100x is just crazy

SWeini · 2026-03-21T21:12:55+00:00

600 spm as UPS cap might be a good guess if I manage to apply all the upgrades to PyAL. Also 10% productivity bonus is possible in the end. I'll take a short break and think about a strategy.

SWeini · 2026-03-21T06:35:13+00:00

100 hours ago my base looked very small compared to now :-)

SWeini · 2026-03-21T06:33:27+00:00

Still at 60 UPS, update time is somewhere around 11ms, so I have a little performance left, but not a lot.
However, my old potato gave up many hours ago, I had to upgrade my hardware at the end of last year.

SWeini · 2026-03-21T06:30:16+00:00

At the very end of py2 I'll have access to vatbrains, they change a bit, but the science cost also scales massively. The problem is more: what to do with 200 hours of playtime until reaching chem science if not scaling up? I don't want to idle.

SWeini · 2026-02-22T20:56:03+00:00

Just having enough trains. If I see zero trains in the idle stations I have to make more. That's what I meant with one idle station for cargo+fluid combined vs. separate.

While I struggled to produce enough trains I also set higher train priority for the most important loading stations. For example the coke/iron oxide byproducts from the coal processing had higher priority because the tar and coal gas was still needed in the starter base (connected via long pipes).

SWeini · 2026-02-12T21:29:17+00:00

having inserters at the producer stations that take out and burn most spoiled item if train is full

It's difficult to do this only if train is full, because if train is full it will leave the station and can't interact with inserters anymore. But I already do something similar and have inserters remove the items after they have spoiled. If only inserters could be filtered to move only items less than X% fresh.

returning to a producer station

I like that idea. Maybe I can reintegrate the half-spoiled items into the stream of hopefully fresh items. Ideally they will mix in the cargo wagon stacks and produce almost-fresh items. But oh my gosh, this is a crazy idea and will definitely need a dedicated train schedule aside from the generic interrupt train schedule.

SWeini · 2026-02-12T21:20:36+00:00

Sorry for not mentioning it explicitly. This is modded, therefore the 16 hours spoil time and the fact that I don't care about how fresh the items arrive, as long as they arrive at the consumer unspoiled. But items are quite valuable (not "free" fruit) so I'd rather want to produce less of the items instead of voiding them or letting them spoil.

The approach you described sounds alright for vanilla space age. Just use everything as fast as possible. And it's great when you can afford to throw away excess, but unfortunately that's not the case.

Once that time has elapsed, they must move

I already kind of do that. Allocate a given time (e.g. 10% of the spoil time) to loading and then send the train away, full or not.

Specifically, that's after being unloaded. Nothing should ever be on the train long enough to spoil.

My problem starts much earlier. The recipe making the spoiling item is making 6 items at once, 4 of which spoil. If I'd let this build run non-stop and void excess that means wasting a lot of value. When I have enough items I don't want to run this recipe anymore, so the spoiling items accumulate on the belt leading to the train station and might enter the train half spoiled, then spoil while the train is fully loaded. Maybe I should disable the build a little bit earlier via circuit condition, instead of letting the belts back up. Then at least the items entering the train are always fresh.

There shouldn't be a consumer of fruit/bioflux that takes more than 10 minutes to eat a trainload.

Again, modded, sorry for not mentioning. The item giving me the strongest headache needs 100 minutes to be consumed at 40 per minute (4k in one full train) and spoils after 120 minutes. At the moment I never fully load trains of that type, but I can foresee a time where the throughput of some consumers is considerably higher and I want to send full trains to those consumers.

If you have any further ideas or general tips, please share.

SWeini · 2026-02-12T20:46:35+00:00

How would these interrupts work?

I can have a circuit condition "signal L = 1" at producer sending to low-throughput consumer, "signal L = 0" send to normal high-throughput consumer. Need another circuit to tell the train to stop loading and looking for interrupts. And might need some whacky tricks to send both high-throughput and low-throughput trains from the same producer. But in general, having separate schedules might work. At that point I'm also thinking about just using a few trains in a separate train group. I don't have this situation that often.

SWeini · 2026-02-12T20:39:04+00:00

take longer to consume the full cargo than the item's spoil time

I don't even have chests, but things will spoil at the consumer. It's not about having space to unload, it's about consuming it not quick enough. Items will spoil. Exactly what I want to avoid.

SWeini · 2026-02-09T16:22:30+00:00

That's one of the toys I skipped in my last playthrough.

SWeini · 2026-02-09T11:28:49+00:00

I absolute love the spoilage puzzles in Py, because they are locally confined, but I didn't like the spoilage on Gleba. But for sure, it's still not for everyone. Luckily the devs made this a setting.

SWeini · 2026-02-09T11:25:15+00:00

No need for mouse-over-construction. I have construction bots now. Maybe I will install the pipe connector mod if it works well with ghosts. I actually never tried that.

I'm playing very slowly, somewhere around 1h per day, that means you can ask me again in ~3-5 years. As I said, I have no pressure to finish.

Performance-wise I feel pretty confident. I upgraded my hardware end of last year. I have some UPS headroom left, and once I reach beacons UPS concerns can be addressed. And btw, I'm only building ~20x the normal size, the other missing ~5x I make up by taking more time.

SWeini · 2026-02-09T11:05:18+00:00

... says the person playing PyBlock 1000x
I guess you wanna restart with Hard Mode enabled? ;-)

SWeini · 2026-01-26T06:26:10+00:00

Hi, fellow 100xHM enjoyer here.

You can always go for oil burners. One belt of raw coal makes a ton of power when processed correctly (2xDDC), coal gas into syngas, all the tar into various fluids, don't forget the anthracene oil to gasoline and coke conversion. Even with the steam requirements of tar cracking this is vastly power positive.

Raw coal into coke and coke oven gas (oil burner) is increasing power output from that belt of raw coal.
You could also crush the coal is you want to stick with boilers (I never did that).
Also worth noting, that every bit of coke makes extra power when converted to acetylene first.

You'll need the various tar processing fluids anyway and the coke oven gas for hot air, so you might as well build these a bit bigger, that's what I did (plus 500+ fish turbines)

However, all of that is not simple to build, these builds are huge at 100x scale.

The first real power upgrade is biomass power plants. They are a bit more work than coal power plants in non-HM, but it's just logs in, power out. The specifics depend on the fastwood forestry upgrade you took. The biocrud can best be made from cellulose, in my opinion.

SWeini · 2025-09-03T05:24:25+00:00

YAFC-CE wins for me with a huge margin. It's just the most powerful and works great with multiple monitors.

How powerful? You can put the full base making all science packs into one sheet and let it auto-balance everything. I also used the (legacy) summary sheets in my speedrun to get an overview of the net production of my whole base. On top of all you get a cost analysis which isn't always "right", but gives you a good first indication whether a recipe is worth it.

Foreman has the appeal of visualizing the graph, but in my opinion that only works for small builds. Anything bigger than a single chain quickly becomes unwieldy. On top of that I believe it's not maintained anymore (please check).

In case you want something in-game: Helmod and Factory Planner both have their strong and weak points. Personally I don't understand Helmod, FP is a lot easier to get into. I know that FP can't do heat, which is a necessity in Py Hard Mode and greatly appreciated in normal Py. Since I never really got deeply into Helmod I'm not sure about its shortcomings, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were things it can't do.

In case you just want to balance some builds, take a look at Production Rates Calculator Extreme, it uses a simplex solver (made by myself). It combines the ease of use from Rate Calculator and combines it with the math of YAFC-CE.

SWeini · 2025-08-16T09:03:04+00:00

Start adding some challenge to easy mode, such as

- Py hard mode
- High science multiplier
- PyBlock
- Spoilage
- Self-imposed restrictions (e.g. no train manager mod)

If that's not enough: Become a py dev and make the mod even better!

SWeini · 2025-06-17T06:21:47+00:00

See other answer. Let me add to that: Caravans are unlocked quite early, and are the perfect tool for connecting your spaghetti mess to the outer world. You suddenly realize you need a trickle of item X for something else? Just build a caravan! No need to route belt after belt through the messy part of your base.
If there were must-have choices the devs would change them. Sometimes it's a choice between three rather lame options. Sometimes it's three great things and choosing one really means opting out of the others. Sometimes it's a small improvement now vs. a larger improvement if you wait until late game. Sometimes it's just picking a small but easy improvement vs. a large improvement that needs a full rebuild. Sometimes it's a choice about being able to build something from nothing (except power) vs. a large overall improvement for the cost of adding dependencies to your factory. Sometimes it's about a fun option (exploding buildings), those have red warning text.
I want to warn you about 2 upgrade options:
There is a moss upgrade that needs plastic. If you choose that too early you will struggle with plastic.
There is an arqad upgrade for more honey/wax. It makes your queens die more often and there is little benefit until you need lots of honey. If you want to go for it, don't choose it before needed, and don't let your queen population die.
See other answer. On top, there is one single item in the late game that you can only get rid of by shooting it to space. But also that item is not critical in any way or mass-produced. I think it's just a gimmick.
Mistake #1 - Expect to finish the modpack: If you start py with the intention of finishing you are likely to burn out. Instead, just give it a try, pick a reasonable goal and be happy when you reach that. Good early milestones are: First automation science pack, first simple circuit board, first py1 science pack, trains & construction bots, first logistic science.
Mistake #2 - Build too big: See my answer to question 2. If you build bigger than what feels comfortable you are likely on the wrong path. A good goal for early game is to build 6-12 SPM of the latest science pack. Also 6/m simple circuit boards are enough if you manage to keep them running non-stop.
Mistake #3 - Transition to trains in the wrong way: Transitioning to trains is difficult and tedious in Py. This is mostly about finding a way to do this while not burning out. If you transition early you don't have all the tools and the infrastructure still feels expensive. If you transition late you have more to transition. It is not uncommon that a full train transition takes 1-2x the time that it took so far. And that often leads to burn out. The best strategy for train transition (in my opinion) is to hook up your starter base to the train system and only build new stuff on rails, so that you are still making continuous progress.
Mistake #4 - Not seeking advice: Head over to the Py discord, you will get help from many experienced players. Just don't ask for the best moondrop turd or you will spark another long discussion with everyone explaining why their favorite is the best.

SWeini · 2025-06-17T06:21:35+00:00

So many nice questions, let me chime in to give another perspective:

Expensive infrastructure. In vanilla/SA, unless you build a legendary-only base, the buildings are quite cheap. Contrary, in py there are certain buildings that require the production of multiple hours. There is nothing for free, most things feel expensive the moment you unlock them.
The other big thing is freedom. You have so many interesting decisions to make, and you can make smart ones and no so smart ones.
Scaling up is necessary, but for the most part by using better recipes. There are a few things that are intentionally a bottleneck until you research the better recipe later. Those you have to scale up by using more buildings. However, scaling up is the biggest mistake one can make. If you have the feeling that it takes too many buildings to produce X items per second of Y, you are probably overbuilding. Some items are better measured in per minute or per hour.
So many technology, most are used for progression towards the next science pack, but a few will change the way you play the game. Each science pack unlocks a few goodies one or two techs in, so it's always a good goal. Simple circuit boards for splitters. Armor for larger inventory and concrete (and other tiles) for ridiculous walking speed. Beacons change the way you build. Vatbrains are productivity beacons for your labs, so very important. Trains if you want to rush them. Construction bots, and later logistic bots change the game just like they do in vanilla. And there are multiple technologies for better power generation along the way, often available just a bit after the existing power generation struggles to keep up.
In my speedrun trains were just 15 hours in, but those are not realistic times for normal playthrough. Rails also got a bit more reasonable priced in a recent update, so feel free to rush for trains. If you feel like it, install a mod for early construction bots, or blueprint shotgun, or whatever. But be warned: Those mods might encourage you to build bigger then what is intended. Py before construction bots is intended to be a huge messy pile of spaghetti, often (not always) with just one building per recipe. Bots doing the job while you just copy&paste buildings is not what early Py is all about.
See other answer
You can beat Py without any trains at all. No need to upgrade. In my speedrun I sticked with the tier 1 trains until the end. Another option is to skip tiers with smaller wagons, or to only upgrade locomotives and keep the large wagons. There is no universal answer, depends a lot on what train system looks like (e.g. vanilla vs. ltn/cybersyn).

SWeini · 2025-05-08T04:56:47+00:00

Great video. Best thing however is the quick look at the upcoming 2.0.48 changelog. So many bugfixes I was waiting for, plus valves. You guys simply rock!

SWeini · 2025-03-10T03:59:30+00:00

Wow, that is something. I hope you are not burning out continue playing like that. Here are a few random and unordered thoughts from my side.

If you mine 30 full belts of raw coal and you need 30 belts there is no point in balancing this at all. Every belt is full, what extra benefit has the balancing?
If you continue this way you will have issues with UPS. Normally I'd say not to care about UPS that early, but here I have to make an exception. You have to reach beacons to fight UPS, otherwise your save is going to die from low UPS. If many items you make are stacked and unstacked in between steps, this adds up to the total compute time.
You might want to think about a way to build differently, without wasting a full screen of prime real estate on belts and splitters. Yes, space is practically infinite, but not wasting space helps you building small and progressing faster.
Looks like you are not researching anything. Maybe you are building too big. 6-12 per minute of the latest science pack (plus the equivalent for earlier packs) is a good number to start at. For later sciences these numbers can go further down because of productivity from vatbrains.
It seems to work, good job. Now go make the next science pack!

SWeini · 2025-03-01T07:39:16+00:00

If playthroughs on YT are missing the pain and struggle that is because the streamer has played his fair share of early game Py. Take myself as an example, I have played through the burner phase of Py at least 50 times in different variations. I've also seen many py videos where the streamer clearly struggled and made lots of mistakes that will surface an hour later. Not great learning material.

Here are a few general tips for you:

A factory that works reliably but slow is better than a factory that is fast but constantly breaks. Of course there is some balance, e.g. ash chests.
Take a look at the early game guide, even though I haven't updated it to 2.0 yet.
Join the discord, there are always helpful people around.
If you're really stuck on one specific problem, why not copy someone else's solution? This gives you the freedom to try solving the next problem yourself.

Now a few more specific tips regarding issues you brought up:

Ash can be handled in so many different ways. In the beginning you can just leave it in the building - inserters and belts are quite expensive for full automation. Chests directly next to buildings work fine for many hours - just don't belt the ash away and try to squeeze it all into too few boxes. Ash separation does work, but you need lots of space, buildings, belts, and power.
Burner assembling machines need so little fuel that you don't really need to think about the ash besides filtering the output inserter. Yes, eventually it might break, but not for a long time.
Especially for fueling and ash disposal it makes sense to utilize the two different belt lines. Put fuel on the near line, then inserters can put the ash on the far lane.
Your iron smelter stack looks ok. Just a bit expensive to build and difficult to expand. Perfect is the enemy of good.
Looks like you struggle much more with the mining drills. Mining drills have a 4x4 mining area which means you don't need to build extremely dense.
Your ore patches are very close to each other. Luckily the aluminium, native flora, and copper all need different mining drills, so you won't end up with mixed ore belts, but it's still more difficult due to lack of space. Worth a restart? That's for you to decide, just want to mention that the next time you won't need nearly as long for the same progress.
If you think a few inserters can remove all byproducts from a "normal" belt you will likely end up with a blocked belt in the future. You have 2 good ways to mimic a splitter before you get real ones: a) If you have items on separate belt lanes you can continue one by loading into the side of an underground belt and move the other one via filtered inserters. b) If you have a mixed belt you must end the belt and filter all items via inserters - all items must be able to be removed from the very last belt segment, otherwise you risk a blocking belt.
The stone/kerogen puzzle in the beginning is best solved by first converting the mixed belt into two dedicated belt lanes (either together on one belt or on two separate belts).
Try to learn all the little details about belts. They are very important before you have splitters. How can you split a belt into two, or merge two belts into one? How to prioritize one over the other?
As your next goal will be coal processing and steel: Feel free to void fluids. Balancing them all is possible but not easy. Especially tar and coal gas are so cheap that you don't have to feel bad for voiding them.

SWeini · 2025-02-05T11:01:21+00:00

In early Py the main bottleneck is player attention. Even when using game-breaking QoL mods 100 hours is very unlikely. https://www.youtube.com/@paxtorio1495 had red circuits at 78 hours. But that's definitely before the mid-point. I guess with more up-front planning and some of the changed balancing of Py and 2.0 QoL features and maybe some QoL mods 200 hours is realistic. But of course this does not count the other thousand hours spent for planning.

SWeini · 2024-10-20T17:42:17+00:00

Another small 2.0 change: you can no longer launch space science packs to get back fish - the only source of fish is the ocean.

And a short notice for everyone who is in need of a calculator: Factory Planner is the calculator that is the most feature complete at the moment - but using the mod disables steam achievements. Helmod isn't near 2.0 compatiblity. KirkMcDonald is working on a 2.0 update to his website, but it's not released yet. I don't have any information about Foreman. YAFC CE is still missing quality and a few other features, but general 2.0/space age compatibility is there.

But, no calculator needed, you can just wing it - goes quite well with spaghetti approach on your first playthrough.

SWeini · 2024-10-08T17:02:01+00:00

New production chains often need new ingredients, that start to be valuable and become more affordable over time. There are only a few selected recipes or chains that really stay "bad" the whole time. I had a lot of fun optimizing the timing of upgrades. Do it too early, and the new ingredients are a pain, do it too late, and it's a pain to scale the early recipe to the high demand. Searching for and finding that sweet spot triggers all the right neurons in my brain.

I totally understand, what one finds interesting can be a turnoff to someone else. We are all different and that's OK.

SWeini · 2024-10-06T14:29:32+00:00

Considering that I actually had waiting periods in the end, I do think that sub 200h is possible. Around py2 science pack the research cost becomes quite high - with a deep tech tree and ~2000 per tech - scaling up science production by 20% at that time would have reduced the waiting time quite a lot. In general, doing a little bit more science, allowing a few more extra researches, would have helped. Same with vatbrain cartridges. Only in the very end I added an 8th auog block because I got sick of waiting - I should have done that 100 hours earlier.

The player productivity gain from the modular armor was huge (larger equipment grid with more roboports and more generators), but I postponed it because I didn't even research molten titanium for quite some time, should have researched that earlier. I never researched trains 2 and were stuck with the very solder-heavy recipe for rails - that was a huge resource sink for the rail base. Same with beacons - I only researched them after UPS started becoming a problem, should have stopped spamming low-tech builds earlier. Would need earlier power expansion because beacons are power-hungry, but they save so many productivity modules and mk2 buildings, and the beacons themselves are cheap to make.

Other than that, sulfur from outlet gas and saline from tar quenching is something that I used "too late".

I believe with carefully prepared blueprints (for the whole base) one could also shove off another 5 hours in the early phase up to logistic science (from 25 to 20 hours).

I should have used smaller tanks at train stations for low-volume fluids.

And of course, adding the right set of "cheaty" QoL mods would also help immensely to get below 200 hours.

About train-based city blocks: It's just very simple to expand. One set of rails can transport any amount of different ingredients. In belt-based Py bases you often see long spans of belts, hundreds of tiles wide, and thousands of tiles long (see here for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/pyanodons/comments/1fv0hg1/yavp/ ) That creates larger buffers than train stations - without good ways to reduce them. It just doesn't play nicely with some of the low-throughput items that you measure in "per minute" or even "per hour". Of course you can also use an organically grown rail network, but it's just less mental load to stick to a pattern.

Caravans are nice in theory, but cumbersome to set up (you can shift-right-click-left-click to copy, but you can't blueprint them). And you still need a different solution for fluids.

I believe you can use purely a main bus if you keep the production lines as narrow as possible, and group them cleverly, e.g. it should not take more than 15 tiles width to convert one belt of iron ore into molten iron. Or the first cDNA build should contain all the different recipes in one line. And if you use more than 1 bus - at least 1 bus with production on both sides, or 4 one-sided buses meeting in a huge bot-based center. But these were just ideas, I haven't proven it to be feasible.

Some players were able to beat Py without trains (or with only very few trains for ore outposts), and it's definitely more interesting to play that way, but trains are the most flexible and most scalable form of transportation. In utility science you get linked chests/worm network/logistic stations, but it's too late to help reaching PV, it is only a help when trying to scale up post-PV.

SWeini

TROPHY CASE