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The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/Hanodest on 2024-10-12 02:01:43+00:00.
This is a very late game factory of my playthrough of Nullius on 10x science multiplier. The only other game-changing mod was LTN, everything else was just the usual QoL. There were no loaders, advanced pipes, inserters, or anything else of that nature.
View of the whole base.
Top-left is my science area. Labs can consume 13.5 kSPM. Some beacons are missing a speed module to keep the consumption an this rate. These 4 rocket silos for my astronomical science work in perfect sync almost non-stop, and have almost 10k rocket launches each.
To the right is my mining area. One of the late researches allows to spawn large patches of resources anywhere on the map, and I think that without that I'd spend all of my time creating new outposts. The ore is mined directly into boxing assemblers, so that I can fit an equivalent of 3000 ore/second in only 8 belts. All the ores are crushed in place before being sent to trains.
Even further to the right is my main smelting area. Those builds are all pretty straighforward, but massive, which makes them nice in their own way. Iron and steel smelting.
Top-right is my my first production area of intermediate materials. There's no particular system in that. Position of some blocks was selected to be near a lake, the rest just put wherever it fits. This area mostly deals with solids, so many of the builds are just boring rows of assemblers. Although, first two tiers of solar panels turned out pretty nice.
Bottom-right is my second area of intermediates. It was built later, so it has more of larger builds, and most of the fluid processing.
Plastic is something that I rebuilt probably the largest number of times. I think that this is the 7th version. The 2nd one was the first time in this playthrough when I ran into a fluid throughput problems when trying to produce mere 15/s. This largely determined many of my later designs, where builds are segmented, and fluid pipes are shared between just a few machines.
Lithium is a build that abuses byproduct production, and I'm not sure that this chain is intentional. Normally the chain starts with a seawater (which is what you get when you place a pump on a water), which you filter down and void the byproducts. The problem is that the seawater pumps are pretty slow, and even when fully beaconed, you need a lot of those. But in this case the byproducts can be conveniently turned into heavy water, which is the main input for anything nuclear, and saline water which goes back into the loop. With sufficient productivity bonuses this whole loop becomes positive, and just needs to void a lot of regular water, and a bit of the saline one.
Styrene is a pretty interesting chain. Zero inputs, a single output that goes into chemical science, and a single byproduct of wastewater that goes into the nearest lake. Rocket fuel factory is a fancy mess that you get when you need to feed 6 solid inputs and 3 fluids into a regular 3x3 chemical plant, and have a fluid byproduct on top. This was my mid-game attempt to produce ethylene, propene and benzene all in one centralized place, and have them all balanced. That didn't scale well into the endgame, but there are still a few low-throughput builds that rely on this. Epoxy was one of the most difficult build to lay out in a decent manner.
Bottom part of the factory is dedicated to bioprocessing. Most of the chains here involve loops, which creates its own challenges.
Algae is probably my favourite build of the whole base because of how many belts and pipes I had to fit into a pretty constrained space. Grass is something where it's not clear what is the main product, and what is a byproduct, so I built two separate chains side-by-side. One outputs grass, and a bit of cellulose, the other one - a lot of cellulose and some sugar. Despite being the same recipe, the layouts turned out to be very different. Wood production holds the record of fluid throughput - each second it consumes 155k, and produces 85k oxygen. By comparison, fish build is pretty straighforward. The only trick here is to use the same belt for both output and input of fish eggs, and loop those back to ensure that the top machines don't get starved. Compost is the only build where I put two halves in a single line.
Interestingly enough, even at this scale sometimes a single building is everything you need for the whole factory. This refinery produces all the fatty acids needed for the whole bioscience. The contraption on the left is a negative loop of wastewater<->sludge, which allows to get regular water (or steam in this case) without access to water tiles.
Bottom-left is a large field of solar+wind, which produces all of the factory's power. In the center of the base there's still old thermal solar that was useful in the midgame when I couldn't produce accumulators at scale, and it conveniently can accumulate energy as a heat instead.
Far top is my biter zoo. Biters are not a focus of this mod, and you spawn them pretty late in the game as a part of the victory condition. Technically, I could exterminate them afterwards, but given that they are easy to contain, I decided to keep them.
Far right is my terraforming project. As one of the victory conditions I nuked this whole area into a giant lake. And then decided that a lake is boring, so I landfilled it back and paved in colored concrete. The colors of the image are quite off, but I consider it to be good enough.
The last major milestone was launching space probes at 477 hours. At that point I had everything to achieve the victory condition, but I didn't bother doing that for another 50 hours or so.
My main endgame goal was to research Mecha-2, the final non-infinite technology. And for that I needed to scale my factory from 1.5 kSPM that I had at that point up to 13.5k which was my chosen goal. Even with that the final research itself took over 30 hours, and just as much - for its prerequisites. The result was honestly a bit underwhelming - it looks just as a Mecha-1, and I didn't even use it. But it's mostly been an excuse to build a large factory anyway.
In the end, the factory may sustain 13.5 kSPM consistently for mining productivity research, which uses double the number of geology research packs. It may also sustain 60 SPM of each of bio research packs, but only while the main factory is running - otherwise it eventually cannot get rid of some of byproducts. The game still runs at steady 60 UPS, with quite a bit of update time to spare.
Overall, this is probably my favourite overhaul mod out of all I played so far. It gave a nice variety of challenges, and at no point it felt boring or repetitive in the same way as K2+SE or Seablock felt at times. Although, it's not without problems.
The good:
- Large focus on fluids and fluid-based production chains. Fluid throughput was almost always a consideration, and created interesting puzzles for many different builds. I'm really glad that I got to play this before the fluid rework coming in 2.0.
- Large focus on byproducts. Some of them were a problem from the very start of the game that got fully solved only at the very end. In-between there were may swings from "how do I get rid of this" to "how can I get more of this" and back.
- Different production chains posing different challenges. Smelting was all pretty straightforward, but had a huge material throughput. Electronics was low material throughput, but large number of different ingredients. Bioprocessing had many different loops, and almost all recipes are in some way interconnected.
- Wide area beacons. They can only be put at a large distance from each other, but any production building can get covered by 4 at a time. This creates certain space constraints that also often became interesting challenges.
- It gave a lot of useful tools at the right time. Most of the game access to the water tiles was a valuable resource, but in the endgame yo...
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