City blocks, bus, or other?
City blocks, bus, or other?
Was curious how people design their factories. I typically do a main bus but decided to try city blocks this time and use a lot of trains.
Nothing like a good old spaghetti Bolognese
In a non overhaul playthrough, I normally use a main bus until the first rocket, then transition to full LTN to scale up to 1k spm and beyond. In BA, I use mostly crawler bots then logistic bots since the thought of a main bus or a belt fed mall in BA terrifies me.
Main bus early on at least until I have bots and trains. Then I usually transition to a distributed train network of specialized sub factories (plus usually one bot mall). Think city block (sub factories) but I just put stuff wherever there is room and I don't cram everything in an organized grid. I like working around lakes and having a more organically grown train network.
I personally prefer main bus, but with train pickup/dropoff spots for high usage items like plates, circuits, fluids, etc. The processing areas aren't "city blocks" per se, but little stations for processing specific items, if that makes sense. Reason being, if I put copper plates on the bus and that feeds directly into circuit production, then space on my bus is being taken up to create intermediate products
I start with a bus leaving enough headroom for multiple stations in the top part and a mall close by.
After trains, first I bring ores and then I start building minifactories for dedicated production drifting away from main bus.
When bots are available I start by converting the mall and then the main base is turn more or less into city blocks, but keeping the main bus.
Not as extreme as this but you can get the idea.
Fot the moment, it has worked everytime (including K2, let's see how it goes with current run of B&A) and the main plus (IMHO) is that I don't end up with a base that looks the same every run.
Mine start as a bus and then evolve into city block, I rebuild after the first launch leaving the mall fed by the bus.
I only use a bus at the start for the mall and research. Once my first ore patches are dwindling I have transitioned to blocks by product as well as the mall. Ingredients in, products out. All by train.
It depends on the goal of the base.
I've always wanted to do a fully automatic city block, where each block produces exactly one resource, but get bored before that happens.
I'm currently working through seablock, and that's some crazy spaghetti. The limited space and the general lack of speed means that there is a lot of tearing down and optimizing my builds. In traditional Factorio resources and space is basically unlimited so optimization isn't necessary, in seablock a clogged belt means the entire factory stops running. So now I'm focused on efficiency.
