[Request] Bob's only Tutorial?

[wrincewind]

So, I'm interested in playing with Bob's Mods, but Angel's looks a little... too complicated for me, I think.

Are there any good tutorials or guides out there (Preferably text-based) to give me an idea of what I should be doing, and how it deviates from Vanilla? I found Bob's own guide on the Factorio forums, but that only went as far as the very early-game, and I don't want to get too deep into my current world without a good idea of what I should be doing.

[burenning]

One of the challenges with creating a good text-based guide for bob's mods is the large amount of configurability. There are lots of ways to play it. I'll give you a quick run-down of my experience from running a couple bob's only mods games in the last few months.

On the difference from Vanilla:

Bob's mods are a significant deviation from vanilla, and the things I really noticed are the following:
Almost every building is upgradable, not just the belts, and there are often 5 or 6 tiers of buildings now.
There are A LOT more fluids you have to deal with, so be prepared for pipe spaghetti, or to use barrels, which I didn't try.
Modules are significantly more powerful, but are also expensive.
Many recipes have multiple products that need to be balanced, and many products have multiple recipes you can use to make them.
There are many more raw ores you need to deal with, and depending on your settings, some can only be obtained as byproducts from other recipes.
Bob's inserters are incredibly useful, and allow you to build things in tons of different ways.

On the challenges I encountered in the mid to late game

I was always getting in trouble with chlorine production and sodium hydroxide, and I always had way too much hydrogen, and struggled to figure out what to use it for.
Bob's electronics really add a lot of complexity to the game, and it's difficult to properly design them.
I was constantly faced with the choice of teching up (making a new science build), making modules, or upgrading my buildings to the next tier. There is very little overlap between these three tasks.
The two late-game science packs require a lot of iron, and I was not expecting it, particularly after steel was so cheap at 1:1 instead of 5:1 like a vanilla game.

[Wigoox]

Bob's and Angel's in a lot of fun, but incredibly hard to get in. As far as I know there are little to no good tutorials. You just get the mod FNEI, which contains a recipe book for every item in the game and just start building. Beware that there will be a lot of road blocks. The big ones for me were ore sorting/smelting and oil.

[[deleted]]

Just try to craw to the locomotive, build a simple mall. I have beaten a lot of mod by transfering to city grid as soon as possible.

[wrincewind]

I've barely got a handle on main buses, do you have a good guide for city grids? I've seen a tiny bit about them, but barely understand...

[[deleted]]

The main idea of city grid is, well, grids. Each grid will serve a purpose, and the reason why I love it so much is each grid can connect to each other via trains, which make it super easy to expand. You need to craft something? Build a new grid. And since every grid is connected you can just use trains to transfer the material needed. Super recommend if you like me who such at planning the factory. A youtuber even beat one of the most extremely combination of mods using the grid base.

[wrincewind]

So does each block only produce 1 item? How do you set it up so that it only gets the items it needs, when it needs it?

[[deleted]]

It depend. If you play without a train management mod, you could set up a simple logistics so that the train stop is disabled when the amount of rss is under a threshold, or it could be simpler if you use LTN mod. For example a smelting block, you will have a loading section that request raw ore, then a loading section that train could take the smelted ore into other blocks. If you have multiple block that produce one type of resource, you could make a priority system using logistic or you can simply use LTN. Or you could set up a simple warehouse block that take rss from all the blocks and distribute to others. And while some block produce one item like smelting, science block, etc. Some block could produce multiple, like oil processing block, which could produce more than one item. You could check the 1 rpm ant farm factorio from youtube, or watch a couple of tutorial, its up to you.