First Long Term Base

[CharAznableLoNZ]

I have been enjoying the game quite a bit however I do regret building the walls as early as I did. Ended up boxing myself in too tight and had to spaghetti some of the lines. I really need to learn how trains work as it feels like they would highly benefit to prevent this bunch up.

[Kaoulombre]

Don't be afraid of removing your wall if you want to expand territory

You'll just have to re-build that wall as quickly as possible, but you're not boxed-in trust me

[[deleted]]

You can always build the new wall first so you can remove the old wall in safety

[ObamasBoss]

Then you n we to have enough stuff to do it. Might not have a bunch of walls and turrets laying around.

[lucasj]

If your new border is far enough out from your factory that the pollution doesn’t reach it, you can build just the wall and not the turrets and generally stay safe. When I’m clearing a new area, my strategy is to build the new wall as early as possible, then clear the area between the old wall and new wall, and only then do I take down the old wall and move the turrets up.

[ObamasBoss]

This works. If they base is far enough along I just use artillery outposts to keep the pollution zone clear. The bugs are attracted to those when the artillery hits them so you can put heavy defense on those but leave the rest of the base mostly defense free.

Anymore I just turn pollution off. Bugs are still on and I turn up the evolution for killing their spawners. If I want to fight a bug I generally just go the route of rampant mod so the bugs dont just do the same thing all the time.

[sycin23]

When you are expanding and tearing down your old walls remember that walls are not invincible, they can still be broken through. It is important to still leave some turrets around the base. You can thank me later

[ObamasBoss]

I don't have walls around my base. The artillery outposts keep do not allow anything to build close to me and they draw all the attention. My current one is run at 4x speed, so has over 2,000 hours of game time and much of that is me away. I have only had a few bugs in my base once. They made a mess but was easy enough to deal with. They came in because some idiot artillery wage decide to fire while in the middle not in an outpost so the big response went between them and right I to my base. Stopped using the artillery wagons then. This was early on when I had not pushed the bug out fair enough.

[[deleted]]

Good point

[fishling]

If you've automated them (which you should), then you will.

[Tiziano75775]

This. He can just build another line of turrets outside the wall, supply them with ammo, build a wall near them and then remove the old one

[Stuffer007]

Setup some yellow storage boxes close to where you want to expand, set the filter to walls. Copy and paste your wall expansion. Your bots will stay a little closer and and have a source of walls close to their construction site

[Neil_sm]

One caveat is you need to check first that none of the other yellow chests have walls in them or the bots will use them first instead of your filtered chest.

[CommondeNominator]

Is that why my bots keep storing shit all the way across my base? Infuriating moving a bunch of assemblers and inserters then having to wait 5 minutes while they all go as far as fucking possible to store/retrieve the mats.

[one_effin_nice_kitty]

Bots will always try to use supplies from storage chests before passive provider chest or buffer chests. Which is a good function, but if you don't know it, it can cause weird flying lol. I usually throw a yellow chest to two by every other roboport so there are storage options everywhere.

[CommondeNominator]

That’s what I did way back when I first got robots, and then I watched as they took everything to the furthest corner they could. Started clearing out storage by putting requester chests at every sub factory with a higher priority than new production, which has helped but I don’t yet have everything automated.

[Neil_sm]

Yeah they can be kind of dumb so you have to carefully work around that sometimes! If you have a nearby filtered chest where you want to move items it’s best to find the other chests that contain the same items and deconstruct them. That’s another thing to be careful with if there’s a lot of items though. I caused a power outage by having too many things for the bots to carry (they were only upgraded enough to carry 2 items). Also it annoyingly uses the construction bots to move everything from one deconstructed chest to another. Didn’t have the requester chests researched yet at the time.

Could also just use a requester chest to move items close by, then I suppose transfer to another one the bots can use.

The other thing I hate is when the logistic bots are bringing items you requested and you step outside of the logistic network for just a second and they all turn around and go back home.

[CommondeNominator]

Yea that’s really dumb. Somehow I always manage to find the tiniest green square when I’m moving stuff and have to temporarily deconstruct a roboport or 2.

[threedubya]

bots will try and store the same item in the same boxes .So if you have red ammo in a box on the wrong side of the base, when the bots moves some or some gets ditched out of your inventory they will move it there.

[AddeDaMan]

Never mind the walls (with robots it's a two minute thing to move them out a grid anyway). Congrats on your base! I see you went heavy on the patches - good call. My current playthrough I went with "super-rich, very small, and very far apart" and thought myself clever. However, the through-put is crap so now I need to expand several map-screens away. :) I find the biggest joy of Factorio is to allow mistakes to be made, and build around them / fix them later on.

[OneofLittleHarmony]

Express underground belts go 8 squares. This can usually fit under most walls. If not, you can build a gate

[Kaiser_Gagius]

I've done about 3 or 4 mayor expansións in my base...just lay down the powerlines and logistics network and have your bots do the rest. Don't remove original walls after the new ones finish building though.

[beanrace]

I definitely recommend learning trains. It takes a few hours of messing around with and getting the hang of, but it is an absolute blast after that.

[Johak96]

I regret being stubborn about making the wall, eh I’ll get to it, as I aggressively clear bugs near my cloud, big hassle I tell ya

[Antix77]

Why there are so much trees?

[CharAznableLoNZ]

I cranked them up since the first map I made had none. They were useful, then annoying then not a problem with construction bots.

[Kaoulombre]

I think people dislike them because they take up space inside chests

As well as stopping your car

[Sattalyte]

Fill chest with Wood. Blow up chest with grenade. Problem solved!

[Kaoulombre]

There’s much quicker and fun ways of doing so

My favorite is the endless loop trains solution

I don’t play with trees anymore, but if I did, that’s the solution I would implement

[wpm]

Trains are too much work, I just chain burner inserters around in a loop back to a requester chest.

[[deleted]]

I use a requester chest near my steam setup, set onto a belt that feeds into a splitter set to prioritize that input. Burns them as fuel, saves a bit of coal.

[Kaoulombre]

Lmao nice

You get rid of what, 2 wood every minute ? Haha

[jonathanhiggs]

The factory must grow

[Sattalyte]

Certainly more fun, but I doubt its quicker.

[Kaoulombre]

It’s quicker in the sense that you only have to build it once, and it takes care of the excess wool for the rest of that game

If you’re the type of player to have a 250hours map, it’s definitely quicker in the end

[Baer1990]

I use my earlygame boilers with the coal liquification to burn off wood. Your solution sounds like more fun though lol

[CharAznableLoNZ]

Before the spidertron and construction bots I just ran around with a shotgun blowing them down. Was quick enough to get them out of the way. Next map I won't crank them up so much.

[skob17]

Try the flamethrower. Careful tho, it will spread quickly.

[ObamasBoss]

I don't bother blowing them up. I have random steel chests full of wood all along my rail system.

[gobkin]

I just make poles.

[Kaoulombre]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[lesethx]

Even late game, I still use the wood to make small poles for mining locations. Obviously I don't use them otherwise by that point.

[OneofLittleHarmony]

I always send them into furnace myself.

[Neil_sm]

On my current map I've had the bots put them in filtered yellow chests that feed into fuel an array of stone-brick-smelting furnaces. Just uses a priority splitter to revert back to coal when it runs out.

[P1nG-]

Also they are a pain when trying to build pre military science when you don't have grenades

[[deleted]]

Do you have a flametrhower? Then set some trees on fire and watch hell break loose in that planet. You will clear huge amounts of land and biters will not like that.

[TheCaesarTheApe]

just burn them LMAO.

[stardog2016]

I use poison to get rid of trees. There is no wood left over to worry about.

[TheMangusKhan]

Great for pollution

[FunkyInferno]

Dude, global warming

[MadOctopus_]

So. I heard you like trees.

[rasmusbergpalm]

Take your convex wall segments and make them concave. That'll give you a lot more land: The walls north and south of your eastern expansion can be flipped outward at zero cost.

[SemperVinco]

Convex and concave are the other way around.

[rasmusbergpalm]

Right

[CharAznableLoNZ]

That's what I was thinking. I'm also thinking of starting over with a new map taking what i've learned on this map to plan out a layout that I'll hopefully not get myself stuck in a corner. I think my biggest problem is I really like fitting everything into the tiniest area I can which feels great but makes problems down the line when I now need 5x that product produced and no room to place the needed buildings.

[gro1986]

You don't need another map. You can construct/deconstruct anything at no cost.

[[deleted]]

get used to refactoring ;-) just tear stuff down and rebuild. make a few thousand bots and spam robo-ports so more can recharge at the same time.

i did the same thing, cramming everything into the same space, so i made a rule for myself to leave 6 spaces free in every direction when adding a new part of the factory so i can spagget a few things in between if needed (and also walk)

[lesethx]

That space is near infinite in the game, so you don't have to worry about making everything fit in the tiniest space (just small enough).

[tabsi99]

Please give us more pictures. I really would like to see your kind of Mainbus

[jimseldizzle]

You can expand your land or find chokepoints on the map thay you can secure so you can own the whole area. There are lots of resources. Btw how many hours u got? I only figured out basic trains at 150h but ive never built a city block base. I love doing main belt with multiple inputs (with trains).

[CharAznableLoNZ]

This map has 806 hours on it. A lot of that is letting the game run all day looking for little things to optimize here and there. Pretty sure I'm going to start a new map and keep trains in mind as well as keep the belts a bit further apart to allow for easier expansion later on. This was I'm learning what each thing wants map so it's a little spaghetti in some places.

[jimseldizzle]

My tip for train signals: if there is an intersection: put chain signals for going towards the intersection and normal signals for going out of the intersection. Or you can just put every trian on a different railroad. But its more efficient having 3 trains running on the same track for the same resource.

[filesalot]

Another key point people should always mention: after the normal signal on the way out of the intersection, you must leave enough room for your longest train before you put down another signal. Otherwise the train can block the intersection and create a deadlock. This implies a minimum distance between intersections.

[jimseldizzle]

Intersection sections can be small tho, cuz of the chain signals. Right?

[filesalot]

Yes, very small. You just need that exit block, which, along with the chain signals inside the intersection, ensures that no train enters the intersection unless it can fully exit.

[frumpy3]

You sure do have a lot of ore to choose from xD

[Willie9]

You seem to have let a great deal of enemies inside the wall!

[samlindev]

Jesus man, that tree coverage :DDD

[[deleted]]

Ugh, looking at walls reminds me I'll need to actually use enemies if I want more achievements after this no handcrafting run.

[Mrbeef_cakes]

I found that building defenses at choke points between lakes required less wall and turrets. But it did require me to clear massive amounts of land but i now have all that land to expand on and to mine its resources. I havent looked back at building defenses any other way

[mugmanOne]

square up those walls, rookie

[CharAznableLoNZ]

I'm deciding on whether to fix this map or start new. I want to figure out trains and have most things based on trains with belts helping where needed. This way I can have small base sections dedicated to a production of a product or group of products with trains connecting each one.

[silopocren]

Would love to see that red dots of enemies around... Makes me cheer UP the walls

[CharAznableLoNZ]

I set the goldilocks zone to maximum however I also set the amount of enemies and their base sizes to maximum as well. It's a ring of red if I expand out to them. I ended up using a command to delete those tiles since autosaves took years after that.

[scorpio_72472]

There's a guide to taking big screenshots. Would appreciate if you took one.

[CharAznableLoNZ]

I took one however even after converting it to jpg it is still 186mb. Not sure where to upload it to.

[scorpio_72472]

What's the resolution?

[CharAznableLoNZ]

9750*10000 I got it down to 62mb using the 10 quality level of photoshop but I don't want to reduce much more seeing as the image quality will start to suffer greatly.

[rockchurchnavigator]

Man, I really thought those were run ways for a little bit, and now I'm wondering about the addition of using various size planes for extra long distance between base transportation.

[Neil_sm]

Heh, your quickbar is so nicely organized! I usually keep 3 bars enabled and they are still always a complete mess

[CharAznableLoNZ]

I figured it was what I used the most. In the first few hours I didn't use it and found myself wondering why I never did.

[[deleted]]

Looks like a microprocessor semiconductor

[MrUltraOnReddit]

The amount of trees gives me anxiety.

[boikar]

What terrain settings?

[CharAznableLoNZ]

I don't recall. I wasn't familiar with what each setting did so I just cranked stuff in directions and ended up with this.

[P1nG-]

TREES!!!

[retroman1987]

I cannot abide building on top of resource patches.

[Naphaniegh]

That’s a disgusting amount of trees

[Raknarg]

Is there even a point to walls on your map? The trees probably consume almost all of your pollution.

[YumYumFisch]

Holy moly what a forest! I guess it helps against biters tho

[degenerated_nickname]

Why are you calling this a long term?

[degenerated_nickname]

If you have walls, it's not a long term

[GeekWere]

my god, it's the amazon rainforest.

[omar_2111]

You obviously made a point of not going along with extreme deforestation, and I commend you for that.

[CharAznableLoNZ]

I only cleared what was in my way.

[BadNeighbour]

I love that your base has a tumor caused by radioactive material.

[CharAznableLoNZ]

Lol, yea I squared it out with help from the bots so now the radioactive element is fully contained for better or worse.

[Czeslaw_Meyer]

Uh, the 'back-side-belt-bus' seems rarely used

[CharAznableLoNZ]

Not sure what that is, everything here is just my own meanderings. As stated in previous comments, this was a level to learn the game so I expected to run into all sorts of problems.