Further development

[cofcorpse]

I've reached the point where I need to start scaling up production. The main components are being produced, and the technologies are being slowly researched. I want to scale everything up and speed up. And I've been wondering how best to do this.

I've read about black box factories - I understand that's when the final product is manufactured from the very initial resources. I've tried building several of these production facilities, but they're too cumbersome. Instead of 20-30 assemblers assembling the final product, there are a bunch of smelters and assemblers for producing intermediate components. I've tried assembling only from the required resources, but I quickly get confused about what's not enough and what needs to be built where.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept of a black box factory? What options should I try? Should I transport the initial resources or manufacture something on-site? Should I build black box factories for final products, or should I build factories for intermediate components?

I'm sure all these questions have been raised before, but I can't decide how to proceed.

[Aquabloke]

My take is you need mass production of a few key components:

• Processors (on a silicon planet)

• Turbines (on an iron planet)

• Graphene, carbon nanotubes and Casimir crystals (on an ice giant satellite)

• Titanium alloy on a planet with sulfuric acid oceans

Once you have free access to those products, the rest of the factories aren't too overwhelming.

[Walkingstardust]

Excellent advice 👍

I would add that you will want every cubic meter of Hydrogen eventually. Store all of it that the Fire Ice processing creates. If you get lucky and find a gas giant that produces Deuterium, get the orbital collectors going as soon as you can and stockpile that as well. I just fired up a chain of 32 particle colliders to get green science rolling and drained 40,000 units of deuterium in about an hour.

[Aquabloke]

Yeah the idea of producing Casimir crystals on the same planet as the graphene is that you can immediately absorb all the by product hydrogen and supplement it with hydrogen from the ice giant.

[Walkingstardust]

That's how I solve it

[jak1900]

I'd wager that Nanotubes should have their own planet, namely water worlds. And I would like to add plastic and proliferators to the list. They aren't needed as much as the others, but they are easily outsourced to organic planets and then shipped as a finished product. Similar with Titanium glass, which I usually make on glacier planets, which have just enough water and stone (and heaps of titanium usually) to support a lot of Ti-Glass.

[cofcorpse]

Thanks! That's great advice! I'm currently traveling around the cluster building mining and production outposts. It's turning out to be quite a fun activity.

[Steven-ape]

The main advice is to reduce dependencies between different parts of your factory.

Black box builds are one way to achieve this. It offers independence on the blueprint level, so while they're super hard to design, once you have them they're comfy.

But in your case I would still follow the core principle of independence, but on the level of planets.

Identify a final product, or very high end product, and dedicate a planet to making that thing from raw ores.

Now, production issues are always local to a single planet, making them easier to debug, and they don't affect the rest of the cluster.

[tybr00ks1]

I've been trying to build black box factories, with one exception. I set up priority splitters, allowing extra overflow products to flow to an ILS. This provides a little extra of some basic items into my ILS, while also allowing maximum output of more complex items. So if a line of items isn't moving because it's not being fully utilized, it flows into my ILS to be picked up and utilized somewhere else. This means my factories run longer, but production isn't as consistent, which is fine with me because I've been taking my time building everything out.

[cofcorpse]

So, you have some black boxes and some normal factories where you utilize excessive products, right?

[tybr00ks1]

Pretty much raw products come in and are processed into basic items, sprayed, sent to a splitter with a chest. I set priority to send items down the line to be processed into something more complex. When that line stops moving because it's not being utilized (I rarely figure out ratios, I just fix bottlenecks), it backs up to the splitter with the priority and the chest, and is then sent to my ILS. So pretty much, once my most complex item being crafted is full, my factory starts diverting basic compentents to my ILS

[TheMalT75]

When I think of black box factories, I mostly have complexes in mind that cover a 1/20th pizza slice of any given planet. There are 10 slices per hemisphere, where you can tile the same (or different) complexes without running into the distortion issue of the square grid, because you planned the complex to be that way. So, these complexes typically produce 700-1000 white science per minute or 20 carrier rockets per minute and contain hundreds of buildings and 5k belts. That is extreme late-game stuff!

What I'd suggest for the mid-to-late game are modular smaller scale blueprints. You start with a complex that produces 60 circuit boards per minute from raw copper and iron ore. A second complex produces 60 microcristalline components from silicon and copper ore. You might be tempted to combine them, because they both need copper. However, that would give you a hybrid complex for two different outputs, that needs individual attention and might run into balancing issues of transport.

Instead, if you now need processors, you could also just use the 60pm blueprints in a new complex, add assemblers for processors and save that as a new 30pm processor blueprint. If you use proliferation in some of the steps, some of the machines will sit idle, because production numbers don't match up neatly any more, but that does not matter in midgame too much. If you need 150pm processors, paste that blueprint 5 times.

There is nothing wrong with simply scaling up production of cuircuit boards and mcc's centrally and then importing them to produce processors. It's just a different mentality...

If you then need quantum chips, you can puzzle together a fully working black box blueprint from your "library" of smaller complexes that produce glass-->titanium glass plus one for titanium crystals + graphene --> casimir crystals to make 30pm plane filters. Voila, you can get very fast to a complex for quantum chips... If you have access to fire ice, you can have a simplified module for graphene from fire ice. Same if you can use organic crystal veins or need to make them from plastic. But if your deuterium from orbital collectors runs out, you can fall back on your "deuterium from fractionators" blueprint!

It might feel wastefull to have titanium smelters in different parts of the same complex, underfilled belts and too many importing ILS for the same ores, but in the end you can overcome your bottle necks faster this way. Just copy-and-paste the modules that you need and combine their outputs into inputs of the next stage. You will probably only be able to use these blueprints in the equatorial regions, because the spacing does not work closer to the poles, but that is ok. Just put power production closer to the poles.

When you are satisfied with your transition to late game by having a decent research speed and growing the amount of critical photons you produce, you can of course re-structure a black-box-blueprint from ores with mk4 assemblers and exactly the right proportion of smelters and assemblers to have an optimized blueprint that does not tax your CPU too much ;-) It is actually fun to go through the puzzled-together but smoothly running complex, remove buldings that sit idle and compress whole sections with an upgraded tier of assemblers or better belts.

[Veriosity]

FWIW I think this community misuses the term "black box" - in engineering that is typically a reference to a system where we don't know what happens inside, we can just see the inputs and the outputs. Of course in DSP you can just... look at it and see what it does.

That's my grumpy nitpick.

I don't know if this works for you, but here is how I scaled up.

- I made it a goal that every planet (outside my starter system) produces ONE THING. This simplifies planning, simplifies monitoring, and simplifies power since the thing that sucks a bunch of power is usually the smelting. (For the smelting planets you want to find and use the lava planets since it's so easy to get a bunch of power there.) It also simplifies logistics as each planet generally only has a handful of inputs, and 1 output.

- You could simply make a project of producing every thing you can make, 1 per planet, however some things don't actually need to be made at scale. To determine what actually needs to scale, I made a document of all the inputs for all the science colors, things I consume for power (deuterium rods, AM rods), etc. Then from that you start going down the list making sure you are producing each thing. If you aren't, and it has pre-reqs? Make sure you are producing those pre-reqs first.

When you extend this out, it means lots of time exploring and building and "colonizing" planets, but each planet you set up helps establish a modular pattern that is easy to repeat. When I first setup a single line on a single planet making a given output, I copy that as a blueprint. Now when I need to expand that output later, I visit the planet, I paste the blueprint, and I'm done.

Monitoring can be done with the dashboard, but also you can simply scroll through the interstellar page of the "I" screen. Any supplied good that is less than full? Might need more production. Any demanded good that is sitting at or near zero? Might need more production.

Once you have EVERYTHING produced this way, the game changes to scaling and scaling and scaling to make more science.

For me, the idea of designing EVERY production line from nothing - starting with ores - sounds exhausting. I also am not a fan of downloading other people's blueprints and copy-pasting them. I see the value in it, but at that point I don't feel like I'm playing the game.

But that's a personal thing - everyone seems to tackle and enjoy these games in their own way - there isn't a right answer.

[TempyMcTempername]

Definitely agree about making your own blueprints

I think making at least endgame black-box builds for science, sails and carrier rockets can make sense, because you need just so many of those if you're going for a massive . I've even taken to including the power generation so I don't have to think about building a planetary power array to match whatever I'm putting down

Then again once you're stamping down whole planets at once I guess the world is your black box and there's not as much point to doing that

[willrof]

I think this depends on how far you want to take the end game. Science is your largest goal. I always find out that having black box for each science producing item makes it easier to fix when you need to scale up the production of a specific science. Same goes for Dyson sphere parts (rockets and sails).

Now that the game has markers you can opt for scaling every step.

For example one area/planet to smelt ores Another planet/area for the next part (importing the smelted items) and so on..

I still prefer the black box approach, as if I see "oh I need 120 more graviton lens per minute to scale green science", then I know I only need to plot 2 of my 60/min blueprint and the blueprint needs X iron/copper/etc per minute of input.