Steam Factorio Chat: Adeptus Mechanicus Chanting Intensifies

[Laskar]

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Come one, come all. All ye who have sank thousands of precious hours of their lives into streamlining logistic chains and unspaghettifying conveyor belts, this is the thread where we gather to share tips, blueprints, and recommend mods.

For my first recommendation, I recommend... literally anything that grants you early access to construction robots. Holy hell, that is something that should have shipped with the base-game. Everything goes so much faster when you can copy-paste turret outposts and assembly line subsections and leave the placement of odds and ends and inserters to those handy little bots.

That being said, though, does anyone have a good layout for the refinery? The problem with refining petroleum in the base game is that you wind up with three different fluids. The plumbing needed to collate three different grades of distilled petroleum from three, six, or dozens of refineries is messy, and I'm wondering if anyone has come up with an elegant solution to it.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Refineries were pretty much what killed the game for me. The sheer pipe spaghetti of having light oil, heavy oil, crude oil, natural gas, water, lubricant, and sulfuric acid in close proximity and having to feed them into each other's refineries while keeping everything separate was too much complexity for me. I got to the eyetwitch stage every time I wanted to tell a refinery what to make only to get told "Can't mix fluids" because this recipe wanted the natural gas and water on the opposite inputs of the old recipe it had been doing ten seconds earlier so I'd need to completely rerun the pipes again.

 

[Laskar]

Refineries were pretty much what killed the game for me. The sheer pipe spaghetti of having light oil, heavy oil, crude oil, natural gas, water, lubricant, and sulfuric acid in close proximity and having to feed them into each other's refineries while keeping everything separate was too much complexity for me. I got to the eyetwitch stage every time I wanted to tell a refinery what to make only to get told "Can't mix fluids" because this recipe wanted the natural gas and water on the opposite inputs of the old recipe it had been doing ten seconds earlier so I'd need to completely rerun the pipes again.

Dude, I don't even process most of those fluids in the same base. Usually I have a refinery set up to crack oil into heavy, light, and petroleum. This then gets shipped by train to other bases where sulphur, plastic, lubricant and sulphuric acid get made.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Eh, quite possibly you're a better player than me. Most of my attempts at a game, I wound up needing lubricant, acid, and plastic long before I had a working railway but I may be odd in my build preferences (I prioritize getting construction/logistics robots ahead of all else for the anti-frustration factor).

I generally chose to pipe crude from the oilfield to my manufacturing base instead and crack it there. I found pipelines relatively easy to protect compared to railroads as I could simply install flamethrower turrets in it periodically and they'd use the oil to fire where railroads needed reloadable weapons or an additional electrical line to power laser turrets. I also already had water at my manufacture bases long before oil became an issue so it was easier to combine them at that point.

 

[Laskar]

You... play a lot different than I do. As soon as I discovered the magic of construction robots, I downloaded a mod to give me them as early as possible. Before that, I always went for railroad first, because I feared getting starved out of my main base. Also, I think that long conveyor belts and pipelines connecting bases are an eyesore, so I prefer to just plunk down a railroad and automate away.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Well the beauty of Factorio is that there's no one right way to do it and it actually delivers on the freedom to build what you want concept in a way other similar games don't.

I also liked having crude piped to my main base because Flamethrower turrets were my favorites and it made them more available. I'd often run my oil pipeline in a big loop around my entire manufactory so I could surround it with flamethrowers. I didn't like worrying that my gun turrets would run out of ammo and I lost one game from running out of power in my accumulators for lasers at night, but flamethrower turrets can just tap into the pipeline.

Are there any mods that make for a more interesting map or enemies? The other thing I didn't much care for was the lack of anything but biters and spitters and how bland and samey the terrain is on every map.

 

[Bassoe]

Adeptus Mechanicus Chanting Intensifies

Indeed.

 

[Laskar]

Indeed.

...
Wow.
That is incredible.
That's like... That fits like a glove. Even the words match up to what is going on in the trailer.
"The fires of the forge" as it's panning over the refineries.
"Engage the linkage, Omnissiah" as a train pulls in and unloads.
"With heat and iron" as it shows the steam power plant.
"Our might has come online," as a pair of trains steamroll a swarm of bugs.
"Engines devious" as a rocket takes off.

Forget Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz. This is even better.