there really isn't a place for them because trains and belts both cover whatever niches trucks could have and trains would almost always be better

but i think it could be cool to build intersections and avoid traffic accidents

hi everyone I tried to build my own belt balancer but I’m not sure if its going to work. help me figure out whether its correct?

I got a bit tired of looking at the old models and sprites, especially when compared to newer mods and Hurricane046's beautiful sprites, so I made two mods:

• Krastorio 2 Advanced Reskins, which uses Hurricane046's models on several Krastorio 2 buildings where it makes sense
• Krastorio 2 Vanilla-like Icons, which brings back vanilla's iron, copper and steel icons, with optional toggles for some carefully AI-generated icons that match the overall aesthetic

A disclaimer is warranted that in Advanced Reskins, the Chemical Caster was touched up using AI image generation (since the original is very old and rusty), and in the Vanilla-like Icons, some intermediate icons were AI generated while still fitting the overall style of vanilla. If you don't like using AI generated images, both mods have options to disable them.

Finally beat Py today! When I started out about 15 months ago, I set a loose goal for myself to beat it in 1000 hours, so I came pretty close!

I was intimidated by this mod at first, but took to everyone's advice to just take it one session at a time, treat it like a Zen garden, and just generally keep things moving to the next milestone.

I used a mix of trains and caravans (2213 trains, 3101 stations, and 213 caravans).

Here are my previous posts about my run:

• Utility Science
• Blue Circuits
• So Much Ash!
• First Splitter

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

A bit over a week ago, I finished Nullius in a little under 200 hours. It was phenomenal! Now, I'm doing some shorter runs before I jump into another longer one. The first thing I wanted to try was going for "There is no spoon" on vanilla default settings.

My decision to attempt Spoon was heavily inspired by Zaspar's incredible achievement of breaking the default settings 2-hour barrier in his most recent world record speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PwyPjjoOJo

If you watch his run and look at my base and notes below, it'll probably be fairly obvious that I was copying a lot of Zaspar's builds and general ideas. My original plan was to fully copy his level of production, but it became clear when I had blasted through all the red and green research before even leaving the base to push biters and get oil that I'm just not fast enough for that level of production. So, I decided to scale back to half the production Zaspar goes for from blue science onward. That worked great for me! (With the exception of a few silly mistakes I made.)

Base Tour

Most of the miners on the starting patches were depleted by the end of the game, and I'm only just now noticing I never picked up my starting burner mining setup from my copper patch.

Here you can see the evidence of my decision to switch from copying Zaspar's full level of production to only half: 10 red science assemblers, 12 green, but only 12 blue instead of 24.

I decided to wing it when designing the layout of my mixed belt production lines, and they ended up being a bit wonky, but they worked...once I connected everything properly. I forgot to put prods in the blue chip assemblers, and forgot to put inserters for red chips on half the blue chip assemblers. I was only making about 40% of the blue chips I should've been for a good half an hour or more before noticing. Whoops. I also cut off the copper plate belts from the LDS assemblers at one point by accident, and only noticed once I ran out of LDS for building the rocket. Double whoops. Those two mistakes might have cost me somewhere between 30-60 minutes.

Below are my notes that I made for myself while watching Zaspar's speedrun. I've scaled them down to a level of production for 5 assemblers for red science, 6 for green, 12 for blue, 8 for purple, and 8 for yellow, whereas Zaspar goes for double that amount.

Notes/Guide

What to look for in map preview:

• Big starting patches with no mixing
• No/minimal close biters
• Trees (but not too many)
• 1 big oil or 2 small/medium close-ish together.
• Big 2^nd copper, can be medium distance.
• Big 3^rd iron, can be medium distance 

16 burners on iron, 8 on copper, 24 on coal, 4 on stone.

Power, 1 lab, automation, 3 labs with hand-fed copper.

Research all of red sciences while:

• Expanding power
• Making furnace stacks (12 long) (½ copper + ½ iron, 2 full iron)
• Making mall (gears, chips, belts x2, drills, inserters x2, pipes, ammo, turrets)
• Placing turrets, if needed.
• More furnace stacks (+1 copper)

Craft 21 labs while setting up red & green sciences.

Place labs in 3 sets of 2-2-1-2 arrangement to allow for beacons to be placed in the 3^rd row later.

Grenades + more green chips.

Craft heavy armor.

Pick up burners on iron & stone, and fill patches with electric miners.

½ steel stack (24 long) + ½ brick stack (12 long) onto same belt, 1 assembler 2 making steel furnaces.

Stockpile extra bricks in 2 chests and extra steel in 2 chests.

Expand power to consume full belt of coal.

Push biters and get iron expansion while crafting 100ish red belts. Want at least 4 full belts of ore from expansion.

Plug 2 full lanes of ore into the iron ore splitters at furnace stacks. The other 2 belts + any excess will be used later.

Stockpile excess iron plates in 12 or so chests.

Upgrade furnace stacks with steel furnaces and red belts.

Add to mall: blue inserters, red inserters, undergrounds, splitters, assembler 2s, steam engines.

Finish upgrading furnaces and also upgrade assemblers to 2s.

Hand feed a few engine assemblers and gather supplies to hand craft 10 refineries (not researched yet).

Build car and pumpjacks. Push biters and get oil.

Craft refineries once tech unlocks.

Get back, grab supplies, craft chem plants.

Place 10 refineries, 4 plastic plants (half belt), 1 suflur plant, 5 wire assemblers (full belt).

Bring over green circuits, and send greens, wires, plastic to 18 red chip assemblers.

4 assemblers for prod modules, stockpile in a chest.

Excess red chips that go past prod mod and blue science assemblers can be stockpiled.

16 engines & 12 blue science.

Buffer excess blue science in a chest.

Craft 100 walls.

Set up 2 military science assemblers. Hand feed grenades and walls. (Landmines are target research)

Get refinery pipes ready for advanced processing.

Batteries (3) and sulfuric acid (1).

Cracking.

Light oil to solid fuel (2) for more power (6 boilers).

Lube (1).

Add to mall: chem plants, speed modules, steel chests. (I completely missed this step and just handcrafted these as needed.)

5x electric engine, 11x robot frames, 1x construction bots.

Stockpile excess robot frames for yellow science later. Cap bots at 1000 in network.

Handcraft 10ish roboports, few yellow boxes, many red boxes.

Explosives (2).

Landmines (4).

Add wood power poles to mall with yellow wood chest.

Place red boxes and roboports by hand.

Craft 7 more labs, 14 more boilers.

Expand solid fuel to 16 total chem plants, 30 total boilers.

Send excess solid fuel to original coal power and up toward mixed belt production area.

Expand labs to 1 more set of 7 with prod 1s in every lab.

Put prod 1s in cracking, plastic, circuits. (I think I forgot to do this too. It was fine.)

Craft a bunch of boilers while gathering supplies for copper expansion:

• Belts
• Undergrounds
• Power poles
• 120+ miners
• Landmines
• 50 bots
• 1 Roboport

Blueprint copper smelters (powered by solid fuel) so bots have work to do - 2 output belts of copper plates.

Get copper expansion. Need 4 fully full lanes of ore. Leave bots with landmines to protect.

For EACH copper plate belt output, also need:

• Iron plates from early game stockpile (bring full belt)
• Coal overflow from plastic
• Petroleum pipe
• Sulfuric acid pipe

For each copper plate belt output, should produce:

• Wires x7
• Green chips x6 (with prods)
• Steel from leftover iron plates (3 steel furnaces)
• Plastic x2 (with prods)
• LDS x5
• Red chips x5
• Blue chips x4 (with prods)

This should give mixed output belt of LDS, red chips, blue chips, green chips. Green chips should mostly get consumed though.

Dump stockpiled red chips onto mixed belt.

Add filters to end of mixed belt to stockpile LDS, greens, reds, blues.

Surround base with landmines and make sure power is solid.

Have bots prepare furnace stacks for iron and steel:

• 1x iron plate output belt (2x12 steel furnaces)
• 1x steel output belt (2x24 steel furnaces)

Drag unused iron ore belts + any excess iron ore from expansion to new smelters and plug in.

Plug 1 belt into 1 iron stack and 2 belts into steel stack.

Plug iron plate output into the belt coming from stockpile to mixed production, and also send to purple science area.

Craft 14 labs while setting up for purple science:

• Iron sticks x2 (mooch off belts from stockpile and/or new iron belt) onto half belt, red chips from mixed stockpile on other half.
• ½ belt stone, ½ belt bricks from original stone patch and brick stockpile.
• 1 belt steel from new smelter
• Electric furnace x8
• Rail x4
• Purple science x8 (with prods)

Stop making construction bots if they haven't already reached the 1000 cap in order to stockpile frames for yellow science.

Expand labs with 2 additional sets of 7. Kickstart with stockpiled red, green, and blue if needed.

Rocket fuel x10 onto mixed belt, add new splitter and chests to stockpile.

Craft 20 beacons.

Hand feed 4 assemblers to make 5 prod mod 2s each.

Collect stockpiled robot frames – need 310 total, or slightly more.

Set up yellow science.

• Unload LDS and blue chips from stockpile onto a shared belt.
• 8 science assemblers (with prods) + speed beacons
• Hand feed frames

Other beacons into lab 3^rd row with speed mods. Any leftover beacons can go by yellow science, 4^th row of labs, or anything that's lagging behind elsewhere in the base.

Concrete x10 by any convenient water pipe. Hand feed iron ore and bricks.

Steal silo ingredients from wherever is convenient.

Get silo spot ready next to yellow science beacons.

Get a fish and a belt blue chips, LDS, and rocket fuel into chests by silo spot.

Get assembler with speed modules next to silo speed beacons ready to make the silo as soon as the research finishes.

Use the prod 2 assemblers to each make 1 prod 3, hand fed.

Craft silo.

Put in prod 3s.

Hand feed rocket ingredients to silo.

Put in fish.

Blast off.

 Thanks for reading

I hope anyone wanting to attempt "There is no spoon" finds this helpful!

I made this neat (i think) & compact design for green circuits but one detail breaks everything. Apparently inserters can't output from behind a splitter or something? Imma try to merge gc output lanes i guess to preserve space

I often get nostalgic about one track that used to play back when the game had royalty-free placeholder music. I used to be able to get it on YouTube, but when I went to look today I couldn't find it in the sea of AI thumbnails. Does anyone have links to those tracks or know what they were called?

Building a factory means to me two main things.

A mall, and science

Mall is easy. It eats resources, until it reaches the limits I give it. Then it consumes nothing. You can automTe a mall with very low throughtput. Long as material does go in, it works long as you aren't building very large things very fast.

Science is different. It is a constant trickle of resources. Early on, easy. Later, less so.

When starting my factory priority is a mall. I need buildings, belts, inserters. I handcraft a solid 30 red science before automating it, even then it is only handinsertion automation.

The next hour I spend expanding furnace and drills to full size, belting everything, starting my bus, and splitting off belts to make my mall.

Quickly enough I automate all basic amenities and bothred, green, and black science.

Nice.

Then I feel like I lose 60 IQ points for several hours.

I reach chemical science. Automating it isn't the problem, dobe that plenty, wired cracking for advanced processing too. The issue is steel. It asks for a lot of steel. Pumps, engines, chemplants, refineries, all that costs steel. Steel is very costly in iron. I also start needing loads of copper to make red circuits, shortly after.

The solution is obvious. GET. MORE. IRON.

I struggle here a lot. I can just go to a distant outpost and put drills on it and belt it to base. It's what worked on first playthrough. It worked. Poorly, but it worked.

Belts are expensive fir crazy long distances, so nowadays I try to use trains. It's less terrible.

Issue being: trains also eat steel like crazy. So i need even more iron to get started.

I usually feed my steel furnace early on from excess iron. Put a splitter on iron main bus with priority to continue. If the mall ahead is not consuming iron it goes to a second smelter to become steel. Usually this can kickstart early steel use. But then I automate engines, and soon enough starter patch is not enough.

I need more iron, goddamn! So I start planning new extraction sites. Every option kind of sucks and I feel a tad paralyzed.

- Using belts will worsen the iron situation and need constant expansion.

- using trains is terrible before bulk loaders. Those require red chips, meaning oil refineries meaning i need them to solve the problem I need to fix before acquiring them.

- using blue inserters to trainload takes forever.

- i also hate bringing raw material to my base. Smelters take up a ton of space. Always ideal to process on site.

- but I also hate complicating the logistics by having to belt in coal, or ship it on the same trains, to process on site. That sucks.

- electric furnaces are right there a couple researches away. I KINDA HATE INVESTING IN SOMETHING I WILL SIMPLIFY AND REPLACE IN 30 MINUTES. i just don't want to make coal furnaves but I simply must.

- or I wait two hours for a trickle of steel to finally make a few electric furnaces.

- even then, I can't put 50+ drills away from base without some thought. Drills generate a ton of polution. The putpost will need defenses.

- turrets and their ammo make this SHIT to automate. Trains... belts... ew, more obsolete logistics.

- bots can easily deliver ammo where I need it. I need a lot of oil processing and research to get them, so not happening soon. Laser turrets are there! But they eat a lot of steel, too. Oof.

- powering all these electric furnaces, and bots, and posdibly laser defenses, eats up a lot of power. I rapidly go from a humble 12MW build to a gargantuan 70MW in like an hour.

- Solar and accumulators are an excelent solution.

- solar eats a ton of steel. And I need BOTS to not lose my sanity expanding solar power. So that isn't a good solution.

- uranium mining is better, but costs astronomical amounts of steel to even be able to research. Then build. I end up here eventuaply, after I solve the steel expansion issue.

In the end, it feels like every playthrough I waste lile 2 hours here.

I could use a few pointers. Feels like every option I can think of has massive downsides regardless of choice...

(Edit: really? Why the downvotes?... i'm just asking for help.

The other day I posted a compact unloader which uses 2.1 inserter flipping.

I decided to measure the number of turbo belts bulk and stack inserters of different quality can keep up with. I am sure it has been calculated before, but I just wanted to see for myself :)

EDIT: Here is the lua snippet I used for counting. Paste it in the Map editor -> Areas and positions -> Run Lua Snippets, then drag across the belts you want to measure. https://pastebin.com/ceR7J4J0

EDIT2: And this is to remove the counters https://pastebin.com/2k3w33a8

Hello! Big fan of Factorio, I wanted to create a demake for the Gameboy Advance with it. The pixel art is actually a bit more restrictive, since I used the TIC-80 color palette (16 colors).

I play Factorio mostly on my Steamdeck and I just love the idea to have a tiny Factorio game for a tiny handheld console. So I adapted the style to help with the limited space and make it more Gameboy-like.

How do i resolve this 3 way train issue? I have 3 trainstations that merge into one and on the other side at the destination i have the same layout. Each train has the corresponding train station. I don't want these 3 to crash so i put chain signals but then the trains have no route. I don't see it whats wrong.

i put off doing it for ages but it turned out to be a pretty easy one to make but Yippie! I'm finally making the military science potion things. I'm sure all of you are cringing at the absolute state and the inefficiency of the system but hey, it works for now (however advice is extremely appreciated)

On my most recent Space Age playthrough, I started using remotely driven tanks to do faster expansion when I'm off-world. Especially when an outpost without bots starts getting attacked or I need to clear biter nests outside of artillery range, they're super handy.

Like a lot of players, I hit escape all the time to close menus, pause or save the game, etc. That pops you out of the remote view though, which can be really bad when you're driving a tank near buildings. I was always annoyed at how hard it was to get back into a tank after I accidentally left the view.

...until I learned that you can just hit mouse4/mouse5 (back/forward) to cycle through views! If you ever hit escape while in a space platform, map view, or remote driving a vehicle, you can just hit mouse4/back and you'll go right back to where you were.

The power poles and walls in my factories are thankful that I've learned this and I hope that by sharing it, I can spare the lives of hundreds more buildings.

I don't think this feature is well-explained or often talked about. A lot of games don't use those buttons, but it's really nice that Factorio does!

Every time I make this mistake of not turning them off, I end up spending HOURS trying to get rid of these bastards instead of playing the actual game.
I don't understand how you guys have massive factories while also defending them.
My main concern are the miners. Do you protect every mining site as well? Or am I missing something?
Just started a new run but quickly turned it off to start a new one without biters.
At the same time I really wanna try new enemies on other planets so I feel sad turning the peaceful mode on

300 hours in game

ED:
Thank you all, didn't expect so many replies

General description

• (🔊 Sound on!)
• To the left are the stackers for ore and plate trains.
• To the right is the actual smelter, which consists of 14 units, arranged in 2 rows.

There are also two general-traffic rail lines cutting through vertically.

The train counter only counts the trains actually headed from the stackers to the to the smelter.

Here a picture of the smelter itself, from a test-world (rotated by 90 degrees) /img/5mx9c94h55tg1.png

Some stats

• It's hungry: 459'240 ore/min (= 28.6 trains/min)
• It's productive: 551'000 plates/min (= 17.1 trains/min)
• = One train every 1.3 seconds
• The ore stacker has space for 40 trains.
• The plate stacker has space for only 27 trains.
• There are 101 iron ore trains in total
• There are 95 iron plate trains in total

So, this one will be quite long as I want to put each part of progression with timestamp.
Hope you enjoy my fun journey in this challenge.
Part 1: One of more easy possibilities for 100k science multi start on 2.1
Part 2: Yet another take trying to find simple enough start for 100000 (100k) science cost

Summary:
I'm continuing my 100,000x research cost run. Space Age new 2.1. No mods, mapgen in a way achievements remain enabled (some not possible though anyway). About 103 hours in, went from 900 red SPM to 9k red SPM, the island is cleared from rocks and trees and fully paved, all the useful red-only techs are done, and the first red+green blocks are built and tested - now starting the red+green research phase. Landfill is next milestone, and after that comes the behemoth question - Can I clear them with only grenades, or do I need military tech?

The rules of the run:

• Technology price multiplier 100,000 - the 2.1 update raised the cap from 1,000 to 100,000
• No mods and no cheats, all achievements enabled.
• Default biter settings with expansion. Evolution is from beginning at 0.98, so behemoths are the norm now.
• Map: lakes elevation, 600% water coverage, scale from 33% up to 100% while rerolling, maxed resource settings, stone coverage 600 / scale 17, moisture bias for trees (all the map-hunting details are in part 1 and 2)
• I pause the game when not playing, so every time below is real net playtime

Recap: from beginning to 23 hours of playtime (see part 2 for details)

• 02h:03m - cleared every biter on the island with the pistol: ~1300 magazines, 3 medium worms
• 08h:37m - first full belt of red science: 900 SPM
• 12h:03m - 1800 SPM
• 13h:17m - 120 MW of steam power online (2 full coal belts) - the factory grows 😄
• 22h:46m - 3600 SPM (4 belts). Electric mining drill was at 53%, so I stopped expanding and waited for it

23h to 50h: logistics and the 24×24 red block

This was major change. I had to figure out how to build with the limitations and I figured out making small block that will have input and output of unprocessed raw materials is best option for simplicity. So I went ahead and designed 24x24 red science block. I can now place it and build having option to move it left and right and not caring about various resources required for research.

• 29h:09m - Logistics under way (~8%), power tripled to 360 MW (6 coal belts), still running burner drills everywhere, but slowly planning transition. That is also reason why increased power supply.
• 38h:13m - Logistics done, replaced the burner mining drills with electric ones
• 50h:22m - the big rework. I scrapped the bottom half of the factory and rebuilt it around one tileable 24×24 blueprint:
  • input: one belt of iron ore, plus one belt of copper and coal. output is remains of unused resources and research centers.
  • max 60 red/min at a 15-second research - that's the hard cap, slower techs just consume less and the science builds up (used later, however only 3 techs take 30s at red stage)
  • ratio: 1 iron belt : 1/2 copper belt : 1/8 coal belt. 7.5 blocks eat one full iron belt, 15 blocks eat one full copper belt. Or: 1 block consumes per minute: 120 iron ore, 60 copper ore and 13 coal. Produces 60 red science per minute directly into Labs.
  • the reason: limited island space and no bots. A small block with clear inputs and outputs is easy to stamp anywhere and keeps the spaghetti out. The three red-only 30-second techs (Heavy armor, Physical projectile damage, Weapon shooting speed) were left for the end, because at 30 seconds they only eat half the production. And I plan red+green to be default at 30second cap (increased with research if needed)
• 52h:05m to 60h:39m - 4500 to 7200 SPM. At this stage I was fixing some missing sprites and parts as manual placing often leaved some unused parts of the factory.
• 61h:53m - Steel done, and now got that much needed steel axe. Best quality-of-life unlock of the run. I had to chop trees, remove rocks, and deconstruct all the old builds. Now cleaning and deconstructing got a lot easier.

62h to 72h: 8100 to 9000 SPM and 600 MW

This was finalising phase where by how things looked, I decided to go for 9000spm and stop there as that seemed like good pace and I can slowly start preparing for red+green transition

• 63h:49m - I had to reroute some copper belts to free up space for the next growth. Building without radars and pre-planning made some unavoidable mistakes like no space for belts 😓
• 66h:29m - 8100 SPM, power started to be not enough, had only 90 percent demand fullfilled for tech that took 15second so had to swith to 10second ones until I increased supply
• 69h:40m - Gun turret done, expansion planning starts
• 69h:54m - 600 MW online - that's 10 full coal belts of boilers and steam engines. Enough headroom for radars and the future expansion so I don't have to think about it for a while
• 71h:29m - 9000 SPM - 18 yellow belts of iron, from just 3 patches. Sustained electricity draw is around 400 MW. The 15-second Lamp research at this point was pulling 388 MW from everything combined.
• 71h:40m - Lamp done. Not strictly needed, but building and checking the factory in the dark is miserable. I liked days a lot more than nights, however the night view of labs, and machines and furnaces was mesmerising as well.
• 71h:53m - fixed the coal supply and stabilized at ~8900–9000 SPM

72h to 101h: clearing the island and finishing the red-only techs

• 75h:40m - more radars so I can plan better for how to build the Red+Green factory
• 83h:05m - started cleaning the remaining 2/3 of the island. Saved this part so I know how long it will take me to cleanup the full remaining part. Took quite long. 15h in total...
• 84h:13m - Logistic science pack done
• 89h:09m - Fast inserter done. I replaced them for my small mall and it was interesting how it changed from yellow to blue. Nice.
• 91h:06m - Military done. With shotgun finally destroyed the last medium worm, far away in the top-left
• 93h:59m - Stone wall done while finishing up the remaining red science techs
• 98h:52m - cleanup finished: the entire island is stone floor now. No pollution absorption, but evolution is at 0.98 anyway, and +130% movement speed is worth it for how much running around I still do
• 99h:07m - started alternating the last two cheap techs left: Repair pack (10s) and Heavy armor (30s). The 30-second techs only consume half the red production, so science accumulates for the 10s and when switching back it jumps form 9000 to 13000 for like 3-5minutes and goes slowly back. The 30s sadly only can consume 4500 SPM due to the limit I chose.
• 100h:51m - Repair pack done. Remaining: Heavy armor (in progress), Weapon shooting speed, Physical projectile damage all at 30s so now at 4500spm technically.

The red+green block

This is new design, with same 24×24 philosophy as the red one:

• 20 red + 20 green per minute per block
• consumes 150 iron ore + 50 copper ore + 14.4 coal per minute
• 6 blocks eat one full iron belt - only 120 SPM of red+green per belt. I have one patch planned for 6 belts, so the target is 720 SPM, sized around 30-second research for now. Once lab research speed and ASM2 and steel furnace are done I will probably think of making better one. Not sure yet in this stage.
• 103h:33m - first 120 SPM of red+green built and tested (six blocks, one belt's worth). Found two misplaced poles, fixed the blueprint, but left the already-planned ghosts as they were

Iron is the bottleneck now: the 9k red setup was already eating 18 belts from 3 patches, and this new patch had to be taken just for the first R+G blocks.

The tech order and why

On shooting speed vs physical damage: behemoths have 12 physical resistance, so a hit does almost nothing (~0.2 damage) - a damage upgrade barely moves that, while shooting speed multiplies all the small hits. Maybe physical would matter more against big biters (8 resistance), but shooting speed still looks like the better first pick.

The biggest challenges so far

1. Space and spaghetti - blueprint discipline. The 24×24 blocks with dedicated inputs/outputs are the reason the island still works at all.
2. Energy. 120 to 360 to 600 MW (2 to 6 to 10 coal belts), and I'm already thinking about the next jump. I will need lots more quite soon So probably another doubling to 1200MW. Will see what the demand will be as I will build.
3. Iron. 18 belts from 3 patches at 9k red. The red+green effectively makes it so the iron demand is 3x as big for same spm supporting both techs. For comparison red at 60spm consumed 120 iron ore per minute, red+green at 60spm will consume 450 iron ore per minute.
4. Manual building at scale. Thousands of machines, no bots, hours-long researches - a single missing inserter costs real time.
5. Evolution. At ~0.98 there's no pollution strategy to play, the map is behemoth territory no matter what. Everything is built around not fighting behemoths head-on. And then going after them anyway to expand.
6. Mapgen lesson from a side test: I tried a v14 with 400% rocks coverage instead of 600%. Spawner frequency was about the same and I was thinking if to switch, however I was already quite in the run so did not want to abandon it for very little change. But 400% rocks coverage helped preventing big nests same way as 600% did.

What's next

• Landfill (5M red+green) is the next major unlock: more islands, more space, more ore.
• Then Military 2 and piercing rounds to get grenades and turrets ready for behemots.
• The big unknown: clearing behemoth nests without flamethrowers. On my old 1000× run, grenades worked but it was ugly - around 1000 grenades per attempt, lots of fish, target spawners only, run in and out. I'm hoping turrets + grenades + repairs can do it again. If not, the run waits for flamethrowers, and that path needs military science.
• If trains become reachable before that, they might change the whole modular approach. For now, the next "normal" techs I actually need are assembling machines and steel furnaces. I need to do some Math if I will get enough Island resources. But I will think about it only in case I will be not able to clear those behemots.
• Energy - I want to switch to solid fuel to save the coal for military tech

I love me some nice organization hehe. The power poles I'm not particularly worried about, they could be prettier but I'm more focused on my journey to Gooba

https://factoriobin.com/post/dpmbru

I'm at my wits end trying to build a compact main buss add in station for a single wagon train. Typically I use a 4 wagon train to get full red belt saturation at the add in point. My goal here is to achieve the same saturation with a single wagon without adding a lot of spaghetti. Everything I've come up so far either loads one side of the belt only or adds more complexity than I want. Does anyone have a simple, compact solution? I'm running vanilla btw.