This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/DN52 on 2024-10-19 02:33:19+00:00.
...Because I am definitely playing it incorrectly.
I've never completed the game, but I've been working on this base for many months, off and on:
This is the largest and biggest base I have ever built in the game, I am up to purple science, and I think I should share a bit of my building philosophy to enlighten everyone as to my superior abilities:
- Everything, and I mean every single tile, of this base, has been placed by hand. This is because I am a dedicated purist committed to handcraftsmanship, and certainly not because I didn't understand how to get bots, or how they worked, or what level of science you needed to get them.
- I have never built a single, solitary train. This is because trains are scary, and I fear them. Well, more accurately, I fear building train stops, and I have the sneaking feeling that the trains will stop working if I stop watching them.
- Ratios sound like math. I hate doing fractions (I can do them, I just hate doing them.) Solution: Build so massively that the incredible inefficiency of my designs is overcome by the sheer bulk of the material being thrown at the problem. For example, that entire lower left area under the main bus, you know, that looks vaguely like a swastika scribbled by a drunken incontinent chimpanzee? Yeah, that's all for purple science. You need that kind of throughput if you want to fill up the entire 4-lane belt you're gonna run half-way across the map to feed that giant array of...uh...8 or so labs.
Now that you understand my brilliance, let's take a look at some of the finer details!
This is my starter base, all the way to the right on the map. You may notice that it's a schizoid mess of spaghetti, and that it operates using vastly obsolete equipment. Unfortunately, I still need it to continue producing certain necessary modules, such as electric miners and power poles, boilers and steam powerplants. Obviously it would be much wiser to tear down this base and replace it with a mall connected to the main bus (and eventually the logistics network if I ever manage that), but I have a very good reason for not doing so, which is that I can't be arsed.
The wonderful design of this base is that with many of my most basic needs placed on the right side, and all my construction efforts on the far left, every time I need something I can drive for 5 minutes across my base. You might think that this would get boring, but I compensated for that by placing lots of interesting obstacles all around the main belt, with no regard to creating any drivable space whatsoever. For example:
This is one of my more entertaining sections. If you try to drive down, you enter the main belt, which is of course going the opposite direction to the mall. If you go straight, you run into the oil field and then the mall, if you go down past the bus, you run into science production under the bus, and if you go up, you run into ANOTHER OIL FIELD! HAHAHA! The only plausible approach is to thread your way carefully north-east through a tangle of pipes and power poles, one of which you eventually hit, necessitating that you leave your car as a bookmark, then run to extreme right where everything is produces, grab one of what you just destroyed, and replace it. Alternatively, you can take your car, retrieve your items, and then spend forever trying to find what you broke. HOURS OF FUN!
I liked this theme so much I repeated it about four times along the whole length of the main bus.
You may be wondering what I needed that oil patch for. Well, I needed it for sulfur. What did I need that sulfur for? Well, for this:
No, I don't know what I was thinking there either.
Now, you may be wondering if there's anything I'm proud about. Well, the whole upper left section of the map is devoted to all forms of chemical processing:
Except I can't be too proud of it, because I cannot figure out combinators and tanks to save my engineer butt (and worse, I figured them out in the past of a previous base), and so my stop-gap solution has just been to produce massive tanks farms. I like tank farms, admittedly, but I have the feeling that this is eventually going to bite me in the tuckus.
Naturally, I built this whole thing way too close to the main bus.
I suppose I can also be proud of The Big Red Chip factory:
But that's only because I built it all by hand (because I'm dumb), and even then, it's not too exciting, because all of that, ALL OF IT...goes solely to the production of purple science. At full bore research, I'd calculate that, oh, maybe 40-60 of the assemblers are really working. Out of 200.
I said I overbuilt things, right?
Anyway, I love this game, this community seems great, and I just wanted to share how crap I am before Space Age!
