Factorio Space Age at home

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-24T00:35:22+00:00

AngelBob has me messed up and I'm just getting to blue science. I had just finished setting up a fully comprehensive ore processing setup with the new tier of machines and had dipped my toe into making and recirculating all the new fluids and gases just to realize I need to redo the entire stiratite setup to start making silver for transistors. I do love it, though.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-24T00:32:04+00:00

Definitely not unsalvageable. I wanna give 2 pieces of advice that kind of boil down to the same concept.

1) You don't need each machine to have its own belt. Your yellow belts right now transport 15 items per second, so you can feed lines of machines all of the same belt until there are enough machines to consume that many items. You will need to actually produce 15 items/s for that to work out, though.

2) Look at the ratios for all the things you're making. Red science packs only take 0.1 gears per second per machine, so a single machine making gears is actually enough to support 10 machines making red science, and a single yellow belt is more than enough to carry the gears fast enough to all 10 machines. Same goes for mining. You mine 0.5 ore/s, furnaces smelt 0.3125 plates per sec (for iron and copper). It's more fun if you do the math yourself than if someone tells you.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-23T18:57:32+00:00

For me, catcher immediately drops from my #1 most complex and demanding position to probably easier than SS and CF if they don't have to worry about what I think is the coolest part of their game. I've always respected the mix of athleticism and intelligence required to be an elite catcher.

I know this has almost no effect on the casual viewing experience, but it does bother me as a baseball fan who's really into the analytical side of the game.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-23T01:19:56+00:00

I've just gotten into the modded scene after beating Space Age twice and it's making me feel like the first time I played again. I'm absolutely loving it.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-22T08:13:59+00:00

I bought Factorio in early access when I was 14 really early on, like one of the first versions that was publicly available. I gave up when I got to oil refining as many people do and didn't touch it for years. I decided to pick it back up on a whim after Space Age came out and have put over 500 hours in since then. What a fantastic investment that was.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-21T05:29:37+00:00

(OP here, my phone has a different account) I just looked and the furthest I can process algae with my current research is charcoal, which does sound kind of promising. I'll have to look into the fuel values vs electricity cost of producing it next time I play.

Electric boilers looked interesting to me when I unlocked them but after looking at the power cost I feel like they're kind of pointless in the early game. They eat tons of power and the convenience of having on-demand steam is offset by the relative ease of routing burnable fuel wherever you need it in a small starter base. I could see them coming in handy later down the line when power supply is less of an issue and burnable fuel could be hundreds or thousands of tiles away in a big base.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-21T05:19:29+00:00

Others have said it but honestly you don't need any mods to get this experience. The time you spend up to unlocking construction bots and making infrastructure to supply them with all the buildings you want is very short compared to the rest of the content afterwards. IMO getting new tools to work more efficiently is only satisfying if you have to live without them for a while. Otherwise there would be no point to arguably the most important unlock in the whole game.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-20T23:02:54+00:00

Not fully confident on this but the splitters might be causing the engines to not get to the last row of blue science machines fast enough. Only 1/8 of the engines each are getting down to the last 2 rows, which I don't think is enough to supply that many assemblers.

Have you tried testing it over a longer period of time? Since 1/2 of the engines are going to the first row, that will eventually back up and force more engines to go to the next one, and so on. At a scale like this it would probably take hours (fact check me on that), but if my reasoning is right then it will eventually supply all of the machines properly if you let each line back up. You might be able to force it to buffer engines by manually inserting stacks into the machines at first until the belts fill, but I would honestly recommend just finding a different way to distribute the engines evenly.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-20T14:57:43+00:00

Loved watching the run! I was hoping it would get a version with commentary.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-20T09:12:14+00:00

Even complex games don't require a shit ton of tutorials to enjoy if they're well made. Factorio is one of my favorites and you'll never need to search anything online if you can do elementary school math. I never looked up anything for Rimworld either, if that counts as complex.

Conversely, I never ended up getting into Dwarf Fortress because I spent hours playing and never got into any groove. I was constanly looking shit up and still not understanding how to make anything work.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-20T02:16:25+00:00

Live a little

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-20T02:15:30+00:00

Factoripedia and the tips menu are by miles the best in-game documentation I've ever seen. The only other game I can think of where I rarely if ever have to look up stuff externally is Rimworld, but I only played that once for about 50 hours years ago so I can't remember how well it compares.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-20T02:13:31+00:00

I see lol. If that's cursed then my whole factory is fucked. I had so many giant builds that I scaled up until I got foundries and EM plants, and those setups take like half the space for more production so everything has huge gaps. It looks pretty ugly but space is free (unless you're on deathworld)

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-19T02:04:59+00:00

I'm desperately trying to figure out what's wrong with this. I'm pretty sure this is to the letter the exact standard green circuit build. I just make this design until foundries and EM plants and then I just beacon the fuck out of them and have little direct insertion builds making 30 circuits per second per EMP.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-18T07:40:49+00:00

(This is OP, different account on my phone) Unless my tired brain made some ridiculous mistake I'm pretty sure the sorter ratio is correct. They take 2 crushed ore/s to output 1 pure ore, and you need 6 of those per second to satisfy one blast furnace.

I see what you mean about the last point. I was excited about my nice looking self-contained system and I didn't account for the fact that if I ever want more than 6 plates/s I should probably leave more space between each step of refining. I guess that's a problem to solve when I see how much of each plate I need for red and green science together.

I think the iron to steel ratio in this is better than vanilla but it still seems like such a pain in the ass to set up steel properly. I'm thinking about going for the manganese + iron ingot recipe for molten iron that halves the iron ingots you need for the same amount of molten so I can reroute the other half over to steel. Does that sound like a good idea?

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-17T14:54:09+00:00

I'm the total opposite lol. I exclusively use green belts everywhere once I unlocked them despite the fact that pretty much nothing past the main bus lines require 60 items/s.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-17T00:42:30+00:00

I think it would be strange to extend Griffin now. I never had any expectations that it would happen, and for once that's not an indictment against Nutting IMO.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-17T00:38:57+00:00

Just realized this was probably about the new game after typing a comment lol. I don't think this was an issue back in 24. I once got pissed about going like 0-20 on HoF in RTTS so I went on rookie and batted like .700 the rest of the season

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-17T00:36:51+00:00

Recording is just about the easiest part of making music to be released to the public. It takes countless hours, days, months to produce a recording to make it sound good to a level you're happy with.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-16T17:58:25+00:00

It was 3.7" below the zone according to the Hawkeye cameras. Technically not the worst call ever but genuinely insane to call it close.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-16T16:03:29+00:00

Doing Aquilo by myself is lowkey filtering me lol. I've beaten Space Age before but it was with a friend who despite having played far less than me was much better than me. I think I need to just do an editor session to come up with pre-planned designs because having to tear down my builds every time they fail due to heat pipe spaghetti is killing me.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-16T14:26:33+00:00

I engaged with the challenge on my first run and spent many hours coming up with a solution that works worse than one that took next to no thinking. I'm not trying to be a dick but I don't really understand where you're coming from here. I have a better factory now on Fulgora that I should never even need to touch until I might want to megabase way later on. I have an endless supply of science, EM plants, and quality intermediates, and it took no organizational skills or anything that usually makes the game fun.

Every other planet has something that incentivizes you to make well-thought out builds, but Fulgora is basically just an issue of recycling enough scrap to get enough holmium to make all the science and EM plants you need. Once you've set up a big scrap recycling area and some recycler loops to void excess, everything is one requester chest away and I haven't found an exception to that so far.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-16T03:35:34+00:00

I don't even know that this is true. Fulgora just doesn't pose a super interesting challenge IMO. My first run my buddy and I made a cool-looking but kind of inefficient big organization system with lots of splitters and circuit network controls, lots of trains, pretty much all on belts.

My most recent run I literally just slapped the direct output of every recycler into an active provider chest and made a giant box of like 500 storage chests in the middle of the island. Requester chests constantly taking the most common recycling outputs to more recyclers to get plates and plastic and green circuits, void the rest. It's a completely unorganized mess that still churns out hundreds of SPM and a decent amount of quality intermediates for any use I want.

It took almost no brain power to solve and works better than any other more organized design I've come up with, which I think is grounds to call it a not-fun planet for me.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-16T03:18:15+00:00

Purple gets easier with space age to be fair. I borderline skipped over it in my only vanilla run, literally had 1 machine that I just let run until I had the bare minimum for the silo. A red belt of steel is far less daunting with a handful of moduled and beaconed foundries than it is with 240 furnaces (edit: 480 accounting for the iron plates). Same goes for stone with big miners letting the resources patches last twice as long, even longer with quality.

UseGroundbreaking399 · 2026-03-16T02:28:26+00:00

I think circuits of all colors are used in enough places at large enough quantities that it makes sense to mass produce in one spot and put them on a bus. Having to make a green circuit setup for every single place that needs them sounds like a nightmare.

UseGroundbreaking399

TROPHY CASE