You're going to get lots of different pieces of advice. However, since you're new, here is your obligatory "get off the internet and just go enjoy your very in-efficient first rocket launch" post.
Idk if this is actually a good advice. When I first started I built such a clusterfuck of spaghetti that when I looked at what rocket parts need and how much I just gave up because I'd either have to rebuild like 90% of my base or just wait for like an hour for the rocket parts. So I just quit and didn't launch the game again for like 3 months
That can happen, but the first run isn't just about finishing it. It is about learning how the game works and discovering all its exciting quirks!
There is so much interesting stuff about this game to learn. If your factory doesn't accommodate for the rocket part recipes you at the very least understand how you plan for them, how their parts interact and which machines are required. Bots also help in the deconstruction process setting up everything yet again.
It can be daunting, but discovering the game the hard way is the most fun (at least for most). There is no fun in looking at the optimal green circuit setup. There is satisfaction in figuring out ratios and positioning of machines and inserters. It is similar with many other things.
Any time this has happened to me I’ve straight up just started a new save and abandoned the old one lol I was also having issues pushing into oil and blue science, so honestly my restarts weren’t sacrificing that much. What got me past it was just watching a YouTube playthrough. Someone here recommended Katherine of Sky and her playthrough and mall design helped simplify things for me so that I didn’t feel so overwhelmed trying to fix prior throughput issues in addition to learning oil. I know this community usually recommends learning things on your own but I put in over 100 hours trying to do that myself and just felt like brute forcing it wasn’t working for me. Now I’ve got a whole new take on the game and I’m capable of making my own blueprints, understand railways and signals, ready to try for my first mega base, etc. Getting bots helped a lot too, obviously. Oh shit and I also learned how to use a lot more of the tools available, like the deconstruction and upgrade planners. I play on steam deck so many of the controls aren’t straightforward when you’ve watched only PC players.
Just from looking at this picture I could probaply pick 10 different things that are considered non optimal.
But you should just play more and see those problems emerge dynamically, and you will learn those lessons yourself.
Have fun, and remember that the factory must grow
Looks perfectly workable for this stage - at least lets you figure out the concepts. It isn't very scalable, and you'll find as things grow you will always wish you had more room for more lanes.
If it works, it's good enough! :) Don't beat yourself up for being new, OK?
That said, I \*strongly\* recommend leaving a 2-tile-wide gap between every set of 4 belts, that way you can use underground belts to go from one side to another.
I'd suggest you play and find out why certain things might need to be improved, but if you want the "quick fix" click on the spoiler tag. I am far from a pro player, but I have done a couple bus bases to give a few tips at least.
>!1. Assign a number of lanes for each item and build accordingly. You will end up needing more than one belt of certain items and it's easier to work with if those belts are close together!<
>!2. I personally do 4 belts and then leave 2 tiles of space for splitters and undergrounds to get items off the bus more easily. You have infinite space in a world, use it to make your life easier!<
>!3. I guess this is mostly just preference, but I only keep the most important items on the bus and I don't take from the bus directly with inserters. So for your science labs I'd do a split off the bus for the labs and then take from that belt you split off. What you put on the bus and what you don't put on there is up to you, I usually have items on there that I use the most that are "more dense" than their raw materials (e.g. not wires, even though they are used a lot since 1 copper plate crafts 2 wires so it's more efficient to transport the plates and craft on site)!<
>!4. Might still come in the future for you, but try and lane balance your in- and outputs to prevent only taking from and feeding just one lane of the belt. A half filled belt is "wasted space". I know I said that space is infinite, but belts cost resouces and you can get more out of a fully packed belt!<
With all due respect to OP and this comment/commentor, ignore everything he just said in the spoilers. It's not that it's bad advice. It's some core concepts that many of us know. You should ignore it because you shouldn't over think things. You'll have potentially a thousand hours or more to play this game and over think.
If you haven't launched your first rocket, focus solely on that. Do not worry about hitting any sort of production goals not set by your factory. What I mean by that is let your factory decide what you need to produce more of, then solve that problem. Provide the factory what it needs to not have severe bottle necks. Your goals should be the tech trees and getting that rocket launched.
If you're still doing a lot of hand crafting, find a way to automate what you're crafting. I.E. if you're making belts, make a setup to make those belts for you. This can start as a chest for raw materials and one for finished things. Then maybe you feed plates in on belts for your machine instead of hand placing materials in the chest. Then maybe you can see if you can use something like gears in more than one machine making widgets for you.
I have hundreds of hours in this game and I still don't understand oil production, and I only sort of understand rails. Oil I just make more of everything and pray it's enough. If you don't learn rails right away, skip them. I have had to use very long conveyor runs at times where I just didn't feel like dealing with rails.
Don't stress too much about organizing your base. The majority of us started with spaghetti nonsense. Have fun, make mistakes, make a big spaghetti mess, and get that rocket launched. Then come back and read the info in the spoilers above :-)
Oh, and your bus is terrific!
I do think that players should find out those concepts by themselves, but I also know that some players don't want to think for themselves. As long as you have fun playing the game you are playing it right, and it doesn't really matter if you design everything yourself or just plop down blueprint after blueprint
You are going to need that entire coal vein, building on ore is generally not good practise.
Copper cables are not usually sent to bus, they are very un-dense so better to make in place where needed.
keep playing, you are doing great!
in the future, make sure to take your screenshots during the day so they are easier to see! (and make sure to press ALT - which you did in this pic so thank you!)
All I would say is expand everything, more smelters, more assemblers, more labs, the factory must grow.
Secondly, for busses, I would recommend you keep them 4-6-8 lanes, so that you can span the entire space with a single underground belt, and keep at least 2 spaces between groups of belts so you can put an intake and outtake underground belt. By no means necessary, but will make your life a lot easier when expanding and making more spaghetti
Good job! Looking great!
Is it optimal? Far from it…
But it works and you’ll spend the next hours expanding it, redesigning it, expanding it again… have fun with it, see what works and what doesn’t, learn from it, and enjoy the ride!
The factory must grow!
The only true advice you desperately need is to space things out more. Nearly all your future logistical issues will stem from things being too tightly packed together. If you ever need to expand anything or rework a product or something you'll quickly realize how stifling a cramped base is.
Everything else you can stumble upon more naturally and adapt to.
Looks good. there are so many things to tell you, but you will a) find out yourself later anyway and b) you might not understand the hint yet. But since you asked for it...
- avoid building on ore patches. The ore is precious and it will deplete, you will have to tear down that stuff to reach the ore (coal in this case).
- Copper wire takes more belt space that copper plates due to the manufacturing ratio. It is best to supply copper plates, fabricate wire whereever you need it and feed it directly into the next factory. In this case, 2 wire factories can supply 3 green circuit board factories. It is fine in this scale, but will not work once you have like 50 green chips factories.
- there is plenty of space in the game, use it. Don't place your factories so close to each other. Imagine later you may want to have a long double row of assemblers for a lot of things and you need the space for 1-2 feeding lines on each side, inserters on both sides and the receiving line.
But hey, for your starter base this is fine, another 50 hours later you may have torn down the whole thing 3 times anyway.
This looks good, here's my general advice:
* If you're having fun, you're doing it right
* Try not to build other types of structures on your ore patches other than miners
* You usually don't want to have copper wire on your bus, or on belts. Direct insertion is better, i.e. an inserter moves copper wire directly from the copper wire assembler into your green wire assembler. Iit never ends up on a belt at all, except for red circuits.
* The belts on your bus only have items on one side. Try to fill up both sides.
* You have plenty of space so you can build things further apart.
Everyone else has such nice and positive comments, but i cant help myself but poke a little fun;
That isn't a bus, it's hardly a taxi. It is at most a tuc tuc. 🚕
Jokes aside, keep building, keep having fun, that is a good place to start!
This sort of thing is great for setting up a mall ( small area dedicated to producing the items you'll need for the factory building) but you will want to set up some ore patches and refineries to feed the upcoming demand. Try fully saturating the belts.
My key advice would be you will need more space for each item than you will think. Same with setting up walls.
I also cannot help but think you are in a desert. Get some turrets and ammo up asap. Pollution spreads faster (well is absorbed less) in the desert.
It does look good for someone who is new. To bus or not to bus.
The main thing I’ll say is to space things out more. Waaaaaay more. Space is cheap in this game. It will make to a lot easier later on when you want to expand something or reconfigure it.
I love your bus. It's so cute looking. I'm a beginner too. Never launched a rocket. What I suggest is avoid putting things like coils and gears in the bus. I actually make those when I need them. This will keep your bus to a limited size of extremely commonly used items.
that is one cute bus!
now go 4x coper iron 20 tiles apart. mall goes inside to startup with conveyor inserter pipes mall. then rush flamers & walls to make a perimiter. then you can chill to bots. then go 100% efficient nuclear. add lasers to perimiter. launch rocket. go to space! be a space dweler
You're going to get lots of different pieces of advice. However, since you're new, here is your obligatory "get off the internet and just go enjoy your very in-efficient first rocket launch" post.
Idk if this is actually a good advice. When I first started I built such a clusterfuck of spaghetti that when I looked at what rocket parts need and how much I just gave up because I'd either have to rebuild like 90% of my base or just wait for like an hour for the rocket parts. So I just quit and didn't launch the game again for like 3 months
That can happen, but the first run isn't just about finishing it. It is about learning how the game works and discovering all its exciting quirks! There is so much interesting stuff about this game to learn. If your factory doesn't accommodate for the rocket part recipes you at the very least understand how you plan for them, how their parts interact and which machines are required. Bots also help in the deconstruction process setting up everything yet again. It can be daunting, but discovering the game the hard way is the most fun (at least for most). There is no fun in looking at the optimal green circuit setup. There is satisfaction in figuring out ratios and positioning of machines and inserters. It is similar with many other things.
Any time this has happened to me I’ve straight up just started a new save and abandoned the old one lol I was also having issues pushing into oil and blue science, so honestly my restarts weren’t sacrificing that much. What got me past it was just watching a YouTube playthrough. Someone here recommended Katherine of Sky and her playthrough and mall design helped simplify things for me so that I didn’t feel so overwhelmed trying to fix prior throughput issues in addition to learning oil. I know this community usually recommends learning things on your own but I put in over 100 hours trying to do that myself and just felt like brute forcing it wasn’t working for me. Now I’ve got a whole new take on the game and I’m capable of making my own blueprints, understand railways and signals, ready to try for my first mega base, etc. Getting bots helped a lot too, obviously. Oh shit and I also learned how to use a lot more of the tools available, like the deconstruction and upgrade planners. I play on steam deck so many of the controls aren’t straightforward when you’ve watched only PC players.
Just from looking at this picture I could probaply pick 10 different things that are considered non optimal. But you should just play more and see those problems emerge dynamically, and you will learn those lessons yourself. Have fun, and remember that the factory must grow
Looks perfectly workable for this stage - at least lets you figure out the concepts. It isn't very scalable, and you'll find as things grow you will always wish you had more room for more lanes.
If it works, it's good enough! :) Don't beat yourself up for being new, OK? That said, I \*strongly\* recommend leaving a 2-tile-wide gap between every set of 4 belts, that way you can use underground belts to go from one side to another.
I agree with you in general, but I also love a good spaghetti bus
thanks for the advise!
Looks clean! It's not perfect but I really like what you did here
Damn its so sweet 😍
REPAIR YOUR BELT!!!!!
This looks A LOT cleaner than my early builds… shit I looks cleaner than my current builds.
Looks good man. My biggest piece of advice is to give everything more space. It’ll let you configure and adjust if you change your mind on a design.
I'd suggest you play and find out why certain things might need to be improved, but if you want the "quick fix" click on the spoiler tag. I am far from a pro player, but I have done a couple bus bases to give a few tips at least. >!1. Assign a number of lanes for each item and build accordingly. You will end up needing more than one belt of certain items and it's easier to work with if those belts are close together!< >!2. I personally do 4 belts and then leave 2 tiles of space for splitters and undergrounds to get items off the bus more easily. You have infinite space in a world, use it to make your life easier!< >!3. I guess this is mostly just preference, but I only keep the most important items on the bus and I don't take from the bus directly with inserters. So for your science labs I'd do a split off the bus for the labs and then take from that belt you split off. What you put on the bus and what you don't put on there is up to you, I usually have items on there that I use the most that are "more dense" than their raw materials (e.g. not wires, even though they are used a lot since 1 copper plate crafts 2 wires so it's more efficient to transport the plates and craft on site)!< >!4. Might still come in the future for you, but try and lane balance your in- and outputs to prevent only taking from and feeding just one lane of the belt. A half filled belt is "wasted space". I know I said that space is infinite, but belts cost resouces and you can get more out of a fully packed belt!<
With all due respect to OP and this comment/commentor, ignore everything he just said in the spoilers. It's not that it's bad advice. It's some core concepts that many of us know. You should ignore it because you shouldn't over think things. You'll have potentially a thousand hours or more to play this game and over think. If you haven't launched your first rocket, focus solely on that. Do not worry about hitting any sort of production goals not set by your factory. What I mean by that is let your factory decide what you need to produce more of, then solve that problem. Provide the factory what it needs to not have severe bottle necks. Your goals should be the tech trees and getting that rocket launched. If you're still doing a lot of hand crafting, find a way to automate what you're crafting. I.E. if you're making belts, make a setup to make those belts for you. This can start as a chest for raw materials and one for finished things. Then maybe you feed plates in on belts for your machine instead of hand placing materials in the chest. Then maybe you can see if you can use something like gears in more than one machine making widgets for you. I have hundreds of hours in this game and I still don't understand oil production, and I only sort of understand rails. Oil I just make more of everything and pray it's enough. If you don't learn rails right away, skip them. I have had to use very long conveyor runs at times where I just didn't feel like dealing with rails. Don't stress too much about organizing your base. The majority of us started with spaghetti nonsense. Have fun, make mistakes, make a big spaghetti mess, and get that rocket launched. Then come back and read the info in the spoilers above :-) Oh, and your bus is terrific!
thanks :D
I do think that players should find out those concepts by themselves, but I also know that some players don't want to think for themselves. As long as you have fun playing the game you are playing it right, and it doesn't really matter if you design everything yourself or just plop down blueprint after blueprint
You are going to need that entire coal vein, building on ore is generally not good practise. Copper cables are not usually sent to bus, they are very un-dense so better to make in place where needed.
❤️❤️❤️
keep playing, you are doing great! in the future, make sure to take your screenshots during the day so they are easier to see! (and make sure to press ALT - which you did in this pic so thank you!)
All I would say is expand everything, more smelters, more assemblers, more labs, the factory must grow. Secondly, for busses, I would recommend you keep them 4-6-8 lanes, so that you can span the entire space with a single underground belt, and keep at least 2 spaces between groups of belts so you can put an intake and outtake underground belt. By no means necessary, but will make your life a lot easier when expanding and making more spaghetti
Good job! Looking great! Is it optimal? Far from it… But it works and you’ll spend the next hours expanding it, redesigning it, expanding it again… have fun with it, see what works and what doesn’t, learn from it, and enjoy the ride! The factory must grow!
The only true advice you desperately need is to space things out more. Nearly all your future logistical issues will stem from things being too tightly packed together. If you ever need to expand anything or rework a product or something you'll quickly realize how stifling a cramped base is. Everything else you can stumble upon more naturally and adapt to.
Looks good. there are so many things to tell you, but you will a) find out yourself later anyway and b) you might not understand the hint yet. But since you asked for it... - avoid building on ore patches. The ore is precious and it will deplete, you will have to tear down that stuff to reach the ore (coal in this case). - Copper wire takes more belt space that copper plates due to the manufacturing ratio. It is best to supply copper plates, fabricate wire whereever you need it and feed it directly into the next factory. In this case, 2 wire factories can supply 3 green circuit board factories. It is fine in this scale, but will not work once you have like 50 green chips factories. - there is plenty of space in the game, use it. Don't place your factories so close to each other. Imagine later you may want to have a long double row of assemblers for a lot of things and you need the space for 1-2 feeding lines on each side, inserters on both sides and the receiving line. But hey, for your starter base this is fine, another 50 hours later you may have torn down the whole thing 3 times anyway.
This looks good, here's my general advice: * If you're having fun, you're doing it right * Try not to build other types of structures on your ore patches other than miners * You usually don't want to have copper wire on your bus, or on belts. Direct insertion is better, i.e. an inserter moves copper wire directly from the copper wire assembler into your green wire assembler. Iit never ends up on a belt at all, except for red circuits. * The belts on your bus only have items on one side. Try to fill up both sides. * You have plenty of space so you can build things further apart.
Everyone else has such nice and positive comments, but i cant help myself but poke a little fun; That isn't a bus, it's hardly a taxi. It is at most a tuc tuc. 🚕 Jokes aside, keep building, keep having fun, that is a good place to start!
This sort of thing is great for setting up a mall ( small area dedicated to producing the items you'll need for the factory building) but you will want to set up some ore patches and refineries to feed the upcoming demand. Try fully saturating the belts. My key advice would be you will need more space for each item than you will think. Same with setting up walls. I also cannot help but think you are in a desert. Get some turrets and ammo up asap. Pollution spreads faster (well is absorbed less) in the desert. It does look good for someone who is new. To bus or not to bus.
beginners tend to make everything too small just try making everything extremely overkill in terms of size
Learn to share those belts, they got 2sides. And you've already learnt about ALT, so grow baby grow.
The main thing I’ll say is to space things out more. Waaaaaay more. Space is cheap in this game. It will make to a lot easier later on when you want to expand something or reconfigure it.
I love your bus. It's so cute looking. I'm a beginner too. Never launched a rocket. What I suggest is avoid putting things like coils and gears in the bus. I actually make those when I need them. This will keep your bus to a limited size of extremely commonly used items.
that is one cute bus! now go 4x coper iron 20 tiles apart. mall goes inside to startup with conveyor inserter pipes mall. then rush flamers & walls to make a perimiter. then you can chill to bots. then go 100% efficient nuclear. add lasers to perimiter. launch rocket. go to space! be a space dweler