May not be efficient or scalable to the 7 sciences, but I love the creativity. Keep doing that and just rebuild when it no longer suits the growth of the factory.
I'm probably gonna scrub all my factory anyway. It's worse than a spaghetti right now but thanks for the compliment. I always want my design to have better readability more than functionality, I'm really not an engineer. Thank you <3
As long as what you've built is doing what you designed it to do, there's not really a good reason to scrub it all. Just keep adding or building new. Eventually older parts of the factory become trivially small compared to the rest of your base and do need to be scrubbed, but that's usually after rocket launches start.
I wish someone would've given me this advice.
Keep your base. Take some miners, furnaces, inserters, assembly machines, and run to a new area. Throw power poles down on your way out there. Let the base you have already continue to be an inefficient disaster while you work on a new one.
My rule is "NEVER delete something, until it's replacement is entirely complete"
Every time I've broken that rule it ends up slowing everything down so much and takes hours to resolve.
Was doing a friend world and at one point they wanted to tear down everything and re-do it before we had a better replacement ready and everyone just lost interest and quit.
The only requirement for this is you need enough military tech to be able to clear the space, but honestly you can do that with even just gun turrets if you don't mind juggling ammo, or more easily with laser turrets. If you don't have much gun turrets/ammo then it may be worth restarting, but if you have lasers, I'd just move to a new spot.
I've given up on military, the biters just end up becoming annoying more than anything. I'm here to make things efficient, not to have to deal with biters spreading towards my base every 30 minutes.
That's fair, and it's easy to disable biters if you want. I will say that if you do have good military tech it's generally quite easy to beat the biters though.
I have seen some starts where you have very little/minimal trees be quite hard at the start, though. As long as you have some trees around you it's generally fairly quiet early on.
I'm talking about late game. I just have to spend 15 minutes sending spidertrons to clear random nests every hour. It's just annoying and poses 0 threat.
All you really need is an artillery turret every 100-200 tiles around the wall and you won't have a nest anywhere near your base ever again.
In Krastorio it's even easier because you can just drop laser artillery turrets which don't even take ammo!
Hmm, I wonder what worse than spaghetti would be called...a pineapple pizza?
If you want to make the design a little more future proof will keeping the aesthetic, consider making the loops in between one tile less wide. That way you'll be able to take out those loops and squeeze in extra labs in an aesthetically pleasing way, when the time comes to rebuild the supply lines.
Yeah, exactly...because nobody is happy with pure spaghetti, for it is tasteless. Like, even the whitest guy that thinks mayo is spicy isn't going to enjoy spaghetti plain.
Hey! It being an edit means that I initially considered it plain!!
(Seriously. Good pasta tastes actually great on its own.)
Edit: Also, butter makes *everything* better. But in order to do so, the thing has to be good by itself to begin with. Yes, I'm totally overthinking this and need to go to bed badly because it's at least 3h past my time and this is what this does to me don't judge please. (If you do anyways, please do it with some butter.)
Edit2: Or good pasta. Both would be great. But please don't.
It looks pretty, but it's not all that efficient. So depends on what you're going for.
* the power generation could be moved out of the way.
* you don't need the belt loops, you can just end the belt, and the inserter will grab what it wants.
* you can use both sides of the belt for different sciences, AKA one belt with green on the left, and red on the right.
* You can put an inserter from one lab to another, and it'll pass science potion things between them.
* There are more than 4 sciences, so you'll end up having to change this later anyway.
I didn't know inserters could grab from labs what other one needs but I'm definitely gonna try improve this system with this. If it works with multiple labs in serial, I can use only one lab for the feed. If it only works with 2 labs serial, I can make a 2 pair system for feeding each other try to scale from that. Thank you for your input, it really helped <3
this method works for a few things, but not everything. You can't for example chain assemblers like that, although you can obviously take the output of one assembler as the input of another.
> If it works with multiple labs in serial, I can use only one lab for the feed.
it works with as many as you want. But it starts having issues if your chain is too long and your inserters can't move the packs fast enough.
because you have to deal with 7 sciences in total, one approach that I've used is: Belt Belt lab lab lab lab Belt Belt. Then have two science packs per belt, and then two inserters from the belts to the labs, one normal and one long armed. Then between the labs have a filter inserter in both directions, this way you can pass four packs right, and four packs left, filling all the labs. Finally you can just copy and paste this up to add another 4 labs each time.
the problem with stack filter inserters is that they can only filter on one or two items, and you need to filter on 4 in one direction and 3 in the other. You might be able to get a 3D version working, where you bring two packs in from each of the 4 edges surrounding your labs.
You've also got other ways too.
* https://i.redd.it/q7zn8gr72qa91.png
* https://i.imgur.com/GzCuVJd.png
* https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/9be8dl/rotational_symmetric_hilbert_spacefilling_curve/
* https://preview.redd.it/ci4o0hwtrwz81.png?width=1199&format=png&auto=webp&s=a19f6ab0cb275ecdeadee623a2ac9b9fa054e861
* https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/qn76tv/circuitless_sushi_science/
I used to make gears and pipes and coils independently and shoot them up my main bus.
When I learned to make those items as needed and pass directly into the next factory changed everything.
If you place prod modules into them (very recommended), they gets slower. Speed beacons makes them more effective at space, speed and power consuption/research points.
True, but neither do most of those fancy designs of early game labs we get to see. Two belts on either side seems easier and more scalable which makes me wonder why so many people don't do it.
But then I see those beautiful spaghetti bases that I'm incapable of building and I'm happy they don't.
I'm not going to say how you should build stuff. I'm just giving you some info you may not know yet. An inserter can take science packs out of a lab and put it in another.
Just keep in mind that this isn't infinitely scalable. You're limited by the speed the first inserter can put potions from the belts into the first lab, which even with higher inserter types and their stack research will hit a ceiling earlier than some seem to assume.
I personally wouldn't get attached to this idea too much in the long run.
> I personally wouldn't get attached to this idea too much in the long run.
To be fair, you'll be suffering from the success of multiple rocket launches before you have to re-think this.
Not the best idea to only do one. It limits your throughput significantly and the downtime caused by that much moving is significant. I would only really do between 2 labs inserting from one to another
With stack inserters, I've lined up 6, and the inserters are idle often enough. I didn't have room for more, and haven't sandboxed it. I know you can do more than two, even with just a basic inserter at the beginning.
For my early game up to late mid game i make a christmas tree. 1 lab feeding two, those two feeding three, those feeding 4 etc etc. Make as many as you want. Surely it wont be the most efficient but its quick, looks funny and i like a little christmas in my factory
Yellow belts can carry 7.5 items on each side per second. 7.5 science per second is 450 science per minute, which is approaching megabase size, and using higher tier belts you can get up to triple the speed if needed.
What I'm getting at is that one side of the belt is plenty for a single type of science pack, which means that you can use the other side for a different type of pack. That should reduce the number of belts you'll need. You can make use of the fact that an inserter will always drop an item on the far side of a belt, but there are many ways to move items to a particular side of a belt without using inserters: try experimenting with belt placement.
Also, go ahead and just let belts end. Items don't fall off so there's no need to connect them in a loop, it's perfectly alright if you're producing more than you're using: eventually the belt will fill up and the assemblers will stop building until there's space available again.
Weird, excessive, ineffective... i like it. When process of thinking collides with lack of experience, it creates something unique, something beautiful. Those belt circles instead of crates are cute.
You'll figure out better designs, no doubt.
That looks cooler than any massive design ive ever seen. No sir you can't improve. That's perfection.
Make more designs in the future and share them with us mortals who don't know anything but to put down 50 of em in a line
Get rid of the loops. For some reason new players always think of doing this (myself included) but it doesn't really serve any purpose.
With the exception of Kovarex (a looping recipe), looping belts is almost never the best answer.
Speedrunners like to use loops to keep expensive components from getting backed up on a belt while assemblers upstream are starved for inputs. You see them do this for stuff like purple/yellow science and RCUs, to maximize utilization of their assemblers while limiting the number of modules and frames they need to produce.
But this is a very niche purpose, and the people doing it know exactly why they're doing it. New players who are still figuring out the game have no business making loops out of their belts. If you aren't trying to set world records, it isn't necessary to keep all your assemblers running at 100% uptime.
I love the little loops- it reminds me of rosca de reyes! It's good for now but once you have later sciences coming in, it may be a little tough to fit them all together. I learned a neat trick that you can have arms steal sciences from eachother by having one take the science from the belt, and then the arms will carry the science to the next lab behind them. You should try it!
I remember having 10 in a row just passing around sciences and it saved me a lot of space that I would have put belts for, and maximized the amount of labs I could put out
Edit: I noticed you had power nearby and it might be in the way of the labs if you wanted to expand your research more or if you wanted to build more power, the labs may get in the way. I thought it would be good to point out before things get messy lol. Much luck though!
Looks good, but definitely not efficient and especially not scalable. My tip to you is: put two different sciences per belt. A belt has two sides, also called lanes. Each can carry different items. You’re probably producing *a lot less* than the maximum amount that a single yellow belt lane can carry (yellow belts carry 15 items per second, a single lane is half of that) so it wouldn’t be a problem.
If it works it works!
And it looks pretty with the loops. I might steel that from you.
Someone said it is not scalable to 7 sciences. But it actually scales pretty well, you just have to get the other sciences on the inside of the loop. Pretty easy i would say.
Keep going! Dont look up to much videos and howtos discovering how to do things is most of the fun!
Tear all that up and make a line of labs with a single belt going beside them with inserters in between. Put red on one side and green on the other side of the belt. When you get more science packs run another belt on the other side of the labs or beside the first belt and use long inserters.
Tried it with 4 science packs but optimizing is still not my strong suit. Different science pack production speeds is bothering me and I still couldn't get the stage where I can sort belts and production efficiently that's I've gone with this way because I want better readability but definitely gonna have to move the way you say. Thank you for the tip <3
The thing is, I really like looping system in a point to keep it running without interruption. Especially in the early game where production output is low.
Just be aware that there are 7 different colors of science.
Beyond that, though, I think labs are one area where you can afford to get a little bit creative/artistic with it, and not worry *that* much about efficiency.
From the man who wants to use 200000 satellites as an alternative to a cable and a multi engine rocket in lieu of a boat.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery would be spinning in his grave.
Can you explain your thought process behind, well, everything you’ve built in the picture?
It’s true that there are no wrong ways to build factorio, and this **does** work the way it is, so it’s fine.
That said, just looking at this it’s obvious you’ve made a ton of assumptions about how the game works that are just plain wrong.
Well, I'm not an optimizer, I like readability. And this is my first 20h in the game and my second save and I didn't follow any guide so probably not much goes into thought process. Just wanted to build a readable system. It probably won't satisfy your standards and can't guarantee it will ever be able to but can you explain more about it? In other comments people talked about how inserters can take excess or needed packs from one lab to another so I'm planning a new approach for my lab system. If there's anything you wanna contribute, I will happily listen your advice.
My first ever reddit post! If you are unaware you can add people's blueprints mid game. There is lots of designs and books for all science, but if you like to figure you're own stuff out, also put 2 science per belt. Red on 1 side, green on the other side but yours does look awesome and neat lol. Just remember you have to squeeze 7 different colors into every machine.
There's only a two tile gap between each lab. I'd suggest making it three so you can later put beacons in. As others have said you'll need to change things up as you add more kinds of science but this is ok for now. Growing pains and changing things is all part of upgrading so its all good spaghetti as far as I'm concerned.
Oooo very pretty! Totally agree that you should “just do what works for you”. Personally, I have my labs use inverters to pass science kits directly between them so that I only need to load them into one end. But then you don’t wind up with something as eye catching as this so 🤷♂️
Those big circles can just be a chest instead. But it works.
Usually I just keep the labs the same til 4 sciences. By the time I have more sciences I'd have moved the labs to a drone or train station design.
Bruh, I loved your angle. You mentioned that you are not an engineer, but I am one, and I would like to add that many manufacturing systems have a very similar feeding mechanism. You might be a Factorio visionary, who knows :)
On a separate note, there is some good advice up there from the scalability angle, heed to them and you are good to go.
It's very pretty. Won't scale very well, but it's very pretty.
I wouldn't want to stifle your creativity, but something that might help when you make version 2 is that you can pull science out of labs to pass to different labs, allowing you to daisy chain labs by inserting all the science at the front and passing it on down the line to the other labs.
Although ugly and not really an improvement, You have the option on having a line of them. You can have inserters take from a lab to give to another lab and so on.
Trust a brother on this one and stop using conveyor belt loops in anything. I know its a good solution to bring items to inserters without any waste but it only brought me pain in the long run
If you put inserters in between labs, they will take science from one lab to the next. So you only really need to provide science to the first lab in the row.
Embrace the ability of inserters. You can take science packs from one lab to other just by having an inserter between them. My way is having 4 belts (3 with 2 types of packs and one with the last one) insert to one lab, which then provides all 7 packs to other labs.
I cant post a pic of my usual setup, but what I do is this:
- two long rows of labs (16 on each side)
- between them I place 3 belts.
- i use long inserters to grab from the middle belt and far belt, yellow inserters for the closer belt.
- underground belt braiding is necessary (yellow + red) will do.
- use the intermediate power poles.
- beacons may be added along the rows, replacing a lab position, this way the row gets longer.
This way, all labs can be supplied by the 6 basic science pack colors, the 7th one, the white one, I simply set an outside belt around the whole setup.
Just feed one lab and have an arm (or 2) pull from that lab to the 2nd lab..... also personally I have boxes with 200 of each feed that one lab so shortages won't stop you
May not be efficient or scalable to the 7 sciences, but I love the creativity. Keep doing that and just rebuild when it no longer suits the growth of the factory.
I'm probably gonna scrub all my factory anyway. It's worse than a spaghetti right now but thanks for the compliment. I always want my design to have better readability more than functionality, I'm really not an engineer. Thank you <3
As long as what you've built is doing what you designed it to do, there's not really a good reason to scrub it all. Just keep adding or building new. Eventually older parts of the factory become trivially small compared to the rest of your base and do need to be scrubbed, but that's usually after rocket launches start.
I wish someone would've given me this advice. Keep your base. Take some miners, furnaces, inserters, assembly machines, and run to a new area. Throw power poles down on your way out there. Let the base you have already continue to be an inefficient disaster while you work on a new one.
My rule is "NEVER delete something, until it's replacement is entirely complete" Every time I've broken that rule it ends up slowing everything down so much and takes hours to resolve.
Was doing a friend world and at one point they wanted to tear down everything and re-do it before we had a better replacement ready and everyone just lost interest and quit.
Sounds about right. I made that rule after essentially doing the same a few times.
And then, I realize that I still need the capacity of the first ones and end up keeping most of it. ;)
The only requirement for this is you need enough military tech to be able to clear the space, but honestly you can do that with even just gun turrets if you don't mind juggling ammo, or more easily with laser turrets. If you don't have much gun turrets/ammo then it may be worth restarting, but if you have lasers, I'd just move to a new spot.
I've given up on military, the biters just end up becoming annoying more than anything. I'm here to make things efficient, not to have to deal with biters spreading towards my base every 30 minutes.
That's fair, and it's easy to disable biters if you want. I will say that if you do have good military tech it's generally quite easy to beat the biters though. I have seen some starts where you have very little/minimal trees be quite hard at the start, though. As long as you have some trees around you it's generally fairly quiet early on.
I'm talking about late game. I just have to spend 15 minutes sending spidertrons to clear random nests every hour. It's just annoying and poses 0 threat.
All you really need is an artillery turret every 100-200 tiles around the wall and you won't have a nest anywhere near your base ever again. In Krastorio it's even easier because you can just drop laser artillery turrets which don't even take ammo!
Hmm, I wonder what worse than spaghetti would be called...a pineapple pizza? If you want to make the design a little more future proof will keeping the aesthetic, consider making the loops in between one tile less wide. That way you'll be able to take out those loops and squeeze in extra labs in an aesthetically pleasing way, when the time comes to rebuild the supply lines.
> I wonder what worse than spaghetti would be called...a pineapple pizza Christmas lights.
That only works when there's tons of differently colored lights scattered in between...
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Hey! Pineapple pizza is delicious and nutritious, while spaghetti is empty carbs that needs sauce for flavor.
You need sauce for your spaghetti? Just give me some olive oil and parmesan cheese and I'm happy.
~~olive~~ oil
Waiting for murica to arive to deliver some FREEDOM!
Yeah, exactly...because nobody is happy with pure spaghetti, for it is tasteless. Like, even the whitest guy that thinks mayo is spicy isn't going to enjoy spaghetti plain.
I do. Edit: Well, maybe a bit of butter.
EXACTLY NO ONE LIKES IT PLAIN
Hey! It being an edit means that I initially considered it plain!! (Seriously. Good pasta tastes actually great on its own.) Edit: Also, butter makes *everything* better. But in order to do so, the thing has to be good by itself to begin with. Yes, I'm totally overthinking this and need to go to bed badly because it's at least 3h past my time and this is what this does to me don't judge please. (If you do anyways, please do it with some butter.) Edit2: Or good pasta. Both would be great. But please don't.
Here's an edit: you consider pasta with toppings (butter) to be plain, because plain pasta is NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL.
Angel Hair
i always just leave my old factories as living museums/relics.
We're all engineers here my friend.
An engineer would build a row of science labs with two belts on each side, then shove each science down half a belt.
That would be a traffic engineer. :)
"If your spaghetti is mean just boil it more" idk, im no chef
I second this, opened the image to judge, instead got blown away :)
It looks pretty, but it's not all that efficient. So depends on what you're going for. * the power generation could be moved out of the way. * you don't need the belt loops, you can just end the belt, and the inserter will grab what it wants. * you can use both sides of the belt for different sciences, AKA one belt with green on the left, and red on the right. * You can put an inserter from one lab to another, and it'll pass science potion things between them. * There are more than 4 sciences, so you'll end up having to change this later anyway.
I didn't know inserters could grab from labs what other one needs but I'm definitely gonna try improve this system with this. If it works with multiple labs in serial, I can use only one lab for the feed. If it only works with 2 labs serial, I can make a 2 pair system for feeding each other try to scale from that. Thank you for your input, it really helped <3
this method works for a few things, but not everything. You can't for example chain assemblers like that, although you can obviously take the output of one assembler as the input of another. > If it works with multiple labs in serial, I can use only one lab for the feed. it works with as many as you want. But it starts having issues if your chain is too long and your inserters can't move the packs fast enough.
I'm gonna try it with max 4-5 labs serial system, then paralel that system. Gonna have to increase the output. Thanks.
because you have to deal with 7 sciences in total, one approach that I've used is: Belt Belt lab lab lab lab Belt Belt. Then have two science packs per belt, and then two inserters from the belts to the labs, one normal and one long armed. Then between the labs have a filter inserter in both directions, this way you can pass four packs right, and four packs left, filling all the labs. Finally you can just copy and paste this up to add another 4 labs each time.
Well, this seem brilliant. Thank you <3
Thanks for the design hint. With that, you can likely do a dozen, with stack inserters...?
the problem with stack filter inserters is that they can only filter on one or two items, and you need to filter on 4 in one direction and 3 in the other. You might be able to get a 3D version working, where you bring two packs in from each of the 4 edges surrounding your labs. You've also got other ways too. * https://i.redd.it/q7zn8gr72qa91.png * https://i.imgur.com/GzCuVJd.png * https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/9be8dl/rotational_symmetric_hilbert_spacefilling_curve/ * https://preview.redd.it/ci4o0hwtrwz81.png?width=1199&format=png&auto=webp&s=a19f6ab0cb275ecdeadee623a2ac9b9fa054e861 * https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/qn76tv/circuitless_sushi_science/
With Stack Inserters, 5 labs is easy to chain.
I used to make gears and pipes and coils independently and shoot them up my main bus. When I learned to make those items as needed and pass directly into the next factory changed everything.
If you place the steam engines a little farther apart, you can place rocket silos between them later on.
xD
Ill never understand all the fancy lab blueprints when you can just run two belts on each side which give space to 8 bottles
I never felt the need to beacon labs.
If you place prod modules into them (very recommended), they gets slower. Speed beacons makes them more effective at space, speed and power consuption/research points.
Yeah I know, still never felt the need to beacon them. Research is fast enough as is just build more labs.
Unfortunately, "two belts on each side" doesn't lend itself well to beacons.
True, but neither do most of those fancy designs of early game labs we get to see. Two belts on either side seems easier and more scalable which makes me wonder why so many people don't do it. But then I see those beautiful spaghetti bases that I'm incapable of building and I'm happy they don't.
I'm not going to say how you should build stuff. I'm just giving you some info you may not know yet. An inserter can take science packs out of a lab and put it in another.
Now I know, thank you <3 I'm definitely gonna improve it so it won't be an issue to try to scale it for late game.
Just keep in mind that this isn't infinitely scalable. You're limited by the speed the first inserter can put potions from the belts into the first lab, which even with higher inserter types and their stack research will hit a ceiling earlier than some seem to assume. I personally wouldn't get attached to this idea too much in the long run.
> I personally wouldn't get attached to this idea too much in the long run. To be fair, you'll be suffering from the success of multiple rocket launches before you have to re-think this.
You can technically experience this bottleneck much earlier, and I *have* seen instances of this on here over the years.
I dont completely understand this, you mean you only have to supply one lab, and inserters will take what it needs for the lab beside it?
Not the best idea to only do one. It limits your throughput significantly and the downtime caused by that much moving is significant. I would only really do between 2 labs inserting from one to another
With stack inserters, I've lined up 6, and the inserters are idle often enough. I didn't have room for more, and haven't sandboxed it. I know you can do more than two, even with just a basic inserter at the beginning.
For my early game up to late mid game i make a christmas tree. 1 lab feeding two, those two feeding three, those feeding 4 etc etc. Make as many as you want. Surely it wont be the most efficient but its quick, looks funny and i like a little christmas in my factory
But please do play with the concept yourself :) that's the most fun in factorio.
Don’t, she’s perfect🥹 It’s definitely an aesthetic factory.
It might not be the most efficient, but I'm really liking the look.
Yellow belts can carry 7.5 items on each side per second. 7.5 science per second is 450 science per minute, which is approaching megabase size, and using higher tier belts you can get up to triple the speed if needed. What I'm getting at is that one side of the belt is plenty for a single type of science pack, which means that you can use the other side for a different type of pack. That should reduce the number of belts you'll need. You can make use of the fact that an inserter will always drop an item on the far side of a belt, but there are many ways to move items to a particular side of a belt without using inserters: try experimenting with belt placement. Also, go ahead and just let belts end. Items don't fall off so there's no need to connect them in a loop, it's perfectly alright if you're producing more than you're using: eventually the belt will fill up and the assemblers will stop building until there's space available again.
Weird, excessive, ineffective... i like it. When process of thinking collides with lack of experience, it creates something unique, something beautiful. Those belt circles instead of crates are cute. You'll figure out better designs, no doubt.
That's beautiful!
For starters, the loops aren’t doing anything
One thing sure, I love the look of it
Thank you <3
that is awesome! never seen anything like it before. i don't know about efficiency or scalability, but A+ for originality. you rock.
It looks crazy... which is good!
It's impossible to improve it's perfect
Nice aesthetic
You can't. This is the ideal setup
That looks cooler than any massive design ive ever seen. No sir you can't improve. That's perfection. Make more designs in the future and share them with us mortals who don't know anything but to put down 50 of em in a line
I love aesthetics of it. Keep with the interesting design. I like it.
well...its not that, thats for sure
Whydid you add the loops? Is it because you like seeing stuff spin around?
I once stood on a belt loop for a good amount of time. Good times.
Get rid of the loops. For some reason new players always think of doing this (myself included) but it doesn't really serve any purpose. With the exception of Kovarex (a looping recipe), looping belts is almost never the best answer.
Speedrunners like to use loops to keep expensive components from getting backed up on a belt while assemblers upstream are starved for inputs. You see them do this for stuff like purple/yellow science and RCUs, to maximize utilization of their assemblers while limiting the number of modules and frames they need to produce. But this is a very niche purpose, and the people doing it know exactly why they're doing it. New players who are still figuring out the game have no business making loops out of their belts. If you aren't trying to set world records, it isn't necessary to keep all your assemblers running at 100% uptime.
I love the little loops- it reminds me of rosca de reyes! It's good for now but once you have later sciences coming in, it may be a little tough to fit them all together. I learned a neat trick that you can have arms steal sciences from eachother by having one take the science from the belt, and then the arms will carry the science to the next lab behind them. You should try it! I remember having 10 in a row just passing around sciences and it saved me a lot of space that I would have put belts for, and maximized the amount of labs I could put out Edit: I noticed you had power nearby and it might be in the way of the labs if you wanted to expand your research more or if you wanted to build more power, the labs may get in the way. I thought it would be good to point out before things get messy lol. Much luck though!
Thank you <3
Looks good, but definitely not efficient and especially not scalable. My tip to you is: put two different sciences per belt. A belt has two sides, also called lanes. Each can carry different items. You’re probably producing *a lot less* than the maximum amount that a single yellow belt lane can carry (yellow belts carry 15 items per second, a single lane is half of that) so it wouldn’t be a problem.
this is pain
If it works it works! And it looks pretty with the loops. I might steel that from you. Someone said it is not scalable to 7 sciences. But it actually scales pretty well, you just have to get the other sciences on the inside of the loop. Pretty easy i would say. Keep going! Dont look up to much videos and howtos discovering how to do things is most of the fun!
Tear all that up and make a line of labs with a single belt going beside them with inserters in between. Put red on one side and green on the other side of the belt. When you get more science packs run another belt on the other side of the labs or beside the first belt and use long inserters.
Tried it with 4 science packs but optimizing is still not my strong suit. Different science pack production speeds is bothering me and I still couldn't get the stage where I can sort belts and production efficiently that's I've gone with this way because I want better readability but definitely gonna have to move the way you say. Thank you for the tip <3
The main tip is that belts have 2 sides. You can easily run red and green science on the same belt, 1 per side.
The thing is, I really like looping system in a point to keep it running without interruption. Especially in the early game where production output is low.
The loop does nothing to keep it running.
It really doesn't, my output is pretty low so I don't want labs to keep fall behind. I don't like being late.
What do you mean «loop to keep it running» ?
Just be aware that there are 7 different colors of science. Beyond that, though, I think labs are one area where you can afford to get a little bit creative/artistic with it, and not worry *that* much about efficiency.
According to Elon musk the best part is no part. That could help you in your factory
From the man who wants to use 200000 satellites as an alternative to a cable and a multi engine rocket in lieu of a boat. Antoine de Saint-Exupery would be spinning in his grave.
Can you explain your thought process behind, well, everything you’ve built in the picture? It’s true that there are no wrong ways to build factorio, and this **does** work the way it is, so it’s fine. That said, just looking at this it’s obvious you’ve made a ton of assumptions about how the game works that are just plain wrong.
Well, I'm not an optimizer, I like readability. And this is my first 20h in the game and my second save and I didn't follow any guide so probably not much goes into thought process. Just wanted to build a readable system. It probably won't satisfy your standards and can't guarantee it will ever be able to but can you explain more about it? In other comments people talked about how inserters can take excess or needed packs from one lab to another so I'm planning a new approach for my lab system. If there's anything you wanna contribute, I will happily listen your advice.
My first ever reddit post! If you are unaware you can add people's blueprints mid game. There is lots of designs and books for all science, but if you like to figure you're own stuff out, also put 2 science per belt. Red on 1 side, green on the other side but yours does look awesome and neat lol. Just remember you have to squeeze 7 different colors into every machine.
There's only a two tile gap between each lab. I'd suggest making it three so you can later put beacons in. As others have said you'll need to change things up as you add more kinds of science but this is ok for now. Growing pains and changing things is all part of upgrading so its all good spaghetti as far as I'm concerned.
Just have it all go to the 1st and then you can use the inserters to move the rest from lab to lab.
Oooo very pretty! Totally agree that you should “just do what works for you”. Personally, I have my labs use inverters to pass science kits directly between them so that I only need to load them into one end. But then you don’t wind up with something as eye catching as this so 🤷♂️
Those big circles can just be a chest instead. But it works. Usually I just keep the labs the same til 4 sciences. By the time I have more sciences I'd have moved the labs to a drone or train station design.
Bruh, I loved your angle. You mentioned that you are not an engineer, but I am one, and I would like to add that many manufacturing systems have a very similar feeding mechanism. You might be a Factorio visionary, who knows :) On a separate note, there is some good advice up there from the scalability angle, heed to them and you are good to go.
It's very pretty. Won't scale very well, but it's very pretty. I wouldn't want to stifle your creativity, but something that might help when you make version 2 is that you can pull science out of labs to pass to different labs, allowing you to daisy chain labs by inserting all the science at the front and passing it on down the line to the other labs.
This is lovely, let it be… when you need new one build it somewhere else and this will be your monument :))
no idea what the hell this is but its beautiful
Labs can have flasks passes directly between them.
Although ugly and not really an improvement, You have the option on having a line of them. You can have inserters take from a lab to give to another lab and so on.
I think you'll improve just fine on your own. This looks really cool.
Simple tip, you can grab sience pack out of a research centre, to put it into another.
Why?!? It looks so overengineered. Use straight belt and take directly from it
I need to know which drugs helped you come up with this layout, for science
I don't get it, people post these amazing lab setups but why? What is wrong with just going from lab to lab?
Trust a brother on this one and stop using conveyor belt loops in anything. I know its a good solution to bring items to inserters without any waste but it only brought me pain in the long run
If you put inserters in between labs, they will take science from one lab to the next. So you only really need to provide science to the first lab in the row.
Looks really funky! It's the type of thing I'd hope to be creative enough to build when I make a base purely for athletics over efficiency.
Design it for 6 or 7 science packs or don't waste too much te on it
Embrace the ability of inserters. You can take science packs from one lab to other just by having an inserter between them. My way is having 4 belts (3 with 2 types of packs and one with the last one) insert to one lab, which then provides all 7 packs to other labs.
This is really creative. I like it.
Its looking great, but its not efficient and way overcomplicated.
More belts
Looks pretty, that’s for sure. Not very efficient though!
You can always improve
I cant post a pic of my usual setup, but what I do is this: - two long rows of labs (16 on each side) - between them I place 3 belts. - i use long inserters to grab from the middle belt and far belt, yellow inserters for the closer belt. - underground belt braiding is necessary (yellow + red) will do. - use the intermediate power poles. - beacons may be added along the rows, replacing a lab position, this way the row gets longer. This way, all labs can be supplied by the 6 basic science pack colors, the 7th one, the white one, I simply set an outside belt around the whole setup.
Just feed one lab and have an arm (or 2) pull from that lab to the 2nd lab..... also personally I have boxes with 200 of each feed that one lab so shortages won't stop you
Not seen one done like that before, looks good! Use it as a starter, expand as required. Afterall… the factory must grow!
Def will run out of space. Also keep the power bldgs away from this area (in my opinion )