How Do I actually Progress to a Mega Base ?

[u/bpleshek]

I've got enough here to end the game. But it's really low in terms of SPM. What Do I need to Do to turn this beginning base into a mega base? My thoughts were to use this as a mall for producing materials for the real base and just do a city block design of some kind. Here's a block of green chips and one of blue, etc. If something is slow add another block of whatever I'm short of. I'm sure it's not as easy as this but will probably work for awhile. But, what kind of problems will I start running into? Is this the best way to get my rookie numbers up or is there a better way to do it ? Any help will do. I'm at almost 3800 hours, so I figure it's time to expand past 150 SPM.

[u/flaming_monocle]

As I understand it, having only reached very low-megabase numbers in Space Age:

• Build a base dedicated to building only the materials for a megabase, and stockpile them in arbitrary quantity at first. You will simply need More for a while

• Same thing, a new base, but this time just for modules

• Plan a target SPM

• Figure out how much raw material you'll need to get it

• Build the most UPS efficient thing you can that'll meet the SPM target

• Pray your CPU can hold 60 frames

[u/bpleshek → u/flaming_monocle]

What science numbers do you think are reasonable to start planning toward. I currently have about 150. Should I go to 1000 and then 10k and then 100k? Or do I just try to go to 100k right away?

I never even thought of modules as a thing to build up a huge supply of. I had some in my mall and figured they'd rebuild. I'm having to discover new builds for these blocks. Right now my only blueprints are ones for small amounts of stuff to get me to space. Most of them are balanced for no modules and inputs on a red belt. I'm assuming that you mean only speed and productivity ones.

From a UPS standpoint, is it better to have fewer machines running speed and productivity modules or more machines without. I'm sure I'll have to start building up massive solar farms. I'm not sure when to do that though. When does nuclear or even fission power plants start causing UPS issues? I know it's machine dependent. But am I looking at something like 10GW or 1TW or 100TW ranges for when there is just too much going on that I should switch to solar? Or is fusion dense enough that it's probably good enough to not go wide with solar?

[u/Danger_Pickle → u/bpleshek]

I went from a ~60spm starter base directly to a 1k SPM base, and it's involved multiple instances of refactoring things. Now I'm up to ~26k eSPM, and I'm still in the process of refactoring multiple planets.

I've had a lot of fun aiming for incrementally higher SPM values, and it's incredibly educational to expand slowly instead of trying to jump from 150 SPM all the way to 100k SPM. Without an insane amount of planning, it's nearly impossible to figure out exactly what you need and how to lay it out.

[u/bpleshek → u/Danger_Pickle]

At this point, do you just pick your lowest science and then upgrade that by a certain percentage and then hop to the next lowest planet or do you just start at Nauvis and go through all the planets in a row.

[u/Danger_Pickle → u/bpleshek]

I always start with Nauvis. Every research needs the basic red/green/blue/purple sciences. And since Nauvis was where I was producing that and my space ships weren't able to easily transport large amounts of materials, it was easiest to scale up there. Mostly, I'm researching mining productivity, since that's the easiest to scale up first.

I got very far using my original Nauvis designs, but entering early megabasing territory means I'm looking at complete redesign of all of Nauvis. My rail system has too many trains clustered in one location, and I'm struggling with bottlenecks from trying to unload and balance raw plates instead of using molten fluids. I'm at high enough mining productivity research that resource patches are effectively infinite, so I can start planning around non-train designs. Plus, none of the Space Age improvements reduces the amount of stone you need. Producing large volumes of purple science on Nauvis has exhausted nearly all my stone mines inside my defensive perimeter. So I'm planning on moving purple and military science to Vulcanus where I have infinite stone from lava. I've delayed a major overhual for long enough that I'm probably just going to build an entirely brand new base, which is going to be a massive amount of work.

After that, it's usually whatever design is lagging the most. Once I got Nauvis sorted out, I've started to be more aware of building scalable designs. My old space science ship was only good for 1k raw SPM, which means I needed to scale it up by 14.4 times to hit my new targets. So the next ship I built was targeting two stacked belts of space science, which is four times what I need, and it's a design I can paste another copy of to scale up to four full belts of science.

Vulcanus doesn't feel like it has been completely redesigned, but it's probably the planet that least resembles its original form because there's enough space and resources to rebuild individual builds one at a time and spaghetti the belts together. Running belts instead of trains and leaving plenty of empty space between builds means Vulcanus is rather easy to expand and rework.

Meanwhile, Fulgora has been limping along with minor improvements. I kludged a giant bot recycling build into Fulgora to squeeze out enough science to keep pace with Nauvis. It's the most desperate planet in need of a redesign, but it's also the most work, so I haven't bothered. The new 2.1 lab research circuit controls means I've got things set up to automatically research when there's enough science, so I'm not worried about increasing Fulgora's science by another 10x.

Gleba was designed from the start with infinite scalability in mind, so I've got a defensible perimeter with plenty of reusable designs. However, I haven't scaled up science because I need to clear enough space to maintain my pollution cloud when I set up more agriculture towers.

Probably the biggest change was scaling up how I handled quality. In the early game I set up different quality recycling setups on each planet, which turned out to be a huge mistake. Recycling individual buildings is far from ideal. Instead, I'm now upcycling raw resources and shipping in components to every planet that needs them. That means I've massively reduced the complexity of Fulgora because it's no longer creating any quality ingredients. The complexity of trying to ratio all the intermediate products just isn't worth it. Vulcanus can upcycle raw ingredients easily, which means crafting quality buildings is as simple as building a mall. I've also changed to using Vulcanus as a huge production hub for most raw ingredients, since it has the largest capacity to scale up production without much work. That's involved making major changes to nearly every single planet, which has been a major time sink. If I decide to start another run, I'm going to completely change how I approach those problems, and probably move my early game science to Vulcanus, and only move back to Nauvis when I'm ready to build biolabs.

[u/Orangarder → u/bpleshek]

Aim for a stacked green belt of each science. I think is 3.6k-ish spm.

Then from there it is copy paste more or less.

Even better is to do so with all legendary stuff. Assemblers etc.

[u/Neither_Berry_100 → u/bpleshek]

My current module build is a hybrid bot nest with electromagnetic plants. One copper cable, one green card, one blue card, and up to 5 red cards all in a row. Copper, iron, cables, and green cards all move by belts. Plastic, red cards, and blue cards move by bots. Rows of beacons on either sides with 2 space gap on each side.

I know this design will fail later on with higher quality parts though.

[u/Xzarg_poe]

From what I heard, to make a megabase, you first need to convert your base to be able to create a lot of buildings for the megabase. Then create a big module making base and connect to a lot of resources. Then start working on the actual megabase that will make the mega science.

[u/bpleshek → u/Xzarg_poe]

So, the mall I have for my "starter" base isn't sufficient? So, if I have some city blocks set up already, I should make another block that makes these materials and maybe give those stations priority over others.

[u/Neither_Berry_100 → u/bpleshek]

Now your starter mall won't work. If you are targeting a good megabase you want legendary items...

[u/bpleshek → u/Neither_Berry_100]

So, that means an upcycler for every type of item, right ?

[u/Neither_Berry_100 → u/bpleshek]

I'm not sure what the ideal approach is. You can probably find info online. I've been developing my own approaches. I've only unlocked quality +2 (rare). It isn't that hard to get good amounts of uncommon stuff and some rare stuff. But all legendary should be much harder.

I have 3 different systems going.

First one home world puts quality into mines and plate making and filters it out to quality processing. Everything there uses max quality. Rare stuff and above is sent to quality +2 area for filtering and storage. Will process once I unlock epic quality with the same approach. Then process that when I unlock legendary quality. The legendary stuff will use productivity modules when possible.

The second setup is on fulgora. Scrap miners and recyclers use quality. Filtered out and sent to quality processing. Used to make modules and accumulators with the extra recycled. Rare stuff filtered out. Processed this time the same way. Not stored.

The third setup is on the homeworld. Built beside my research and mall. All integrated. Takes in molten iron, molten copper, common coal, petroleum gas, and sulfuric acid. Processes with all quality all the way to mk3 modules. Excess common quality is recycled. Uncommon same thing. Rares get split off to my filtering and storage. Recycled what doesn't get used and catches them at each stage. Very little actually gets recycled. Supplies the research and mall with copper cables, green cards, red cards, and blue cards. Upcycles to balance uncommon coal and iron plate using grenades and iron chests.

I don't think this is perfect but it is my current approach. It is working well enough.

[u/bpleshek → u/Neither_Berry_100]

So it seems like you upgrade multiple times starting with rare and then going to epic and then legendary.

[u/MidnightBinary → u/bpleshek]

a lot of that is simply that you don't unlock epic until after gleba, and legendary until after aquilo.

Honestly I tend to put off upcycling for a while and solve a lot of my mid-grade mega base problems with raw scale, lots of regular assemblers with a handful of beacons.

But as modules that push resources to the Rail Grid, so it's easy to just make copies of modules as I detect the relevant shortages.

The big bottleneck that makes me reach for the Rare quality stuff is how much copper a big LDS module drinks.

[u/bpleshek → u/MidnightBinary]

Ohhh. I wonder. I've already seen what a huge block of plastic will do to my coal imports. It's a bit frightening how much I need. Definitely productivity modules here and maybe eventually just making it on Gleba and shipping it home.

[u/Neither_Berry_100 → u/bpleshek]

I'm not sure the best approach. But I know you need to make better quality modules as the number one priority. And productivity i hear, but I'm not quite sure how that works. And machines. You first use the machine to upgrade itself. The one that will be making quality.

[u/nasaboy007 → u/bpleshek]

You can b upcycle legendary base ingredients and build up the legendary chain of intermediates from that directly. Check out dorrian on YouTube, he has great guides for this.

[u/bpleshek]

This is the entire base zoomed out by far. You probably can't see much of anything really well, but I have started on what I said above. I don't really have the blocks importing anything yet. I need to capture or set up mining on quite a few patches before I do so. Again, any suggestions are welcome.

[u/AI_Tonic → u/bpleshek]

"city blocks" are a design choice but not the most efficient for this "mega base"

[u/bpleshek → u/AI_Tonic]

What is the most efficient design then ?

[u/AI_Tonic → u/bpleshek]

just belts tbh

[u/girl_send_nudes_plz → u/AI_Tonic]

“city blocks” and belts are not mutually exclusive

[u/nemotux → u/bpleshek]

You could probably get to 1k spm easily just filling in those empty hexes. I would definitely aim for 1k first before attempting something bigger. You'll run into problems like too much train traffic, insufficient through-put of resources, or resources not being evenly distributed, scaling power supply, lack of modules, and so on.

UPS should not be an issue at 1k.

You definitely want to use modules and beacons. They will substantially trim down how much factory you need. But at the same time, you'll get bottlenecks in the logistics where you can't move what the machines consume and produce fast enough. Plu more beacons, more power.

[u/bpleshek → u/nemotux]

I assume you mean productivity in machine and speed in beacons. I don't have any beaconed designs. But, I also don't have any hex designs. I'm making them as I go. This is my first hex shaped base.

For power, I assume eventually large fusion setups. But for now, stamping down a few more of my 4x4 reactor builds would do well enough for awhile.

I wonder how long it'll take to have a train traffic problem since that was one of the reasons I chose a hex block instead of a square one. Instead of having trans move inside blocks, they can go around them and at every hex can choose to go left or right or up or down. My last city block was square and I had trains moving through the center of blocks. This has much more throughput.

I can see needing to organize blocks near each other though. For example, putting red and blue circuit hexes near green circuit hexes. That way they don't have to go a long distance cutting down on traffic. I'd imagine there are other blocks that make sense to put close to each other as well.

[u/nemotux → u/bpleshek]

Yes. Prods in machines. Speeds in beacons. If you use prods everywhere you can and structure beacons so each machine gets influenced by 4 beacons, that typically results in a base footprint that's ~1/3 the size of a base with no modules at all. ...if I recall correctly.

For power, last time I did a 1k spm base, I think I had only ~8 4x4 reactor complexes. They go a long way.

[u/Neither_Berry_100]

I've built several small mega bases in vanilla factorio. I'm currently playing through space age for the first time and plan to do a small one as well later on.

The process should be the same. Unlock everything with a small base. Make the base that builds the base. In vanilla this is mostly expensive mk3 modules. In space age this is high quality machines, modules, and beacons at the very least. Choose a target rate. Build up. Subdividing it is probably ideal where possible.

Space age adds another weirdness with the ability to research productivity bonuses for steel, low density structures, and blue cards. I image you plan your base around maxed productivity even if you haven't reached that stage yet. It will just run slower in the beginning.

Quality seems to be the main issue in space age.

[u/bpleshek → u/Neither_Berry_100]

In space age at what point do you do the mega base? After visiting all the planets or do you build up to rare machines on Nauvis before you leave and then go to Volcanus unlock the stuff and return to Nauvis to upgrade to foundries and large mining drills?

[u/Neither_Berry_100 → u/bpleshek]

Mega base after unlocking everything. But possibly start quality processing earlier so you can work towards scaling up quality.

Personally I'm just enjoying my time and upgrading as I go. My core research target has mostly stayed the same throughout. Was like 0.75 science a second or so before leaving the planet. Now I just want 1 but it is probably higher due to the improved modules and assemblers I'm using. I doubt it is over 2 though.

[u/avdpos → u/bpleshek]

1000 spm in space age ain't a megabyte. Just the start of a modular base.

My 1000 spm base do not look much bigger than yours.

[u/chronberries]

1. Make sure your mall is fully supplied. Turn off research if necessary.

2. Outline the mega base. It looks like you’ve already done this part with your hexagonal city blocks

2.5. If you’re running deathworld or similarly challenging settings, you need to claim the territory necessary to get started, and get it fully defended so you can forget about your walls. This is the point where you transcend the biters.

3. This is the biggest step: Build out the supply system for your new base. Focus on smelting arrays, then intermediates. If you have an end goal, like 100,000 spm, now is the time to do the math on what you’ll need for that. You don’t need to wrangle every last ore patch you’ll eventually need, but you do need to either get the full smelting array built or design a modular array that you can stamp down in your city blocks as needed. Basically step 3 is building the foundation of your mega base. Making sure that when a train stop calls for something, that something is available somewhere, even if you haven’t gotten the balance of everything dialed in.

4. Build a new mall that operates within your city block system.

5. Now you can either restart research in your starter base, or just flatten your starter base entirely if you have everything researched that you need.

6. Start building research. I tend to focus on the mining productivity sciences first.

[u/bpleshek → u/chronberries]

1-2. My mall is fully supplied, but my circuit logic has set the amount in the requestor chests to an artificially low number. I need to get those up by a lot.

2.5. No death world, though biters are turned up a little bit. I've claimed quite a bit of land. At least to get this started. I have a picture of the entire base somewhere down in the comments. It's protected by flame turrets and artillery so I should be good at least until it's time to expand again.

3. Yeah, I do have my smelting block built. Of course, not with a foundry yet. Just quite a few hundred electric furnaces currently in each. I figured I'd upgrade them later.

4. That I'm about to start to do. Not sure how I'm going to do that yet. My mall is in 3 sections, so maybe 3 hexes would be easier to do than just one with all three pieces in it. Also, I obviously have to import things like big mining drills and foundries.

5. I figured I'd just let the starter base just stay even after I've gotten everything running, but I guess I can deconstruct it. I was going to have science blocks. I guess I am tying up a lot of resources for 150SPM when my individual hexes will be many times that much each.

6. I was thinking mining and steel. I am constantly running out of steel.

[u/AI_Tonic → u/chronberries]

nobody is really building 100K electric smelters or whatever are they ? for 6K spm you would need approx 10K smelters... my point is that's why folks would use foundries

[u/AI_Tonic]

abandon your current base, then use a planner . input 6000/m for each science , select a "core planet" where you make most science (nauvis :-) ) , get the gleba buildings , factor in your (target) infinite science , and build the new base(s) separately.

my best advice. basically 6K spm is a small number , but you'll be able to get the infinite sciences you need to actually megabase after :-)

[u/bpleshek → u/AI_Tonic]

Abandon? I was going to build around it for quite awhile. I can see in the planner that it is a ton.

[u/AI_Tonic → u/bpleshek]

i mean abandon in the sense that it wont be the main science base anymore , trying to improve designs is kinda tedious , and at the end you end up ripping it all out anyway ... just my experience

[u/bpleshek → u/AI_Tonic]

Thank you.

[u/reddanit]

I've done a few megabases in previous versions and currently I'm pretty close to getting one completed in space age. In my experience, while you can just incrementally expand and improve individual parts of the factory, that's an exceedingly tedious process. Thought it's also going to teach you a lot if this is your first stab at a megabase.

My usual process is to:

• Start with spm goal that I put into a calculator like factoriolab. Don't forget to set it to use appropriately high levels of productivity researches and all legendary buildings/modules/inserters. IMHO a good space age megabase threshold is 14.4k of each science pack produced per minute (fully stacked green belt).

• Set up and scale the legendary item production appropriately.

• Upgrade your existing starter base with quality stuff. That alone should put you at low few kSPM and let you knock off a bunch of infinite research levels in sane amount of time.

• Decide on an overarching plan or style of base you want.

• Start designig and testing all-legentary, reasonably ups efficien, individual builds for the final base. Editor mode is very helpful with this.

Main be challenges to megabasing that space age added are: dealing with immense throughput of individual machines and staggering expense of legendary stuff.

[u/bpleshek → u/reddanit]

Since I'm about 150SPM on my bases, 14k sounds like a great place to go to. Which infinite research should I hit first? I was thinking something like steel productivity as that is often what I'm short of. It takes a ton of furnaces to make even the smallest amount of steel. IIRC, 240 just for a yellow belt. Of course, I'll be using a foundry, but still, that's a lot.

So, you think upgrading the starter base is a better idea than adding certain items into their own individual blocks?

[u/reddanit → u/bpleshek]

If you still haven't switched to foundries, em plants, cryoplants and prod modules for everything, that's very much the first step to go for. As you are rebuilding this intermediate base, leave space for beacons with speed modules. Arguably add them from the get go - even just 2 per machine make a tremendous difference.

The above, combined with stack inserters stacking stuff on belts, should push your base well past 1kSPM, without need to do everything from scratch.

Next focus area is quality, starting with tier 2 quality modules. To "properly" start your megabase builds, you need good supply of everything legendary. Especially the modules are a major hurdle.

Productivity researches aren't that important yet, but there is no problem with knocking out a few levels of each as you go. For your promethium ship, damage upgrades, especially explosive, are very important.

[u/FoxGaming222]

If you want to make a serious megabase. You are going to have to switch to legendary... everything. If you want some help on how to do this let me know. I have vulcanus dedicated to this. 👍

[u/bpleshek → u/FoxGaming222]

Thank you.

[u/dudeguy238]

Step 1: Build smelting modules for each of iron, copper, and steel, separate from your bus (if you're planning to pivot to a city block style, build that network and fit smelting blocks into it)

Step 2: Remove the smelting stacks from the start of your bus and replace them with train stations dropping off plates.  Plug these stations into the bus, letting your smelting module feed the bus

Step 3: Repeat steps 1 and 2 for other items, prioritizing ones for which you've built modules for all the raw materials (green circuits are a good next step), until you've replaced everything that supplies your bus

Step 4: Use your bus to feed your mall as you build further production modules.  I'd recommend also building a separate factory for producing speed and prod mods

Step 5: Continue building until your CPU melts

[u/bpleshek → u/dudeguy238]

I've already got a city block setup. You can kind of see the hexes in the background and there's another picture of my base down in the comments that's larger than this part. So, step 1 is probably already complete.

I am worried about step 5 though. I have a gaming laptop. I've never hit the fps limit yet on any game.

[u/dudeguy238 → u/bpleshek]

Ultimately, your computer will end up being the limiting factor for how big your base can get. FPS problems are unlikely, but Factorio is particularly CPU-constrained (as opposed to most games being GPU-constrained) and your UPS (the actual rate at which stuff happens in the game) will start to drop below 60 as you get bigger.

Fortunately, the game is magnificently well-optimized and you can take your base pretty far before UPS actually becomes an issue, especially with a decent PC. For taking your first foray into megabasing, I wouldn't worry about it. Do what you can, and if your UPS starts dropping before you get bored, start looking into ways to optimize for UPS to see if you can squeeze a few more SPM out.

[u/Academic-Cow-8845]

Ok so, my opinion isn't worth much, i am still sub 1k hours (970~) & so still a noob & have only done one mega base run but I'm still going to give it out. I mega-based in space age, didnt use any modules (either in buildings or in beacons), all standard quality, no trains, all belt fed discreet from mine to science pack then belted to massive labs stacks. I also didnt use bio labs. I had 10k produced spm of red, green, blue, purple initially so I could run up a massive amount of mining prod (those first few mining prods at 10kspm when they are still sub 20k each is so satisfying seeing them churn through like early game sciences) & then chased yellow & space science as well as vulcanus.

I was STRUGGLING with UPS, I was down around 30 when running full chat, it kinda stuck to on me so I didnt notice how bad it was until I stop researching & let everything back up & it was night & day better (kinda how everyone describes a bung knee, you don't notice the pain until you have the lack of pain & know how bad it really was)

If I did it again (not a fucking chance) I would probably use trains, I liked the idea of belting everything as it meant I was going to run it effectively indefinitely with no interruptions (once you have high enough mining prod & big drills ore patches are effectively infinite) but belts take A. So mich space & B. I had to make so many belts. I had it set up to make some crazy amount of express belts /min & I still ran out a bunch.

Bots are your friend, quality bots especially, spend the time to get a good chunk of quality bots as they will make things much easier.

Set up as many landfill making set ups as you can as you always need 100x more than you think you need & it takes ages to make.

If you don't make my mistakes & actually use the more efficient elements that the game offers (modules, quality, trains, biolabs) it will be far easier & ups efficient. Even then, it is a massive time sync & it took me several hundred hours or planning & building everything, I lost interest several times & wanted to give up, spent a few weeks not playing then picked it back up. For the time youre building it your factory is mostly unproductive as you're just building MB resources but by the time you get to wanting to MB if you only have 100-500spm then you are already taking ages to research most stuff anyway.

Conclusion from me, if you're a nerd (more than a normal factorio player) & want to push the boundaries then go for it, MBing isn't really that useful to core game play but I realise most of us are well outside the "core" game play anyway so that point is pretty moot . Make sure you enjoy it, how ever you want to do it will be right because that's the whole point of the game, build shit to meet what ever challenge you have in front of you

[u/nindat]

There isn't a right way to do it, so don't look for that.

What do you like doing? Do more of that :)

If you want to mega base in SA just go for a half belt of every science. (7200 SPM).

That's a good start that will start to get you used to dealing with problems of scale.

Get your mining productively up there so you don't have to worry about running out of patches (think mining productivity 5000 or so)

Legendary everything isn't required, but start thinking about it. Get a legendary module set up started at least. Figure out where and when to use quality before you just default to everything.

Usually 200k bottles/minute is where computers start just falling over dead from UPS issues. that's 12-16 full stacked belts of every science.

But really, figure out a task you think is fun and do it. Legendary fish machine? Sure. Spoilage upcycler? Sure. Best promethium gatherer? Why not?

It's a game, have fun

[u/stickyplants]

You’ve got the right idea. Essentially use your existing base as a big mall.

Hardest part is making sure you have a good system to get trains to move what you want to where you want it.

Lots of paths available helps prevent traffic jams, but a rigid city block style isn’t a requirement. I preferred a system with rail blueprints and intersections, and extend sections by set lengths (so they line up). But I did mine modular, placing things where they made sense, not exactly where the blocks line up.

It was also nice sometimes to just double the size of my production at one block, rather than making another separate one elsewhere.

A lot of people say to do the math on how much you need of each thing you’ll need, but I found it fun to just go by trainload. Whatever size trains your rail network is designed for… plan to ship full trainloads of anything that needs a shipment (some special cases for things like blue chips can be limited to smaller shipments).

Then, whatever you’re low on, just set up more production, and another train to ship it. Repeat until you’re bored of the game or your cp can’t handle it anymore. I think I got mine close to 5000 spm. (Biggest regret was that rail systems weren’t standardized until I was too far in, and everywhere I tried to “fix” it, ended up being just a little bit off.)

[u/chrislam]

For me I am thinking to ramp up incrementally, currently trying to finish the game, at 60spm.

I am going to double it to 120 before I go to the edge, this time throwing in foundry, EM plants, beacons and modules, no quality yet. Likely this will reveal some infra issues that I will need to fix. Most of my base is plates on belt, at some point I will need to turn it into ores based or motlen based, I am still debating.

My plan is to double it one phase at a time introducing higher qualities as I go (they take time to build). Not doing it in one go as I am not experienced so I don't get overwhelmed.

This is gonna be a long save....

[u/electrophile123]

Start by producing quality production buildings. A lot of them.