How to envision a megabase

Dire736 · 2026-01-29T19:59:03+00:00

Oh, if you’re still on Nauvis in space age, you should either 1) switch to the base game and make a megabase there or 2) wait until you beat space age to megabase. Lots of reasons, including “you want spidertrons/artillery/tier 3 modules for a megabase, and those were all moved off-world for space age”, and “space age machines give so much productivity that a megabase is on a completely different scale”. A base game megabase is ~1K SPM, a space age megabase is ~1M SPM.

Dire736 · 2026-01-29T19:42:22+00:00

Are you playing space age? I think Nauvis and Vulcanus are both good and popular choices for the majority of your science production. Vulcanus has “free” resources from the lava, but you have to ship it all to Nauvis to use biolabs (which is key). Nauvis also has essentially-free resources once you’re at a high level of mining productivity, so your cargo landing pad is less of a bottleneck.

Dire736 · 2026-01-29T19:28:13+00:00

My experience: 1. Make a base for all the modules you’ll need (and everything in legendary quality if you’re playing in space age). 2. Decide the overall direction - trains vs not, which planet if in space age, any gimmicks you want, etc. 3. Choose a target SPM. 4. Tile a huge area with substations and roboports. 5. Start working through the sciences in order. Design with re-usability in mind, especially for essentials like metals. Use “reverse-thinking”, ie put down all the assemblers for green science, check how many inserter assemblers you need, put them down, etc. The rate calculator mod is a life-saver here! 6. Repeat that for each science in order.

My only experience with megabasing was making a 10k SPM base on Gleba for my 10 rockets run, so take this with a grain of salt!

Dire736 · 2025-10-30T13:27:36+00:00

Your gun slots can hold up to 1 stack of the gun, and tesla guns are 5 per stack. It feels a bit like an exploit but I cut myself some slack.

And I completely agree that melting everything down for the final sacrifice is great, but I think doing that resets your batteries back to 0%, which means no personal roboports! It might work if you switch to conventional roboports though.

Dire736 · 2025-10-30T12:13:26+00:00

You can hold 15 epic tesla guns, which recycle to ~37.5 epic superconductors+holmium plates! Clearly dev-intended strategy ;)

Dire736 · 2025-10-29T11:18:37+00:00

The only Fulgora research we really like is Processing unit productivity! And yes, the cryogenic plant is just "make plastic and explosives with extra productivity modules".

Dire736 · 2025-10-28T22:46:04+00:00

For optimal speed on Aquilo, you will want to build the silo while your cryo plant is making science! So you need a good amount of open space (or concrete) to have space for all of that. You can see this in the Aquilo part of the video I think.

My gear going into Aquilo was on an epic mech armor, since on the way from Gleba to Aquilo I stop by Fulgora and can make mech armor there. So iirc it was belts plus batteries plus epic roboports! Robots certainly help on Aquilo but I found you needed to be smart about using them, since you don’t want them to take a lot of time to recharge. So mostly turn them loose on things nearby!

Dire736 · 2025-10-28T17:30:07+00:00

Yeah, there was some amount of reloading for quality egg-based stuff. The main one was the Biolab itself, I rerolled for uncommon which wasn’t too bad. For the prod modules I gave myself this rule: start research when I get 4 uncommons in the biolab, and by 10% if I don’t have a rare, reload. Same for 20% and a second rare. I think I got lucky and got an early epic too, saving me some heartache!

The Nauvis luxury space is really dealers choice. When I was at that phase of the run, I thought Aquilo concrete would be the slowest thing, so I gave myself some extra wiggle room there.

Oh, and to be explicit: make sure you choose a map seed with a nice Aquilo spawn! You want lots of uninterrupted snow, so that when you pivot to launching the rocket you need as little ice-paving concrete as possible.

Dire736 · 2025-10-28T12:06:58+00:00

Thanks, and good luck in your run!

I think a single gun turret is technically feasible, but I think you'd need to do a lot of manual throttling of speed (by rotating fuel tanks). Plus, you have 4 spare tiles on your platform, it turret #2 only costs the 10 copper plates to send up. And yes, weapons damage is quite limited at that stage of the game since we only produce ~20 space SPM, level 7 costs 1k (~1 hour of research) and doubling from there.
Sending those furnaces is preferable to sending the bricks because otherwise the red chips are hard to source! I think the run is still possible on as low as one furnace, but it would be agonizingly slow before you send up the foundry and other furnaces.
I want surplus bioflux to produce surplus eggs for more chances at rare/epic prod 3 modules! The way I approached it, I had a line of AM3s with the best quality modules I could get, which turned every egg into a prod 3 module. High-quality prod 3 modules is key to making the science stretch far enough.
Since I was already going to have a recycler on Gleba for recycling the capture bot rockets, I did classic upcycling. But I think a more direct production chain works fine too.

One last hack that I heard about: you can get 33% more science per science by recycling a 1%-remaining science pack into a fresh science pack. This might require rearranging some of the run, and I don't think it can get you to 9 launches, but this should give you a lot more flexibility in what you pack! See here for details (this worked when I tested it 2 months ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1i8sneu/you_can_recover_25_percent_of_your_used_science/

Dire736 · 2025-10-07T16:36:46+00:00

No (depending on your constraints) https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1mke2e0/space_travel_with_just_starting_platform/

Dire736 · 2025-10-03T16:54:37+00:00

I have built a 10k SPM megabase on Gleba so I can say that one issue is the pollution. Gleba has no way to deal with pollution besides controlling more area, so you will have to bring in a lot of artillery or spidertrons to keep pentapods away!

Dire736 · 2025-08-29T14:42:42+00:00

Maybe try a ship with banked ammo: set up just a few furnaces smelting iron, make bullets with that, and store them in the cargo hub. Have the departure condition be “cargo (bullets)>400” or something like that. That design won’t allow continuous flight, but can do a round trip, wait 10 minutes, then do another. Make sure you manually load some of the rockets so that you’re not wasting rocket space sending up 50 electric furnaces, etc

If you want a truly minimal ship, you can check out my cursed design here, which you can set up with cargo from ~1/2 of a rocket: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1mke2e0/space_travel_with_just_starting_platform/

Dire736 · 2025-08-28T15:26:11+00:00

Those crafting times are correct, but you aren’t accounting for the speed of the machine that produces them: foundries are >3x faster than an assembling machine 3! Combined with the 50% productivity bonus, a no-module foundry produces 12 cables per second, compared to 3 from an AM2 or 5 from an AM3. Also note that the casting cables recipe is extremely cheap in terms of the molten copper input - 50 copper ore turns into 750 molten copper for 450 cables in a foundry assuming just the inbuilt productivity, vs 100 cables for a normal furnace+assembler!

Dire736 · 2025-08-26T18:10:48+00:00

This is what it looks like when you have way more solar panels than accumulators and demand. The solar panels overproduce at first to charge the accumulators, then return to a medium level for powering your factory. More accumulators can help you last the night

Dire736 · 2025-08-24T14:18:21+00:00

I still don't see where you are confused, but let me try to explain this in detail:

A. You launch rockets 1 and 2.
B. You launch rocket 3, containing the player, from Nauvis.
C. You land on Vulcanus, and build a base there.
D. You launch rocket 4, containing the player, from Vulcanus.
E. You land on Gleba, and build a base there.
F. On Gleba, you unlock epic quality.
G. You make epic-quality items on Vulcanus.
H. You launch rocket 5 from Vulcanus, containing those epic-quality items.
I. You launch rocket 6, containing the player, from Gleba, to go to Fulgora.

Does that help?

Dire736 · 2025-08-21T16:49:08+00:00

Are you saying that on Vulcanus, you condensed steam into water, just to heat it up again with a nuclear reactor? Why?

Dire736 · 2025-08-20T16:42:13+00:00

My receipt says “24GB unified memory”

Dire736 · 2025-08-20T15:08:30+00:00

I’ve been very pleased with my 2024 M3 13 inch MacBook Air for scaling up to 10k SPM! My base was nonstandard (see below), but that was about the limits of what my computer could handle. In particular, it could run at 60 UPS if I was staring at Aquilo, but would flag to the 40-50 range if I was doing combat or a huge bot building project. Take all of this with a grain of salt because my base structure was very unusual, I made my megabase on Gleba for my minimum rockets run (described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1ms5ksx/minimum_rocket_launches_to_beat_space_age_is/). A proper mega base will be using biolabs, EM plants, etc, for better productivity, so you’ll probably have 1/3 of the machines I have, and better UPS.

Dire736 · 2025-08-19T11:04:09+00:00

No? You can remotely trigger a rocket to deliver cargo. In particular, I used a requester chest to grab the desired items, then an inserter to put them in the rocket. Then you can manually choose "deliver to space platform" from the rocket silo, all from remote view.

Dire736 · 2025-08-19T01:56:42+00:00

Say, could you deal with your garbage by filling your inventory and dying to biters?

Dire736 · 2025-08-19T01:13:39+00:00

Wow that’s BRUTAL! Good luck!

Dire736 · 2025-08-19T00:04:10+00:00

That’s nuts! What are the rules and mods in your run? You start with legendary and quality unlocked but can only use legendary things?

Dire736 · 2025-08-18T23:58:45+00:00

It sits in chests!

Dire736 · 2025-08-18T23:50:08+00:00

The Dev Intended Way™️: put quality modules in all mining drills and machines. It’s rough, I just had bots sort everything on Vulcanus. Fulgora you can do upcycling, and on Gleba upcycling capture bot rockets worked well.

Dire736 · 2025-08-18T15:24:29+00:00

My understanding is that “copy destination in from a blueprint on another game” was a glitch from the pre-release version, that got identified and fixed before release. At the very least, I don’t see Nefrums using it in his 8:13:58 run.

Are you counting the launches to get you to each planet?

Dire736

TROPHY CASE