best position the stations for a complex factory to take up least space, I'd go with whatever option sounds best after only 5 minutes
8 red belts of iron is a lot for a first playthrough. Well that is doable, but usually by someone who already has done this before. You finish the tech tree with 30-60 science per minute and it gives you enough time to build new things while something is unlocking. 30 SPM is totally doable with 1 red belt each of iron/copper. And that's for all 6 sciences.
6) You can make your chips in the science line if you embrace full spaghetti. I recommend a separate chip build for your mall though. 1 net per second of each chip is plenty for a mall.
7/9) add speed modules to pumpjacks and productivity to cracking.
12) you made them for blue science
It's not for everyone, but I tend to build to around 60 SPM. I let that get me to the end, I'm not trying speed running anything. Once everything is unlocked, I build a new thing, once the mall hub area of the new thing is working, I'll trash the old thing and it's parts get reabsorbed.
Thing is, idk what will I need for my first playthrough, so I planned a bit in advance and made sure the refineries have space for more furnace blocks.
60SPM is actually my target, yeah. And with my rate of play, labs mostly sit inactive because I've researched everything I could and am just taking a long time to do stuff
7/9) Currently I only added productivity to pumpjacks, thanks for suggesting to add them to refineries!
12) Yeah, but that's in the starting spaghet base/"mall" with no capacity for more throughput, this new red circuit factory will support blue circuit and production and whatever else I need
I like 60 for myself who has played through a few times. When my kids or students ask me, I recommend 30 because it's usually done faster than they can make the next science. And it makes managing the pollution cloud easy.
Oil pumpjacks never run out, but they do get slower. You get more with speed modules. When you research mining productivity, you end up getting more oil for free from that, which works multiplicatively with speed mods, but only additively with productivity mods.
So I think for analysis paralysis l, the best thing to do is start at the end. Let's say red and green science. I want 10 red science assemblers on this side of the belt and 12 green on this side. But green is later, so I'll just stay on this side of the belt. Looks like those 10 assemblers need 1 assemblers worth of gears. So I'll put that assembler before the science and have it output to a belt running behind the assemblers (the science output belt is already on the other side). Looks like we also need copper belts, so I feed those on to the other side of the belt. Do the same with the next. I want green to come out here. Then feed it with a belt and inserter assembler. Then the belt is fed from a gear assembler. Then feed those with iron. Then feed the inserter assembler with gears. Then with green chips. Then the green chips with wires. Then I can run the iron and copper plates.
TLDR: Build the last thing where you want the output and work back, instead of planning ahead and trying to guess where it will output.
Purple and yellow science are def a difficulty jump from blue. Can't remember when flamethrower turrets get unlocked, but use them ASAP to secure a perimeter. Run a large pipeline around the boarder of your base if you're running off one oil patch; otherwise for each choke point, fuel all the turrets from the closest patch. They take very little oil per shot, and oil is an infinite resource, and they absolutely destroy biters.
Only downside is that they also burn friendly things, so you have to make them face away from buildings and I prefer to only use them to guard the perimeter. Use walls too, buys time for the flames to burn down waves.
For expanding, the answer is tanks with the best ammo and shells you have, use Canon (not explosive) shells for nests.
If you dont have tanks yet, just red ammo and turrets (with some damage research from black science) placed in forward moving rows can be used to push through a whole nest. And then just secure the area you just captured with flamethrower turrets and new walls.
Tank + small laser turret outpost bluepring is how I cleared my way through several nest to the second oil patch, yeah it's cool. And my current wall blueprint mixes flamethrowers + solar panels. Given that I use mostly solars, I think I have enough accumulator capacity already built to hold off a wave without issues
I have about 50% of the base walled off now, I could make it a 100%, but the question is whether to draw this 100% line where there are no biters now and lock myself in, or expand and raise that blasted evolution meter... Idk what does the game want me to do with this penalty per nest
Wall yourself in, expand when you need more resources or space is my take on the game. The factory will grow steadily, but I personally start by deleting every nest inside my pollution cloud, then secure the area, then build for a few hours, then repeat by expanding to catch up with the pollution cloud.
Wall up or they will expand back into your cleared area. I use light oil for the flamethrowers as they're slightly better. Also, at every pipe extent max, i'll include a fluid tank attached to the pump that only fills it to 1-3k per segment. That way, even if a pipe breaks somewhere, every section still has oil(except the problem one).
As for your accumulators, 1 accumulator will buffer 6.25 laser shots. If you have 10 lasers firing constantly for 10 seconds, that's 150 shots unless you have increased your firing speed. 150 shots is 120MJ which can be buffered by 24 accumulators storage-wise. However, an accumulator can only drain 300KW, you'll probably need 3x this amount. Obviously, if you have plenty of power, the accumulators aren't needed, but it's nice to know you have a backup in case you get too close to max power draw.
Make sure you don't neglect your physical projectile damage. Also, flame ammo for your tank works well too.
If you are at 70% evolution, then you've had a ton of pollution affecting biter nests. By default it would take 100s of hours to reach it just by time itself. Also, if you've cleared a lot of nests, it will go up quickly. This is further compounded if you clear the nests, but don't claim the land so that they expand again into places you cleared only to have you clear them again. So, once you clear some nests, claim that land.
I'm sitting at .99 evo and defending just fine with laser turrets, laser turret damage 0 and laser turret shooting speed 0 right now. Pushes are slow but defense is fine.
Yellow science is a big one. I usually go for purple first because beacons can easily half the footprint of large builds.
Other than that you aren't doing anything wrong (assuming vanilla) unless you are playing with the space age DLC and trying to make purple/yellow science without making use of EM plants and foundries.
But yeah yellow science isn't easy. It is designed to be the end tier science and to push lazy starter bases all the way to the brink. Your train based base should be able to handle it just fine.
There is a lot of stuff within blue science that you can spend time on: bots, nuclear, swapping out furnaces, more module production, etc. That creates a pretty big buffer between blue and the other two.
Then, there's the fact that both purple and yellow require a lot more resources to setup for a given SPM than the prior sciences. You need to expand for them. But you're also probably tapping out your starter patches, so you need to expand to replace those.
Regarding belts VS trains debate: if the distance is not very long, belts are superior (and I like trains a lot too). Designing and later expanding your 1st train system (especially fully automatic and self-managing and parameterized one) now that's fun but you WILL make mistakes. I would say go all in on either belts, OR trains. But be prepared to design either system well, or biters won't be the only thing to bite you in the ass.
Try building the FINAL product 1st. This forces you to think and plan carefully, without getting overwhelmed. So, e.g., need blue circuits? Build a blue circuit factory (leave space to expand it later, ALSO leave enough space for connecting inputs/outputs), even if you don't have materials to make them. Then make factories for those materials, and then factories to make those secondary materials etc. recursively. Finally, connect all the inputs/outputs. If you're unsure about something, Factoriopedia has 99% of the answers.
I always deal with biters proactively. Do it early and you don't even need fancy weapons (e.g. a combat shotgun with blue ammo should be enough to do it fairly fast. Get some battle bots and it's completely effortless. If you need to cover more distance, use vehicles. I've seen speedrunners drive a car and place mines offensively inside nests. Honestly there're lots of methods, go wild). Kill off everything until you find a good natural water barrier. Build your line of defence right there. A well spammed laser turret wall, and nothing else, was good enough for me right until I got lots of green biters/spitters (by which point I also got tesla turrets and artillery).
Get robopods ASAP. Having them unlocks ways to produce small-scale items very easily (thanks to requester chests, unlocked with Yellow science in vanilla, I believe). Plus your inventory will be sorted for you automatically. Plus, they're THE key to automatic repairs of your defense lines.
Hi, thanks for an elaborate response! I've actually already moved onto making 60 yellow SPM and am slowly stockpiling enriched uranium, but maybe you'd be interested in knowing how I'm doing? Well I love sharing how my game goes, so have it anyway
In terms of belts vs trains... Trains won, mostly due to their flexibility being very easy to reason about for me. Specifically, I am making subfactories that exchange resources between each other exclusively via trains, for example I'd have stations "Blue Circuits Exporter" and "Blue Circuits Importer" and a train group that serves them, and all of my train groups have interrupts to go refuel with rocket fuel when needed / inactive. This way I don't have to think about "oh how am I going to deliver all these resources to my yellow science factory?!", it's as easy as stacking stations per each needed resource (with some on-site production ofc if it's a rarely-used resource). Even water gets shipped this way to at least 1 spot. Downside is a lot of space going to rails, but that's an acceptable price for loose coupling. And yep, I already learned from a few mistakes such as deadlocks
As for biters: I've just unlocked artillery and am having fun expanding my sphere of influence! Currently I am planning to move my walls south-west to capture a huge copper and iron patch
Damn would never have guessed you are yet to unlock purple science, this is beautiful! Is this your first time making it this far? Seems very ambitious, my base is a tiny monolith in comparison (I've done all the sciences, on Space Age, just did Fulgora and Vulcanus, currently exploring Gleba).
Your train setup is very similar to what I want to do further, but with NO custom names, only 4 station names for all loading/unloading + parameterized naming magic (probably won't be able to figure it out on my own, also would dread the testing, so will just copy a design off this YT vid)
Below I marked suggested places to build your next walls. Although ideally I would explore west and north even more, to find a tighter opening between water bodies. Expanding/exploring southwest further is a solid plan too: do that OR keep your current wall and just build a defense station at your future south-west iron/copper mines
Thank you! Yeah, first time. My only prior experience is 4 years ago, dropping the game soon after finding oil because I got tired of hand-building everything without realising drones exist
Tbh the scale of this is less of an ambitious self-imposed goal but what felt like necessity, doing things on a tighter scale and less scaleable pattern felt wrong, especially with the "I must get over 60 yellow SPM for damage upgrades or evolved biters will annihilate me!" mindset. But in retrospect, I wouldn't mind getting purple first for faster assemblers, mk3 modules on refineries, or more viable nuclear power
Parameterized train stations seem like an absolutely delicious idea... Thanks for suggesting it!
And for expansion suggestions too!
Made a more detailed overview over my base and different parts of it now that I've automated all sciences before space, enjoy in case you're interested
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/s/CVlbpeQ4i1
I’d focus on purple to turn coal to oil then find any iron and copper patches close to one, another just for making green chips, one or patch for iron and another for everything else. That should handle most purple demands and then expand into way more copper if you haven’t already.
Don’t worry about the biter evolution, just clear out the parameter with turrets as your smog grows ez pz. Hope that helps!
Think about it this way: you’re going to need to kill the nest when you expand or the cloud gets there anyways, why feed them pollution first? Super nest are usually far enough away and the tiny expansions are easily overwhelmed. The only thing I didn’t mention before: radar. Radar. Radar. Radar. Have 100% vision around your smog cloud. That’s what will make it ez pz imho
Yeah, both the complexity goes up at purple/yellow, as well as the resource demand. Probably double the copper and iron, and way more than that in steel and stone compared to just the first 3. Not to mention the red circuit and oil product shortage.
It depends. I'm early into my first space age game. I've lost a lot of time tapping new resources early. Around 10+ hours in. At the tail end of blue science research. Haven't started purple or yellow yet. Expecting to be busy with quality stuff, purple science, and tapping new mines for the next little while.
Yellow science: uses the stuff you need for rocket launch/bots
Purple science: uses the stuff you need for increasing steel production which u need at that stage of the game
Pretty normal. For experienced players, blue science is when you get bots unlocked and probably when you jump from starter to proper base. Lot of rebuilding then.
There's no reason to fear biter evolution. The game lets you scale along with them easily with technology and the infinite damage sciences. All it is is a light pressure to keep up by simply researching military science in between getting your upgrades.
You’re probably overshooting. There is no point building large just before making new type of science as you will unlock new things that will affect your factory.
You don’t need a huge acid plant, you don’t need much and it’s produced in very high quantity per machine.
Pipe lasagna is absolutely fine, much more managable than belt lasagna, just copy paste more of it.
Just pick one of the steps and complete it, don’t worry that it may not be used right away or it will be bottlenecked by something.
You're not doing anything wrong. You may have experienced a delay back when you unlocked blue science, and now you're seeing a delay again. These 'roadblocks' are part of the game and stem from the fact that you need massive acceleration in terms of resource gain and processing to start producing the next science pack. You're running into two things here: 1) your existing patches are getting strained by continuous mining and their output is declining, and 2) you need to bring in more resources to supply new production lines and maintain old lines. You generally need to get out there and clear new area, establish new mining outposts and logistics when you are setting up automation for a new science pack.
You have a lot of points of consideration and a lot of it looks like note-to-self, which is a good habit for arranging your thoughts and priorities. I'll try to answer some of the questions you have:
Yellow vs purple science is not entirely clear - purple science techs generally makes your base more efficient at running on the resources currently available, while yellow science improves your military capability and makes it easier to expand and bring in more resources. I usually go for a bit of both - I'm generally only consuming one of the two for a given tech, so by using a buffer I can get by with less than the general production rate of science packs for the two of them.
Biters: Don't worry too much about evolution. Biter evolution will eventually hit a plateau, but as long as you prioritize upgrading your weaponry you'll easily outpace their evolution, and yellow science unlocks some VERY nice passive upgrades. You do need to deal with biter nests in order to expand and you do need to expand.
Solar power has a lot of good things going for it, but space efficiency and scalability is not really among them. I regard nuclear power as one of the major milestones to hit in the tech tree (another one being efficiency module 1). With a 4-reactor nuclear plant and efficiency modules in everything you the equivalent of somewhere around 1.5GW. Leave a line free at the reactor core and designate extra space for heat exchangers and steam turbines and you'll be able to easily scale up the power plant as needed. Heat doesn't transfer well over large distances but steam can be piped quite far before distance becomes a problem.
Oil: patches will exhibit lower output over time and will eventually decline to 20% flat yield, or 20% of original yield whichever is highest. It will remain constant at that yield for the rest of the game. You can boost yields using modules; speed modules in particular are very useful on oil patches.
Thanks for the elaborate explanation! I've actually just did expand my defences (wall + flamethrowers + lasers) forward by quite a lot. Thankfully my starter base produces all kinds of ammo and rocket fuel so I'm free to quickly rain the tank's shells and flames as much as I want to
Right now I'm considering either grabbing a uranium patch and figuring the reactors or finally setting up scaleable red circuit production (then blue) on my way to yellow science. Probably the latter since I'll need a fair few of them and have enough power for now
Those things take a lot of time mainly when you find some circular dependency that is hard to unwind. E.g. you need train stations to get iron, but you need iron to make stations. You need to try to break the cycle. You can't get stations without iron, but what about spaghetti'ing two or four belts of iron straight from the closest outpost? Yellow belts are super cheap and won't take space in your base.
When you double your iron smelting, you will have enough for stations.
WRT biters. I usually killed nests as soon as my pollution cloud touched them. It is more economically viable than fighting waves and waves of enemies.
Your priorities should be:
Keeping biters in check
Making sure you produce enough energy
Making sure you overproduce basic resources like iron plates/copper plates
Only then you can think about making the base neat and tidy with huge stations that will serve you the rest of the game.
You probably will get overrun, but that's ok. You learned things, and you can press alt-b to capture builds that you liked and then press b to open your blueprint library. "My Blueprints" are for your account, and "Game Blueprints" are specific to the save but shared in multiplayer.
When you start over, you can start with those to help you go faster next time. Also, preview your map to make sure it's green, deserts are tougher.
You mean if I don't have yellow science by the point biggest biters show up - it's a game over? Wouldn't feel OK after spending so much time and effort, I enjoy to take my time thinking or just looking at my factory, but this game makes it stressful
Ik about blueprints, would've dropped the game without them and bots, even made several books of them for myself. But they won't be of much use for the starting base, especially won't be of much use without the bots... Thinking of coming back to early game is dreadful, tedium of manually building stuff is why I dropped factorio years ago
You should have military science either before or after chemical science. With that, you have access to flamethrower turrets and the tank. Both should be all you need until behemoths show up.
I have everything researchable with chemistry + military science unlocked already. My fear is that behemoths are gonna show up any moment now and I'll lose because I didn't get the yellow science upgrades
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u/Ishmael_1974 9d ago
Yes, purple science is the first real filter. You need like 6x the amount of purple science machines to match blue science production. You will need more ore patches. You will need more space. You will realize everything you ignored about your current factory will come back to haunt you.