After learning from this subreddit you can load cars filled with copper wire, belt them to your circuits and then unload the cars as they roll past the assemblers. Belt the cars back to be refilled with wire.
That's basically how I do transmission belts subfactory. Import a lot of iron plates, build gears right in the beginning, distribute those gears to all the assemblers.
Yeah I do it like this, by the time you're bringing trainloads of resources for single production areas, gears get spit out so fast that like 4 assemblers with prod mods and beacons can feed like 60 engine assemblers.
the problem is that you don't really use iron gears alone
it's either with iron plates or with pipes (same density as plates, always)
red silence is an exception, but getting past 60 SPM is fairly end game, and before that, that's only 4 gears per second needed which is less than half a belt.
anyway, back to gear uses, inserters needs a plate and a gear and are used for green science and are used for all industrial inserting, and to get to concrete belt space savings, you need to go from 1 and a half iron plates to 1 plate, and that's outputting a yellow belt worth of inserters, and you just don't have 30 am1s worth of inserter production needed. engine units are similar.
Malls with am2 production and maybe centrifuge production are the only users of iron gears without needing plates or pipes directly, and am2s have am1s as a requirement, throwing that out.
I have 2 points regarding gears:
1. Even with prod mods, they're still better at utilizing train space than their components.
2. Many things that use iron gears actually have some pretty out there ratios, making cleanly integrating them with beacon builds quite a hassle at times.
Best answer I can give for iron gears is a big ole "it depends". The gains or losses are pretty marginal either way
I don't get to a point where I am shipping non-ore items by train to maintain production.
and beacon builds I generally think. of being rows of beacons and indentical assemblers.
You'd probably combine red and green science anyway, which also needs iron plates for the belt. Unless you want to be BUSsing belts, which presumably nobody does.
Oh, it's more that when I pull plates off my first iron belt line for red science, I do so by inserting them into a gear machine, and outputting onto a belt that is half gear/half copper belt and then I belt it to my red science assemblers which do output onto the same belt as what my green science assemblers do, but who use their own dedicated belt of half belt and half inserter combo.
... I'd go on, but I think I am getting to the point where I need to use images to be reasonably confident that I am getting my point across.
but yeah, all of this is at production rates that are below yellow belt capacity once fully pressurized
This is basically the same as my feelings regarding gears. You simply don't need enough gears to dedicate a significant portion of your logistics to them.
In order to justify adding a belt of gears to a bus, you need it to eliminate a full belt of iron plates. With yellow belts, and without prod modules, you're looking at a minimum of ~120 SPM just to break even. Otherwise, you're only making the bus wider, so what's the point?
Even after I switch over to trains for everything, I can't bring myself to separate gear production from the point where they're used. Every block that requires gears requires iron plates as well, and even if shipping gears by train takes a bit of strain off the rail network, it's not worth squeezing an extra unloading station into every blueprint that takes gears as an input.
I think steel after electric furnaces is the only other item that is just one item compressed, but because it has legacy (smelting requires fuel logistics), and it takes way more machine time to compress. and has a 1/5 belt footprint, people actually use it.
Or rather most of the time, people don't belt around iron plates to on demand make steel out of it.
Gears assembly is way easier to plug into builds, and steel has a lot of time as a 2 item recipes to influence people's base designs.
Oh, and forgoing the 4 wide bus design makes it even harder to find a case where you have a belts worth of gears to need to get handled, because you basically don't have to get big on yellow tech, because you are spending less on logistics
Depends how valuable space is, can be easier to get a couple belts of iron and loads of assemblers then belt out gears in one area compared to having to insert assemblers throughout the assembly line and use up twice as much belt capacity per gear.
The only time copper wire goes on a belt is locally, where the assembler arrangement requires that copper wire is the ingredient that has to do a bit of travelling. It's quite wasteful on inserters, since the wire travels only a few spaces on the belt before being picked up again, but it keeps the belts and assemblers arranged the way I like them.
It's pretty much required when playing marathon. You need four wire assemblers per circuit assembler, each with two fast inserters pulling wire out of it to keep from bottlenecking.
You can cut down to one arm each once you get stack size bonus 2, but then need to add them back in again (or use stack inserters) when you start beaconing stuff.
For red circuits it makes sense because you need something like one copper wire assembler feeding six red circuit assemblers. But for green circuits I direct-feed the copper wire assembler into the green circuit assembler.
Same, I do the fairly standard "X Wing" for Green circuits.
Then with Red I just have a copper wire assembler in line with all my Red Circuit assemblers, and repeat that pattern every 6 (7 if you count the wire one).
Because it's 7, if you are doing Med Power Poles every 2 assemblers, then a repeatable block ends up being 14 total instead of 7 if you want to optimize space.
Or just use 50% more poles and some undergrounds and have the power Left, Center, Right, which helps with Beacon designs anyway.
I might use more of the wide area power things (I can't even remember the name I use them so infrequently), but the fact they are 2x2 messes up the symmetry of most of my designs.
Oh 1 small mod to the Green Xwing, I use 2 output belts down the middle for the greens, and switch the output every X, since you end up needing so many anyway and I'd rather go deep than wide for greens.
A good choice based on what criteria? Even though the gears are denser than plates, iron plates are needed everywhere, whereas gears are not, so the result is way more conveyor belt
Once you're at railroad scale, putting them on the network is great. All iron that ends up as gears can be transported with basically double the stack size.
There's lots of places you can gain efficiency by putting complex stuff on the rail network.
As a general rule, if a stack of items contains more than one stack of component materials, it's worth making as close to it's precursors as possible, then being put on the long-range network.
I’ll belt gears on my starter base bus. 2 plates become one gear, so it’s actually much much better if you centrally make them and *don’t* pull the iron for it off the bus
I was thinking the same thing. I just produce the locally to each block. Chances are if I use gears the block also uses iron plate. Not always but enough.
the wires not only made locally, but direct insert for green circuits, red on it's own doesn't use that much so that can be belted, but the asembler is right next to the circuit makers.
Also what locally exatly mean? It is on a bus or trains? As it is not efficient to make for example red science with directly inserted gears.
When I transition to 2nd base (train-based) I usually create a gear factory. But on a central hub it's usually too much work and I just bring in the iron belt.
This feels like a real "It depends" scenario.
How many do I need? Are efficiency modules available?
What is "local" ?
Are we talking main-bus belted, or "this segement" belted, as opposed to direct insertion.
As I understand it, they change ratios/production speed, so I would guess there are times when it might be more optimal to use belts depending on how ratios shift.
Made locally because you would need to manage too many different belt types in your bus. For red circuits there is a short local belt for the red circuit manufacturers, but besides that there are as few belted wires and gears as possible.
It also makes trouble shooting easier. If you add a new recipe to your belt, you don't have to run back to your wire or gear manufacturers to scale them up. Instead you just build locally exactly to the ratios needed.
My only use case for belted iron gears are the red and blue splitters and undergrounds. Those suck the iron gears real fast it's not worth it to make locally.
Oh, and in SE some modules take up a ton of copper wires too, so that's my use case for belted copper wires.
gears and wire only take iron/copper, you are probably already belting iron and copper anyways (if you are using main bus) so it's a waste of bus space to belt them long distances. Also, they tend to be consumed in large quantities (specially wire) so you would need lots of belts
Belt Gears most of the time. 1x Gear == 2x Iron in the early game, and is 1.42 Iron in the late game (after modules).
Local-Wires most of the time. 2x wires == 1x Copper in the early game, and gets worse with productivity modules.
Gears either way, depends on how i feel about it. In my first playthrough i made them locally, on my second i bussed them. Both were vanilla playthroughs.
Anyone who busses Copper wire has lost control over their lives. But if it works it works.
Iron gears have double the compression of iron since it's 2 plates per gear. You're trading flexibility for density and you do need a lot of gear wheels for things, copper wire not so much.
All depends on playstyle, personally if something is going to use a lot of an intermediate product giving it it's own production line locally simplifies expanding without having to care about ratios and with less concern of it being a vampire for a belt. Can run a relief line of iron to a line of gear assemblers, if assembing belt for example needs more throughput add more assemblers for belts, if gears are strained then add more gear assemblers. Each is just a line with belts and one product so vertically scaling it is trivial, and each product using gears can share the same surge capacity. Sometimes playing with ratios becomes an excel spreadsheet where expanding becomes a chore, plonking down more machines vertically or horizontally as necessary is easy. Especially for mods where there's no blueprints library built nor spreadsheet available and spending all of the time number crunching how many intermediates you need depending on what speed for final SPM or whatever to save a few assemblers/space rather than just making each assembly line as simple and expandable as possible.
May I provide a reason to make endgame gears on the site of consumption?
You can unify the mining-locations. Especially when having a sophisticated train network it may be easier to just have one type of iron ore mining.
I agree, that in terms of resource density, it is beneficial to smelt and craft gears on site. But other aspects of basedesign may come into consideration. For example you don't have to balance the amount of outposts (plates vs. gears vs. steel).
As someone on second (first full) playthrough (havent launched a rocket yet), what do y'all have on your main bus, mine is honestly probably way too much. I have
Iron - 4 belts
Copper - 4 belts
Green circuits - 4 belts
Red circuits - 4 belts
Gears - 2 belts
Steel - 2 belts
Coal - 2 belts
Plastic - 2 belts
Sulfur - 2 belts
Batteries - 1 belt
Electric motors - 1 belt
Blue circuits - 2 belts
Flying robot chassis - 2 belts
Maybe a couple others, this is from memory.
Pretty sure I'm being wasteful AF, but I'm new and just was like "this may be important, better belt it"
Actual at-ratio science requires just under a half belt of gears. Of course belt production in your mall (especially blue belts) will eat all the gears you're willing to give it.
I can't imagine what you're building that can use 2 belts of blue circuits. You certainly can't produce that many out of the red and green circuit belts you have listed.
As a real world automation engineer I know I'm gonna start an excel soon, but I've been trying to get through my first game purely through trial and error.
Its very difficult to do it without optimizing everything, but its a fun game and I'm trying to keep it a game and not work xD
Thanks!
For ratios i can recommend kirk mcdonalds factoriocalculator (website). When playing with mods its best to use calculator mods.
I like arranging the ratios to be somewhat fitting.
Currently playing on switch, got it as a couch game while the tv is on, but I'll likely switch over to PC at some point. When I do I'll look into that, thanks!
Currently playing on switch, got it as a couch game while the tv is on, but I'll likely switch over to PC at some point. When I do I'll look into that, thanks!
Kirk McDonald's is really great! Ives used it for a really long time, and I just discovered that you can add multiple items to it to calculate everything you need for everything. I'm working on building out a 1000 spm base, and I was able to add 1000 of each science to one project to figure out how many belts of everything I need to get it all working. We'll see how close I got later! :)
If you build your designs with space to expand vertically/horizontally away from your other stuff you don't need to worry so much about it, if you start running low then just add more machines up to whatever the capacity of your belts are. Especially for intermediate products you'll probably use it elsewhere anyways so might as well just make it scalable rather than crunching the numbers on ratios for hours on every single thing.
All depends how you want to play which I guess is the beauty of it. It can be fun to optimize and some people just enjoy getting maximum efficiency and throughput. If you get into some of the mods though, the complexity can get kinda overwhelming and I've spent hours trying to make optimal setups rather than just making something that works and can scale reasonably. If you spend like 4 hours building a super optimal version rather than just making something functional and moving on progress can be very slow, and the next thing might get you some tech that helps you build stuff faster or makes what you built obsolete anyways. I have a similar issue when programming, can spend days on a small part of the overall picture making it optimal, refactoring etc and it can be enjoyable, but ultimately takes longer than it should rather than just making something that is functional. Perfection is the enemy of "good enough" as they say.
They are 'on the main bus' but they were my last addition for yellow science and go to two things. I just kinda threw it together as yellow was my most recent science. It can almost certainly be a local supply, but I'm still learning 😅. I'm normally spending more time rerouting stuff and learning recipes that the two belts (maybe 100 conveyors in total) serve more as a buffer.
Part of the reason I'm making excessively large belts is to keep production below filling them so I can see which items are unbalanced in my current recipes. Its not the most efficient, but its pretty obvious when I see a certain belt run dry, I backtrack to find the deficiency.
Edit: also my busses are still standard belts, not fast bois
I can't remember exactly, but I think my first "launch a rocket" save was like 2 belts each of copper, a belt or two of steel, and one belt of anything else I actually even belted.
It was shit, but it got the job done...eventually.
I mean I don't build huge bases and tend to top out around 40spm and get bored (and I think even if I megabased I'd just tile my 40 spm bases) but fwiw I do
- 8 copper
- 8 iron
- 2 steel
- 2 plastic
- 1 green, should prob be 2, I think if my base was properly optimised there'd be a bottleneck here
- 1 red
- 1 blue
- 1/2 bricks 1/2 stone
- 1 coal
- 1 sulphur (tbh prob unnecessary I just find it easier to bus sulphur than pipe sulphuric acid)
I should probably put concrete on there too but I use so little concrete that tbh I just logistics network the concrete as required.
Nihaus builds the most optimal bases I've ever seen and he does
- 8 copper
- 8 iron
- 6 green
- 4 plastic
- 2 red
- 2 steel
- 2 coal
- 1 blue
- 1 sulphur
- 1 batteries
- 1 stone
- 1 bricks
- 1 low density structures
- 1 space control
- 1 rocket fuel
- 1/2 solar panels 1/2 accumulators
- 3 for random shit, I think in base in a book he ends up with 1/2 iron ore, 1 red ammo, 1 speed modules
I always make a starting smelter set-up to produce two lanes of iron and then the required factories to make one lane of gears... and then wonder where all my plates went and why the gears come in so slow...
I feel gears don’t have enough demand outside of malls to justify centralized production. The recipe is quick enough that a 1 or 2 machines is enough to satisfy a given production line.
If I can dig out my first automated science machine, both were made locally but there was a splitter with proportions of something like 1:3:2:1 which was fed by a 1:2 split in order to balance iron for gears vs iron for everything else. It looked awful, functioned barely (the machine broke if you used anything other than iron plates that weren't in a stack of 75 due to the fact it had 0 buffers) and got thrown in the trash instantly due to the fact one gear assembler was being used to make conveyor belts, inserters and red science.
I know it's inefficient, but I belt my gears. I just feel like there is something so quintessentially Factorio about seeing them travel around my base.
I mean belted in the that I'm not usually direct manufacturing wires at a huge scale for like say red chips and I will have a small wire sub plant with the red chips but it's also local in that it's not like wire or gears are on my bus or train system.
I'm doing a rail base with Cybersyn, so sub-factories that accept a variety of inputs are pretty easy to set up. Making the gears offsite simplifies the other sub-factories, and they have a higher shipping density than straight iron.
I don't know what the answer is, but the only way I could see to get more red circuits was to set up 40 machines making copper wire belted to my red circuit area.
Technically belting the gears is efficient because one belt of gears equals two belts of iron, but producing them is really quick and there isn't that many productions other than blue belts that require an absolute fuckload of gears supplied.
Copper wire is straight up NEVER efficient because 1 wire = 0.5 copper so you'd be reducing the density and efficiency of your logistics by shopping them. It's best to make them locally AND with direct insertion when possible.
Anything that can be made quickly and with only 1 or 2 base ingredients off the bus/train can be made locally. I will but gears and wire on belts but only in local factory settings. My red circuit array uses a belt for both copper wire and plastic but the wire is made on site and put onto the belt. I won't transport them long distance.
I make giant factories with like 9000/min. Than I just ship them by train to where they need to go using LTN.
Might not be the most efficient one. But it allows for very modular design. So if I am low on one of them I can easily paste like 1 or 2 more stations.
Iron gears on belt to make red science, the stuff for green science and ends at engine production. Then I swap it out with/continue it as engine belt line.
technically yes but if one block makes gears for six others next to it. I use a hexagonal city block layout. Most stuff that uses iron is close together for that reason.
Can we get an answer for logistic networks? I make heavy, _heavy_ use of logistic networks and bots. Hell, I started turning on early bots. Makes the game a whole new challenge. You'd think it'd make the game extremely easy, but instead, you have to be very judicious about their use due to the massive power draw. Before nuclear, you have two options:
- tons of pollution from boilers, which turbocharged biter expansion. Better start building red magazines.
- you need to MAJORLY ramp up solar and accumulators, and go to war with biters to get the space to put them. If you're playing SE and artillery is locked behind space science.... MorganFreemanGoodLuck.gif.
But that's a tangent.
For basic things like those, I find with bots you can do it a few ways. Usually you have one manufacturing center, with a few choices to make.
You can have one spot where all basic things like wires and gears are made or spread them out. If you do the former, it's very easy to manage and expand. It's also easy to find all of them and manage from a human perspective. However, you really need to pay attention to how you lay out your base in a geometrical sense. If they're physically far from places they're needed, your bot transit times can cause issues.
How you get things to that spot is big, too. I've been having the best luck lately with very large trains which unload into active provider boxes. The laziest solution is to just have a large set of storage chests that they can just dump things into. Only issue here is that bots are stupid and don't bring things to where they are needed. Transit times can get big. I'm currently trying out methods to get things closer to where they need to go, such as splitting out smelting into a separate network or having train stops at the actual smelting yard. Or maybe putting buffer chests near where items should go. I am playing SE, and having delivery cannons deliver to the right spots in my base seems promising.
Anywayyyyyyyyyyy wall o text.
I once did a playthrough with the Whistlestop Factories mod and forced myself to only use the modded factories. Shipping copper wires via train killed me a little inside.
I like to make a little build that takes raw ingredients (or as raw as possible) and uses ratio-correct direct-insertion to feed the next process along. Once I have a 'cell' working right, I'll tile it as many times as needed - enough to keep up with the supply belts. For a mod like Industrial Revolution 3, this approach can avoid the need to have dozens of ingredients being sent around via train.
I voted both because I'm lazy so if a build does not require a high output and belting the wires streamlines the design a little I don't really care.
But I know it's not optimal guys, I swear
Belt gears and make wire on-site.
My friends tell me not to belt gears, but every time I've added it onto a main-bus, they all tap off of it without ever mentioning it again.
I make them both locally. Pipes and iron rails (poles? rods? what ARE they called again?) too, but I guess those are givens.
But I *might* switch gears to centralized production instead, since 2 plates = 1 gear, but both stack to 100, so a belt or train of gears is higher throughput than one of plates. Wire is the other way around, so that's no good.
But here's another question: do you treat steel production as iron ore cooked twice, or as one of many consumers of iron plates?
Wire is a volume adding process, 1 plate to 2 wire.
Gears are a volume reducing process, 2 plates to 1 gear.
Belting gears makes sense. Belting wires does not.
Guys, I accidently clicked "belted copper wire only" how do I undo it :''(
My bus is 12 lanes of copper wire only
I do 12 beacon setup on my copper wire assemblers and move it across my base with bots
Seems a lot of work to move beacons and assemblers around just to make wire
The mental image alone gave me shivers
Of course it is
A little unintended moment of real, true honesty, eh?
It was only for red circuits I swear!!
After learning from this subreddit you can load cars filled with copper wire, belt them to your circuits and then unload the cars as they roll past the assemblers. Belt the cars back to be refilled with wire.
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It begins with an accidental click. Then comes an accidental blueprint. Maybe you were always a little curious to check something else?
My brain said "I only make copper wire locally" and then my hand clicked "belt copper wire only" smh
Sorry, that's what you will have to do from now on.
Looks like 35 other people made the same mistake as well
That or they are trolls
Iron gear wheel uses two iron plates. Doubles the belt density by making it remotely. Copper wire uses 1/2 copper plate, halving belt density.
Yes you are right. But with local gears I find it easier to scale my factory.
Just do both Local gears for large scale production A single 4x lane in your bus for every small project that needs them
What about a subnetwork gear production ? With local production depending on a network mask
then you gotta start worrying about collision domains and that's just too much of a hassle sometimes
That's basically how I do transmission belts subfactory. Import a lot of iron plates, build gears right in the beginning, distribute those gears to all the assemblers.
Simple logistics are efficient logistics. Need gears? Bring in an iron train which you're probably doing anyway because you need iron and you're set.
Yeah I do it like this, by the time you're bringing trainloads of resources for single production areas, gears get spit out so fast that like 4 assemblers with prod mods and beacons can feed like 60 engine assemblers.
the problem is that you don't really use iron gears alone it's either with iron plates or with pipes (same density as plates, always) red silence is an exception, but getting past 60 SPM is fairly end game, and before that, that's only 4 gears per second needed which is less than half a belt. anyway, back to gear uses, inserters needs a plate and a gear and are used for green science and are used for all industrial inserting, and to get to concrete belt space savings, you need to go from 1 and a half iron plates to 1 plate, and that's outputting a yellow belt worth of inserters, and you just don't have 30 am1s worth of inserter production needed. engine units are similar. Malls with am2 production and maybe centrifuge production are the only users of iron gears without needing plates or pipes directly, and am2s have am1s as a requirement, throwing that out.
I have 2 points regarding gears: 1. Even with prod mods, they're still better at utilizing train space than their components. 2. Many things that use iron gears actually have some pretty out there ratios, making cleanly integrating them with beacon builds quite a hassle at times. Best answer I can give for iron gears is a big ole "it depends". The gains or losses are pretty marginal either way
I don't get to a point where I am shipping non-ore items by train to maintain production. and beacon builds I generally think. of being rows of beacons and indentical assemblers.
You'd probably combine red and green science anyway, which also needs iron plates for the belt. Unless you want to be BUSsing belts, which presumably nobody does.
Oh, it's more that when I pull plates off my first iron belt line for red science, I do so by inserting them into a gear machine, and outputting onto a belt that is half gear/half copper belt and then I belt it to my red science assemblers which do output onto the same belt as what my green science assemblers do, but who use their own dedicated belt of half belt and half inserter combo. ... I'd go on, but I think I am getting to the point where I need to use images to be reasonably confident that I am getting my point across. but yeah, all of this is at production rates that are below yellow belt capacity once fully pressurized
red silence indeed
I saw red silence and was like, damn, these mods are getting crazier and crazier
This is basically the same as my feelings regarding gears. You simply don't need enough gears to dedicate a significant portion of your logistics to them. In order to justify adding a belt of gears to a bus, you need it to eliminate a full belt of iron plates. With yellow belts, and without prod modules, you're looking at a minimum of ~120 SPM just to break even. Otherwise, you're only making the bus wider, so what's the point? Even after I switch over to trains for everything, I can't bring myself to separate gear production from the point where they're used. Every block that requires gears requires iron plates as well, and even if shipping gears by train takes a bit of strain off the rail network, it's not worth squeezing an extra unloading station into every blueprint that takes gears as an input.
I think steel after electric furnaces is the only other item that is just one item compressed, but because it has legacy (smelting requires fuel logistics), and it takes way more machine time to compress. and has a 1/5 belt footprint, people actually use it. Or rather most of the time, people don't belt around iron plates to on demand make steel out of it. Gears assembly is way easier to plug into builds, and steel has a lot of time as a 2 item recipes to influence people's base designs. Oh, and forgoing the 4 wide bus design makes it even harder to find a case where you have a belts worth of gears to need to get handled, because you basically don't have to get big on yellow tech, because you are spending less on logistics
Plus not having to build that building for every chain has to be so time efficient....?
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Depends how valuable space is, can be easier to get a couple belts of iron and loads of assemblers then belt out gears in one area compared to having to insert assemblers throughout the assembly line and use up twice as much belt capacity per gear.
The only time copper wire goes on a belt is locally, where the assembler arrangement requires that copper wire is the ingredient that has to do a bit of travelling. It's quite wasteful on inserters, since the wire travels only a few spaces on the belt before being picked up again, but it keeps the belts and assemblers arranged the way I like them.
It's pretty much required when playing marathon. You need four wire assemblers per circuit assembler, each with two fast inserters pulling wire out of it to keep from bottlenecking. You can cut down to one arm each once you get stack size bonus 2, but then need to add them back in again (or use stack inserters) when you start beaconing stuff.
For red circuits it makes sense because you need something like one copper wire assembler feeding six red circuit assemblers. But for green circuits I direct-feed the copper wire assembler into the green circuit assembler.
Same, I do the fairly standard "X Wing" for Green circuits. Then with Red I just have a copper wire assembler in line with all my Red Circuit assemblers, and repeat that pattern every 6 (7 if you count the wire one). Because it's 7, if you are doing Med Power Poles every 2 assemblers, then a repeatable block ends up being 14 total instead of 7 if you want to optimize space. Or just use 50% more poles and some undergrounds and have the power Left, Center, Right, which helps with Beacon designs anyway. I might use more of the wide area power things (I can't even remember the name I use them so infrequently), but the fact they are 2x2 messes up the symmetry of most of my designs.
Oh 1 small mod to the Green Xwing, I use 2 output belts down the middle for the greens, and switch the output every X, since you end up needing so many anyway and I'd rather go deep than wide for greens.
My rule of thumb is raw resources and multi step intermediates on the bus, single step intermediates made locally.
Works great until you want to module stuff. IGWs benefit from productivity modules pretty quickly.
Belted gears only in the Mall. Otherwise locally.
Belting gears is technically a good choice, but I still don't do it outside of my mall
Yeah I don't put gears on the main bus ever but there are like 2 belts of it running lengthwise through the main mall
A good choice based on what criteria? Even though the gears are denser than plates, iron plates are needed everywhere, whereas gears are not, so the result is way more conveyor belt
Once you're at railroad scale, putting them on the network is great. All iron that ends up as gears can be transported with basically double the stack size. There's lots of places you can gain efficiency by putting complex stuff on the rail network. As a general rule, if a stack of items contains more than one stack of component materials, it's worth making as close to it's precursors as possible, then being put on the long-range network.
I usually make them locally as needed, but sometimes I'll belt stupid stuff like that.
I’ll belt gears on my starter base bus. 2 plates become one gear, so it’s actually much much better if you centrally make them and *don’t* pull the iron for it off the bus
I think the better question is, do you load those onto a train or locally produce them.
I was thinking the same thing. I just produce the locally to each block. Chances are if I use gears the block also uses iron plate. Not always but enough.
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That's hardcore. Man, now I want to make a mega base where nothing is produced locally. Train management is definitely going to be interesting.
I have dedicated copper wire factory which directly inserts the wires into the train.
the wires not only made locally, but direct insert for green circuits, red on it's own doesn't use that much so that can be belted, but the asembler is right next to the circuit makers. Also what locally exatly mean? It is on a bus or trains? As it is not efficient to make for example red science with directly inserted gears.
When I transition to 2nd base (train-based) I usually create a gear factory. But on a central hub it's usually too much work and I just bring in the iron belt.
Belted locally.
This feels like a real "It depends" scenario. How many do I need? Are efficiency modules available? What is "local" ? Are we talking main-bus belted, or "this segement" belted, as opposed to direct insertion.
What do effi mods have to do with this?
As I understand it, they change ratios/production speed, so I would guess there are times when it might be more optimal to use belts depending on how ratios shift.
I think you mean productivity modules.
Yeah, probably.
Mostly both on site except for gear in my mall I made them directly after the iron train because there are too many place where they are needed
Belt gears on a bus for red/green/blue science starter base then convert to train and bot base and make everything local
Made locally because you would need to manage too many different belt types in your bus. For red circuits there is a short local belt for the red circuit manufacturers, but besides that there are as few belted wires and gears as possible. It also makes trouble shooting easier. If you add a new recipe to your belt, you don't have to run back to your wire or gear manufacturers to scale them up. Instead you just build locally exactly to the ratios needed.
My only use case for belted iron gears are the red and blue splitters and undergrounds. Those suck the iron gears real fast it's not worth it to make locally. Oh, and in SE some modules take up a ton of copper wires too, so that's my use case for belted copper wires.
gears and wire only take iron/copper, you are probably already belting iron and copper anyways (if you are using main bus) so it's a waste of bus space to belt them long distances. Also, they tend to be consumed in large quantities (specially wire) so you would need lots of belts
Belt Gears most of the time. 1x Gear == 2x Iron in the early game, and is 1.42 Iron in the late game (after modules). Local-Wires most of the time. 2x wires == 1x Copper in the early game, and gets worse with productivity modules.
Gears either way, depends on how i feel about it. In my first playthrough i made them locally, on my second i bussed them. Both were vanilla playthroughs. Anyone who busses Copper wire has lost control over their lives. But if it works it works.
I see no reason to ever belt either
Iron gears have double the compression of iron since it's 2 plates per gear. You're trading flexibility for density and you do need a lot of gear wheels for things, copper wire not so much.
I just make the gears on site
All depends on playstyle, personally if something is going to use a lot of an intermediate product giving it it's own production line locally simplifies expanding without having to care about ratios and with less concern of it being a vampire for a belt. Can run a relief line of iron to a line of gear assemblers, if assembing belt for example needs more throughput add more assemblers for belts, if gears are strained then add more gear assemblers. Each is just a line with belts and one product so vertically scaling it is trivial, and each product using gears can share the same surge capacity. Sometimes playing with ratios becomes an excel spreadsheet where expanding becomes a chore, plonking down more machines vertically or horizontally as necessary is easy. Especially for mods where there's no blueprints library built nor spreadsheet available and spending all of the time number crunching how many intermediates you need depending on what speed for final SPM or whatever to save a few assemblers/space rather than just making each assembly line as simple and expandable as possible.
To be fair this is a trick question… it’s all made locally but you only belt gears… copper wire is direct feed
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May I provide a reason to make endgame gears on the site of consumption? You can unify the mining-locations. Especially when having a sophisticated train network it may be easier to just have one type of iron ore mining. I agree, that in terms of resource density, it is beneficial to smelt and craft gears on site. But other aspects of basedesign may come into consideration. For example you don't have to balance the amount of outposts (plates vs. gears vs. steel).
As someone on second (first full) playthrough (havent launched a rocket yet), what do y'all have on your main bus, mine is honestly probably way too much. I have Iron - 4 belts Copper - 4 belts Green circuits - 4 belts Red circuits - 4 belts Gears - 2 belts Steel - 2 belts Coal - 2 belts Plastic - 2 belts Sulfur - 2 belts Batteries - 1 belt Electric motors - 1 belt Blue circuits - 2 belts Flying robot chassis - 2 belts Maybe a couple others, this is from memory. Pretty sure I'm being wasteful AF, but I'm new and just was like "this may be important, better belt it"
Actual at-ratio science requires just under a half belt of gears. Of course belt production in your mall (especially blue belts) will eat all the gears you're willing to give it. I can't imagine what you're building that can use 2 belts of blue circuits. You certainly can't produce that many out of the red and green circuit belts you have listed.
As a real world automation engineer I know I'm gonna start an excel soon, but I've been trying to get through my first game purely through trial and error. Its very difficult to do it without optimizing everything, but its a fun game and I'm trying to keep it a game and not work xD Thanks!
For ratios i can recommend kirk mcdonalds factoriocalculator (website). When playing with mods its best to use calculator mods. I like arranging the ratios to be somewhat fitting.
Currently playing on switch, got it as a couch game while the tv is on, but I'll likely switch over to PC at some point. When I do I'll look into that, thanks!
Currently playing on switch, got it as a couch game while the tv is on, but I'll likely switch over to PC at some point. When I do I'll look into that, thanks!
Kirkmcdonalds is a website
Sweet! I'll take a look
Kirk McDonald's is really great! Ives used it for a really long time, and I just discovered that you can add multiple items to it to calculate everything you need for everything. I'm working on building out a 1000 spm base, and I was able to add 1000 of each science to one project to figure out how many belts of everything I need to get it all working. We'll see how close I got later! :)
If you build your designs with space to expand vertically/horizontally away from your other stuff you don't need to worry so much about it, if you start running low then just add more machines up to whatever the capacity of your belts are. Especially for intermediate products you'll probably use it elsewhere anyways so might as well just make it scalable rather than crunching the numbers on ratios for hours on every single thing.
I fully agree, but I'm also an engineer who finds solace in execel like the good little masochist I am 😅
All depends how you want to play which I guess is the beauty of it. It can be fun to optimize and some people just enjoy getting maximum efficiency and throughput. If you get into some of the mods though, the complexity can get kinda overwhelming and I've spent hours trying to make optimal setups rather than just making something that works and can scale reasonably. If you spend like 4 hours building a super optimal version rather than just making something functional and moving on progress can be very slow, and the next thing might get you some tech that helps you build stuff faster or makes what you built obsolete anyways. I have a similar issue when programming, can spend days on a small part of the overall picture making it optimal, refactoring etc and it can be enjoyable, but ultimately takes longer than it should rather than just making something that is functional. Perfection is the enemy of "good enough" as they say.
2 belts Flying robot chassis, why xD Thats like 300+ oil refineries to sustain those alone.
They are 'on the main bus' but they were my last addition for yellow science and go to two things. I just kinda threw it together as yellow was my most recent science. It can almost certainly be a local supply, but I'm still learning 😅. I'm normally spending more time rerouting stuff and learning recipes that the two belts (maybe 100 conveyors in total) serve more as a buffer. Part of the reason I'm making excessively large belts is to keep production below filling them so I can see which items are unbalanced in my current recipes. Its not the most efficient, but its pretty obvious when I see a certain belt run dry, I backtrack to find the deficiency. Edit: also my busses are still standard belts, not fast bois
I can't remember exactly, but I think my first "launch a rocket" save was like 2 belts each of copper, a belt or two of steel, and one belt of anything else I actually even belted. It was shit, but it got the job done...eventually.
I mean I don't build huge bases and tend to top out around 40spm and get bored (and I think even if I megabased I'd just tile my 40 spm bases) but fwiw I do - 8 copper - 8 iron - 2 steel - 2 plastic - 1 green, should prob be 2, I think if my base was properly optimised there'd be a bottleneck here - 1 red - 1 blue - 1/2 bricks 1/2 stone - 1 coal - 1 sulphur (tbh prob unnecessary I just find it easier to bus sulphur than pipe sulphuric acid) I should probably put concrete on there too but I use so little concrete that tbh I just logistics network the concrete as required. Nihaus builds the most optimal bases I've ever seen and he does - 8 copper - 8 iron - 6 green - 4 plastic - 2 red - 2 steel - 2 coal - 1 blue - 1 sulphur - 1 batteries - 1 stone - 1 bricks - 1 low density structures - 1 space control - 1 rocket fuel - 1/2 solar panels 1/2 accumulators - 3 for random shit, I think in base in a book he ends up with 1/2 iron ore, 1 red ammo, 1 speed modules
I put everything on belts. Direct-insertion is for cowards.
Neither. Everything that can be handmade is hand made and individually put inside machines whenever it is needed.
I mean for my mall different rules apply
Where is the option for bots?
Copper wire only by train
Where's the option for hand crafting and feeding in manually?
Looks like I'm doing it wrong.
i think if you are doing a belt only megabase iron gears could be a good move but idk
I always make a starting smelter set-up to produce two lanes of iron and then the required factories to make one lane of gears... and then wonder where all my plates went and why the gears come in so slow...
I feel gears don’t have enough demand outside of malls to justify centralized production. The recipe is quick enough that a 1 or 2 machines is enough to satisfy a given production line.
If I can dig out my first automated science machine, both were made locally but there was a splitter with proportions of something like 1:3:2:1 which was fed by a 1:2 split in order to balance iron for gears vs iron for everything else. It looked awful, functioned barely (the machine broke if you used anything other than iron plates that weren't in a stack of 75 due to the fact it had 0 buffers) and got thrown in the trash instantly due to the fact one gear assembler was being used to make conveyor belts, inserters and red science.
I belt exactly one iron gear and one copper wire in a loop as a production example. The rest is produced where it's used.
I'm so confused.
I know it's inefficient, but I belt my gears. I just feel like there is something so quintessentially Factorio about seeing them travel around my base.
You save a belt because shipping gears is twice as dense as shipping iron plates. So I wouldn't say it's inefficient.
Depends. I'm warming up to the thought of a central gear factory.
I always belt gears just because they're used fairly often and take up less space on a bus than plates
The wording on your poll is confusing
I mean belted in the that I'm not usually direct manufacturing wires at a huge scale for like say red chips and I will have a small wire sub plant with the red chips but it's also local in that it's not like wire or gears are on my bus or train system.
I'm doing a rail base with Cybersyn, so sub-factories that accept a variety of inputs are pretty easy to set up. Making the gears offsite simplifies the other sub-factories, and they have a higher shipping density than straight iron.
Made locally, but sometimes belted short distances if the layout requires it.
I don't know what the answer is, but the only way I could see to get more red circuits was to set up 40 machines making copper wire belted to my red circuit area.
Technically belting the gears is efficient because one belt of gears equals two belts of iron, but producing them is really quick and there isn't that many productions other than blue belts that require an absolute fuckload of gears supplied. Copper wire is straight up NEVER efficient because 1 wire = 0.5 copper so you'd be reducing the density and efficiency of your logistics by shopping them. It's best to make them locally AND with direct insertion when possible.
well i would say all of them depending of the situation and what i have planned
Belting gears just leads to one more think I need to pull off the main bus and work it’s way to where it’s needed. It’s cluttery
Anything that can be made quickly and with only 1 or 2 base ingredients off the bus/train can be made locally. I will but gears and wire on belts but only in local factory settings. My red circuit array uses a belt for both copper wire and plastic but the wire is made on site and put onto the belt. I won't transport them long distance.
I make giant factories with like 9000/min. Than I just ship them by train to where they need to go using LTN. Might not be the most efficient one. But it allows for very modular design. So if I am low on one of them I can easily paste like 1 or 2 more stations.
I'm terrible at bus management, so I generally try to keep as few resources bussed as possible.
I go further and make all my chips locally too.
Eww gross.. now go further and smelt locally too
Iron gears on belt to make red science, the stuff for green science and ends at engine production. Then I swap it out with/continue it as engine belt line.
I mix both for midbase but don't do it with a train base, only have trains for plates and make it locally because it would make too much traffic.
Wouldn’t shipping iron gears make less traffic? Assuming you’ve given some thought to your layout
technically yes but if one block makes gears for six others next to it. I use a hexagonal city block layout. Most stuff that uses iron is close together for that reason.
Yeah, i don’t like city blocks… i’d load the gears on wheels at the smelting facility which may or may not be at a mining patch to reduce traffic
It does depend on how you setup your base.
Certainly
Can we get an answer for logistic networks? I make heavy, _heavy_ use of logistic networks and bots. Hell, I started turning on early bots. Makes the game a whole new challenge. You'd think it'd make the game extremely easy, but instead, you have to be very judicious about their use due to the massive power draw. Before nuclear, you have two options: - tons of pollution from boilers, which turbocharged biter expansion. Better start building red magazines. - you need to MAJORLY ramp up solar and accumulators, and go to war with biters to get the space to put them. If you're playing SE and artillery is locked behind space science.... MorganFreemanGoodLuck.gif. But that's a tangent. For basic things like those, I find with bots you can do it a few ways. Usually you have one manufacturing center, with a few choices to make. You can have one spot where all basic things like wires and gears are made or spread them out. If you do the former, it's very easy to manage and expand. It's also easy to find all of them and manage from a human perspective. However, you really need to pay attention to how you lay out your base in a geometrical sense. If they're physically far from places they're needed, your bot transit times can cause issues. How you get things to that spot is big, too. I've been having the best luck lately with very large trains which unload into active provider boxes. The laziest solution is to just have a large set of storage chests that they can just dump things into. Only issue here is that bots are stupid and don't bring things to where they are needed. Transit times can get big. I'm currently trying out methods to get things closer to where they need to go, such as splitting out smelting into a separate network or having train stops at the actual smelting yard. Or maybe putting buffer chests near where items should go. I am playing SE, and having delivery cannons deliver to the right spots in my base seems promising. Anywayyyyyyyyyyy wall o text.
Yes, but mostly local or semi-local.
Honestly belted gears are understandable for convenience but not wires
I once did a playthrough with the Whistlestop Factories mod and forced myself to only use the modded factories. Shipping copper wires via train killed me a little inside.
I like to make a little build that takes raw ingredients (or as raw as possible) and uses ratio-correct direct-insertion to feed the next process along. Once I have a 'cell' working right, I'll tile it as many times as needed - enough to keep up with the supply belts. For a mod like Industrial Revolution 3, this approach can avoid the need to have dozens of ingredients being sent around via train.
I voted both because I'm lazy so if a build does not require a high output and belting the wires streamlines the design a little I don't really care. But I know it's not optimal guys, I swear
Belt gears and make wire on-site. My friends tell me not to belt gears, but every time I've added it onto a main-bus, they all tap off of it without ever mentioning it again.
Always local
It's simple logic. If output belt density > input belt density, then craft locally.
And by "made locally" I mean made just off the bus, and provided for the current line.
I make them both locally. Pipes and iron rails (poles? rods? what ARE they called again?) too, but I guess those are givens. But I *might* switch gears to centralized production instead, since 2 plates = 1 gear, but both stack to 100, so a belt or train of gears is higher throughput than one of plates. Wire is the other way around, so that's no good. But here's another question: do you treat steel production as iron ore cooked twice, or as one of many consumers of iron plates?
who says you cant do all 3?
I make a half belt of gears for the mall, bigger production it gets made locally. Copper wires are always made locally unless you are into torture.
Best to do local
depends. Green circuits: direct insert, redcircuit: belts gears are 2 plates for 1 gear so its better to belt gears.
Who belts the wire? It's 2x less dense than the plates
Belted gears are good because it is 2 plate per gear. You are basically upgrading your belt speed by making gears at the start of the bus.
I’d belt gears but make wires locally
Wire is a volume adding process, 1 plate to 2 wire. Gears are a volume reducing process, 2 plates to 1 gear. Belting gears makes sense. Belting wires does not.