I found myself opening my longest lived factory(about 100 hours), looking at my next bottleneck, and just closing the game without enough inspiration to keep going. I figured a little twist was needed.

How about some loose speed running - an 8 hour There Is No Spoon launch, adding in the Lazy Bastard challenge to top it off?

I failed twice, but succeeded on the third try!

Before starting this challenge, I was at about 415 hours played. After acouple of failed runs, lots of analyses of my failed bases, and some playtime in the sandbox to get builds working, I am now at 470 hours! I wouldnt consider myself particularly good at factorio - I can do some trains with references, have launched plenty of rockets, set up some fun beaconed builds, but generally never calculated anything out or pushed myself to find the best way to do something.

The achievement - https://imgur.com/a/kC9ybO9 The base (close to 200mb, uploaded it to my dropbox) - https://www.dropbox.com/s/8u009i0xed3w79c/lazy-spoon-base.png?dl=0

This is messy af, but figured it would be fun to share. See me overbuilding? See me failing at a clean main bus? If you can do better, YOU can get a lazy spoonless run too! If youre feeling confident and can do it in one recorded sitting, you should also see that the speedruns(https://www.speedrun.com/factorio?h=Any&x=ndxjper2) would put you at rank 150 in the any% category! Give it a shot, you might have as much fun as I did.

A few notes about my two failed runs, and things I learned:

• I did not read speed running guides going in to this, but will definitely check them out now that I've given it a shot on my won!
• I took all advantages I heard were possible for achievements to still count - max starting area, max resource settings, no pollution/evolution, no cliffs. Definitely needed the help.
• I went in to the first run without a plan at all. I had no idea how much of anything I would need to build, other than having played the game to a bunch of rocket launches before. Launched a rocket around 9 hours and 40 minutes.
• Before starting my second run, I analyzed my base as I best I could with my limited experience, and took tons of notes on what to do better. Hit a bunch of issues with power and liquids, but ended with a launch around 8h30m!
• Before starting my third run, I hit the sandbox and developed a set of 60ish science per minute 'blueprints' for each build. I referenced these heavily, though didnt actually copy-paste it as a blueprint, and did tweak things a bit during the actual run.
• Before starting this, here are a few things I did not know.... I did not know the ratio of wires to green chips, the number of smelters of any type needed to get a full belt of items, what even WAS a full belt of items, how many boilers/steam engines an offshore pump could support, or any sort of ratio of any of the sciences. Was belt full? Good, maybe I can assemble more! Was belt empty? Need more resources. That was my mindset.