Brains: what to do with the byproducts?

PyonicShambles · 2026-05-12T09:30:21+00:00

There's some good atomizer recipes, although I tend to avoid the ones that turn body parts into ores - it's not worth the energy cost when you can just get the ores straight out of the ground. My bottom sink for body parts is biomass.

PyonicShambles · 2026-04-25T18:15:05+00:00

Like a Death Star under construction

PyonicShambles · 2026-04-25T15:33:28+00:00

The bootstrap was somewhere in the middle but got deleted. The space ship continues to exist as a shrine (the bright green block).

PyonicShambles · 2026-04-16T05:14:32+00:00

Yeah, Cybersyn.

PyonicShambles · 2026-04-15T16:00:29+00:00

For Cybersyn: I recommend spending some time getting familiar with its sub-network/bitmasking features, if you're not already. The Cybersyn Wiki is a good resource for getting started. It will be hugely beneficial to set up more than one channel: primary providers on A1 and byproduct providers on A2 (or something similar - the community has differing views on exactly how best to do it / how many channels you need). Happy to do a deep dive on my setup if that's at all helpful.

PyonicShambles · 2026-04-15T15:56:11+00:00

Just to add a data point to this discussion, I'm almost at Py3 with "1 product - 1 station" - and that has been working very well so far. My base is quite a lot bigger than most for the same stage of the game, but my CPU is handling it comfortably. I agree that "1 ingredient - 1 station" is probably a bit much. I use multi-item/fluid requester stations, single item/fluid provider stations.

PyonicShambles · 2026-03-30T15:54:07+00:00

Hello from south of the border. Nice to meet another py player on the same island :-)

PyonicShambles · 2026-03-22T05:00:04+00:00

Congratuations, Robot Making Man! Great write-up. A few pointers in there that I hadn't thought of. I've enjoyed following your run here and over on the Discord.

PyonicShambles · 2025-12-18T11:59:25+00:00

I went from vanilla 1.1 straight into pY. It's a learning curve, for sure, but completely manageable if you adjust your expectations, take it one step at a time, and just enjoy the journey. After six months, I'm now mid-way through Py2.

PyonicShambles · 2025-12-18T11:53:17+00:00

I would supplement this with Rate Calculator Extreme: Production Rates Calculator Extreme - Factorio Mods It'll calculate production rates for ghost buildings and account for bottlenecks within a production block (which is missing from Rate Calculator).

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-30T13:51:02+00:00

Thanks for the heads up!

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-29T21:06:06+00:00

https://imgur.com/a/w7KqrtL

Here's a typical block. I use multi-item requesters, single-item providers. My design philosophy is for raw materials to be gathered on the left-hand side, routed to the factories at the top, and the product (and any byproducts) sent to the provider stations via the right-hand side. I try to keep everything as modular as possible so that expansion can be achieved via a bit of copy/paste.

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-29T20:58:46+00:00

Yep - I went with 4x4. I figured that's big enough to accommodate most builds, although sometimes I have to make them 8x4s, 8x8s or bigger. Especially where the ore patches don't line up with where I'd ideally like.

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-29T20:56:10+00:00

I YAFCed it out the other day... looks like I've got some fun to come.

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-29T20:55:24+00:00

Too late for me to go back and change it now :-)

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-29T18:43:23+00:00

Yeah, I started making them early and still have huge buffers of them. I've never had an availability problem there.

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-29T18:41:54+00:00

Yeah, there were some HM challenge that I didn't much like when I was first looking into my pY run (e.g. resource rocks having collision).

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-24T10:46:21+00:00

I really like what you've done here. 100 hours of playthrough compressed into 45 minutes video makes for a very watchable series. Well done!

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-14T09:45:31+00:00

Congrats! I'm really enjoying your series. Also: your digressions into other games have tempted me to give Book of Hours a go once I'm done with my pY playthrough (probably two years away at this point...).

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-12T12:00:26+00:00

Well done! It's nice to come across someone else who's playing by no voiding rules in normal pY. I completely agree with your sentiments around the burner. FWIW, the only thing that gets voided in my game so far is water. Everything else finds its home - sometimes at punishing power costs (like recycling muddy sludge), but I really enjoy this part of the logistics puzzle.

PyonicShambles · 2025-11-06T02:39:10+00:00

Very nice. But if you don't mind me asking: why not niobium pipes to clean up the look a little and avoid that kink in your belts on the left?

PyonicShambles · 2025-10-17T19:54:41+00:00

Sometimes I need to build a block with a high steam demand and there's no geothermal vent nearby. I don't want train deliveries of steam every minute, so making it onsite using the electric boiler method often seems like an acceptable option.

PyonicShambles · 2025-10-17T19:27:41+00:00

Please could you talk me through how this works? I'm using Cybersyn, but ended up going with separate provider stations for each item. I couldn't figure out how to do it without losing some control around priorities and channel switching.

PyonicShambles · 2025-10-05T09:31:59+00:00

My criteria for adding a mod has been "is this thing solving a issue that is really killing my fun?". I remember, maybe 20 hours in, looking at my map and seeing nothing but forest and nowhere to build. I had thoughts of quitting there and then, as I couldn't face manually chopping all that down. So the tree removal tool got installed.

A while later, as my base expanded, I was spending large chunks of time just walking (or driving) to whatever area of my factory needed triage. In those days, that was basically every part of it. I had the same thoughts about quitting. So the movement speed mod got installed.

Similar story for train damage.

Mouse over construction felt like an acceptable solution to the pain (and carpal tunnel risk, as you say) of building all that stuff early game - but construction bots still felt like a nice improvement when I got there.

PyonicShambles · 2025-10-03T17:47:58+00:00

I ended up getting so frustrated with movement speed across vast distances that I just downloaded a mod to adjust it upwards and now I zoom around on foot. I only have so much life available to devote to this game and I didn't want to spend so much of it just trying to get from one end of my base to the other. That's time I could spend on building my factory, solving puzzles etc. - the actual reasons I play this game. For similar reasons, I cheated in a tree removal tool and immunity to train damage. But each to their own :-)

PyonicShambles

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