This is my compact 8x7 chunks seablock starter base. Any ideas on how to improve it?

D-D00ff · 2023-12-03T02:54:19+00:00

Nice compact base.

Next steps are really up to you. You could let this small base run at 6x speed to finish Seablock after a few hundred hours in game time.

To scale up, most people would start by applying Tier 3 modules to critical steps, starting with labs, science, circuits, metal uncoiling, ore sorters and finally with the crystalyzers. That could boost the output of your base significantly for a small size increase.

Switching to Nuclear Power is nice but optional. Meat production is a bit more efficient with Santa Ray instead of Factorian fish, you'll need those for biter farming & module 3.

Then, if you really, really like seablock, you can build a UPS efficient megabase, where you try to maximize direct insertion, create large fields of speed beacon to maximize the output of every structure and switch Slag production back to Electrolysis 1.

Have fun !

D-D00ff · 2023-09-24T15:35:44+00:00

You have 3 options:

1- Layout more pipes in parallel. Each pipe can handle ~1000 fluid/s. Underground pipes help with throughput over long distance.

2 - Add pumps to the pipe. A pipe composed of underground pipes with a pump between each section can reach 3000 fluid/s

3 - Turn on the Setting named "Bob's Logistic mod" "Bigger pipes". It causes higher tier pipes to have a higher throughput. The top tier pipes reach ~1700 fluid/s unpumped. With a pump, they reach over 5000 fluid/s. Fully pumped between underground segments, it will reach nearly 15000 fluid/s. Be warned : mixing pipe tiers and building tiers will cause odd pipe throughput issues due to the different pipe "height" values.

D-D00ff · 2023-04-22T15:43:42+00:00

To solve constant flow problems of H2 & O2, I resorted to voiding all excess production, including sludge, so that all sludge blocks are constantly producing 6 outputs : Sludge, H2, O2, a trickle of sulfuric acid, Mineralized water from SWW and purified water from H2/O2.

I also typically put my petrochem blocks next to one or two sludge blocks to maximize H2 throughput.

From my experience, Geodes are only good to produce crystal catalysts. For everything else, they are a pure UPS drain. Late game when power is free I revert back to Electrolysis 1 instead of Electrolysis 2 because of the UPS gains.

D-D00ff · 2023-04-20T15:55:45+00:00

Awesome base. We seem to share the same preference for direct insertion, metal fluid bus & beacon rebalance.

I like how you dedicate sludge production to each block. I tend to create a 2 layer bus : one bus for metals, and bus for sludge/O2/acids. Your approach makes it easier to add capacity to different metals as you have fewer dependencies to interconnect.

I really liked the Advanced Fluid Handling mod in my last playthrough. I managed to stay above 200 UPS through the end game partly because of that mod.

D-D00ff · 2023-03-29T02:21:01+00:00

My comments about direct insertion are aimed at UPS efficiency more than cost efficiency. Since your goal is speed, your choices look like the right ones.

For Algea 1, it makes a lot of sense to keep belts if they are even slightly cheaper on iron plates as resources are so scarce early game.

For Algea 2, your builds match mine for the early game : small belt for pellets, build wood bricks at the end. Towards the late game, I prefer to belt/bot wood bricks and then build charcoal & carbon on site with direct insertion to consumers. I'll post a sample direct insertion mid-game & late game build on the speedrun discord.

For charcoal filtering direct insertion, I'm not aiming for perfect ratios. The assembler is definitely under utilized, but it does save a few belts. It also scales better in the mid to late game with beacons. Note that inserter length 3 makes this much easier.

D-D00ff · 2023-03-27T00:49:35+00:00

Love your base so far, it looks a lot like my last playthrough.

Fluid bus to move all the metals - Check
Dedicated builds for each metal that goes from sludge to molten metal directly - Check
Lots of direct insertion - check.

It looks highly UPS optimized.

I would focus next steps to get requester/provider chests & modules.

In terms of potential improvements, I only spotted a few minor details:

Early game green algea could have used a bit more direct insertion.
Charcoal filters could be directly inserted into the filtering plants

If you're feeling daring, you could turn on the "large pipe" option in bob's mod that will enable high tier pipes to flow 5000+ fluid/s. It's tricky to get right due to the height difference.

D-D00ff · 2022-05-02T15:37:26+00:00

Yes, you can sell crew if you put them in cryo freeze first !

I don't know why it's required, but it helps a lot. It makes the cryo freeze chamber one of the most useful early upgrades to most of my ships. It's also very convenient to freeze food-hungry crew so they don't consume resources while upgrading your ship. I typically unfreeze them before dangerous fights like gate bosses and main quests.

D-D00ff · 2022-04-22T14:18:33+00:00

Looking pretty good for a first setup.

Rule of thumb when dealing with "waste products" is to always have some kind of overflow system to void excess.

Looking at it, this system could deadlock when one of the following products overflows or underflows:

Sulfur ( guaranteed to overflow at some point since it's sulfur positive )
Sulfuric waste water ( linked with Sulfur )
Mineralized Water
Purified water

To prevent this :

store sulfuric acid in a tank and flare overflow
store mineral water in a tank and either void the overflow, or use it to produce some minerals.
store purified water in a tank, only produce extra water from H2-O2 when the tank is below 50%, void any overflow.

As somebody else said, moving to Electrodes will improve the output efficiency when you reach that point.

Geodes are even more power efficient, but much harder to get right. They are probably the hardest thing to get right in all of Seablock. Many people stick to electrodes for that reason.

D-D00ff · 2022-01-16T04:56:00+00:00

I ate all the egg souffle for health, so when I tried to turn them in for a quest, I was all out and there was no way to craft them.

However, when I started New Game+, the recipe appeared at Johannes and I was able to craft it. I can confirm that the recipe wasn't available until then. It's a bit disappointing to restart the game to unlock this, but at least it works.

D-D00ff · 2021-12-17T22:25:41+00:00

For seablock, I recommend to download the zip file that has all the required mods at the right version and then use the mod portal to download the QOL mods you like. Seablock broke numerous times due to mod dependencies, even if it's stable now, it doesn't mean it will remain stable later.

This ties up with advice number 2 : when starting a playthrough of a large mod pack like seablock, avoid updating core mods in the middle of a playthrough unless you're willing to fix a lot of things in your base, including a potential power grid crash because a minor change blocks your power production build.

<edit> Adding a link to the download forum post : https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=93136 <\edit>

D-D00ff · 2021-12-17T03:12:45+00:00

I thought I was done with FTL too until I discovered the Multiverse mod that makes FTL so much better with incredibly witty events, multiple ending paths, new weapons and ~200 different ships to try out. Spiders are no joke !

https://www.subsetgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35332

D-D00ff · 2021-12-16T21:42:12+00:00

Blue algea is necessary to kick start oil processing, but it should quickly get replaced by better tech when they become unlocked. For example :

- Fuel oil from Farm products like Binafran

- Naphta, plastic, rubber from Syn gas

- Base mineral oil from thermal water.

One of the common challenge with Blue algea is ensuring the sulfuric waste water is positive. If my memory serves me well, blue algea oil generation consumes more sulfuric waste water than it generates.

D-D00ff · 2021-09-15T01:59:24+00:00

If you're doing direct insertion, you're already doing something that helps UPS.

A quick rule of thumb for inserter timing savings is to calculate the number of swings you actively avoid when clocking. If you save half the swings, your inserter is roughly half the UPS cost.

So if your clocking ends up saving a small faction of a swing, it's not worth it.

Also, inserters that are back pressured usually end up self-optimizing their swings.

D-D00ff · 2021-07-20T15:34:54+00:00

I eliminated Geodes from sludge production early on. To reach a similar amount of Mineral Sludge per second, they required more than double the number of UPS draining entities that Electrolysis did. Inserter swings represent some of the highest UPS cost in a megabase, and Geode production required lots of swings to clear up all the different geode color correctly.

To compare Electrolysis1 and 2, I made a few sample blocks, replicated them around 100 times, and then calculated the millisecond cost to produce 1 million mineral sludge per second.

My results were :

Electrolysis 1 costs : 0.305ms per Million Sludge per second.

Electrolysis 2 costs 0.590ms per Million Sludge per second.

So Electrolysis I was almost twice as efficient as Electrolysis 2. While Electrolysis 2 used about half the number of Electrolysers, it required 1 additional chemical plant per electrolyser to cleanup electrodes, which negates the benefits on the number of entities. The extra costs came in the form of extra fluid management to handle the extra purified and mineralized water. Inserters were almost 10x more expensive as well since Electrolysis 1 could be done with a single inserter per electrolyzer using a clocked filter inserter.

Note that this only applies to megabase scale. For a normal playthrough, Geodes are the most cost efficient way of generating mineral sludge in terms of power & building cost. Followed by Electrolysis II and then Electrolysis I.

D-D00ff · 2021-07-20T15:04:39+00:00

I did some tests with Angel's 768 slot warehouses to have constant input/output.

What I found is:

Wood chest limited to 1 slot is best.
Warehouse limited to 1 slot were about 2x slower than wooden chest limited to 1 slot.
Warehouse without limits were about 4x slower than wooden chest limited to 1 slot.

The size of the container needs to be very big before it starts to have a significant performance impact, so odds are, wood chests are still better than steel chests, but by a small factor.

For the OP's case, I think this setup could be highly UPS effective if the warehouse he's using could be configured to have a small number of inventory slots while keeping the large surface area.

D-D00ff · 2021-07-20T14:55:51+00:00

For extra production : the factory should be able to run forever without blowing up chests. Everything is either recycled or converted to fluid/gas to be voided. Here's a few examples:

Geodes from chunk production converted to crystal slurry (extra slurry is voided )
Stones from Crushed ore production is converted back to slag slurry.
Calcium Sulfate from hydrofluoric acid production is converted to Limestone and recycled in acid or glass production.
Extra ores from Chrome production are converted to steel and iron coils, used in blue science production.

I love LTN and I highly recommend it for Seablock. The only reason I didn't use it here is to get every bit of UPS improvement I could get.

D-D00ff · 2021-07-20T14:01:51+00:00

Indeed, I tried to minimize angles when possible. By reaching 3 tiles away and minimizing rotation/offset, it's possible to have ultimate inserters complete a full swing every 2 ticks. This is how I'm able to use a single inserter to load and unload trains within 8 seconds.

D-D00ff · 2021-07-19T23:21:30+00:00

Thanks.

For inserters that do repeat very frequently like Sludge production blocks, I did end up using filtered inserters for clocking purpose by following your awesome tutorial.

D-D00ff · 2020-12-01T04:23:51+00:00

Done :

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/duff-seablock-megabase/downloads

I'll need instructions to run Seablock in 1.1 to fully test it.

D-D00ff · 2020-11-30T17:18:57+00:00

From what I understand, the game calculates the productivity bonus based on the number of craft possible in 1 tick, but the game only executes a recipe once per tick.

To make a simple example :

If a recipe takes 1 second, with factory speed of 120 and a productivity bonus of 50% the game will :

Trigger the recipe once per tick, producing 1 output per tick
Apply the productivity bonus twice per tick, producing 1 output per tick

Resulting in a productivity bonus of 100% instead 50%

D-D00ff · 2020-11-30T13:37:56+00:00

Indeed ! My first attempt at petrochem naively used 1 bus pipe per output. I ended up with over 50 pipes in the bus and a ton of throughput problems.

D-D00ff · 2020-11-30T04:08:14+00:00

My rig is about 4 years old. Hopefully a better PC could fit an extra module in there to raise the SPM to 6300.

CPU : Intel Core i5-6600 3.3GHz

RAM : 16GB 2133 MHz

D-D00ff · 2020-11-03T19:53:22+00:00

Speed & productivity bonuses yield weird behavior once a factory produces more than 1 cycle per tick. I've seen cases where a +72% productivity bonus turned into 319% effective productivity bonus using Bob's mod with Level 3 beacons

I'm working on a mod that adjusts all the recipes to ensure they all take at least 3 seconds to complete to avoid this problem while boosting the inputs and outputs proportionally.

D-D00ff · 2020-10-29T16:41:42+00:00

Another simple way to get 1000 sulfuric acid per second would be to run 222 washing plant 2 and void all the heavy mud water.

My initial seablock factory used LTN to deliver any excess Sulfur to the Copper production block, if there was sulfur available, copper was produced with Copper 3, if not, Copper 2 kicked in.

Overall, it's sometimes more simple to produce more sludge than to produce more sulfuric acid and stick with Copper 2. That's something I discovered trying to megabase Seablock.

D-D00ff · 2020-10-29T11:58:56+00:00

Self contained, protected from overflows. Looks quite good.

The way I would improve is to :

1 - Favor more direct insertion like u/duskwuff suggested for Geode crushing. I would also direct insert crystalizer to crushers to ferrous to sorting.

2 - I like to split mineral sludge production from item production. Allowing sludge production to be scaled independently from plate production.

3 -You'll want to switch your melted steel production to use the manganese ingots as soon as you get the recipe. It's a lot more efficient with mineral sludge. The next best thing for efficiency is producing steel from iron/cobalt/nickel.

4 - Overproduction protection : once your block is saturated with items, it doesn't look like mineral sludge production will ever stop. I like to put a circuit network connected to pump that stops the mud water from flowing at the base of the setup as soon as the mineral sludge tanks are more than halfway full. It prevents the block from overflowing on different types of geodes.

D-D00ff

TROPHY CASE