It's a very minor detail but it took tons of trial and error to get working well! I was actually kinda surprised Factorio didn't already have tire tracks. There are different tracks for tanks and cars.

The mods about unlocking the power of solar energy on the moon while trying not to run out of air.

There's also blue lasers, white concrete, electrolytic crucibles, reflector satellites and the lethal airless vacuum of space. Check it out if any of that interests: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/selene

I was just messing around in my test world making a platform defended solely by laser turrets, and ended up making this. I plan to use this in one of my saves at late game to feed my bases when I am pushing for 3k spm or so. Could maybe even add a rocket production part in the future as well for aquilo but we will see. Could it have been slimmer? Probably. Yeah. But 280km is good enough. Not 2.1 btw.

Heyo! First time, long time. I'm a lifelong engineer, gamedev and factorio addict.

Lately I have been building factorio "minigames" using claude and I finally think I have something worth sharing. Its called Quota. I've been playing it for a few days now and it's a real nice reprieve from my long winded megabase nightmares. Each game takes like an hour to play.

The gist is you have a goal to make it through some number of shifts selling items you craft for a given price. The strategy is in how each sale affects the price just a little bit.

I think there is a real opportunity in building custom Factorio scenarios to build off the wall new games. It's unbelievable how powerful the API is.

You can install the mod here: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quota, and then start up a new game scenario.

I'd love for other people to give it a try, give some feedback, maybe some balancing issues, things like that! I would absolutely love PRs if anyone has any ideas!

Here's the slop synopsis it generated:

The Company drops you on a tiny island with a Shipping Terminal, a starter kit and a quota. Every shift the clock runs and the number goes up. Anything you put in the terminal sells at market price. Make quota and you get a break, a paycheck and a catalog. Miss it and you get a written warning. Miss it twice and you're fired.

It's still Factorio: ore, belts, assemblers, power, the tech tree. A run just fits in an hour, and you start over each time.

How a run plays

• Crafted goods pay more than their ingredients, so deeper chains make more money. Prices come from the real recipe graph, so modded items get priced too.
• The market moves. A few items run hot each shift (x2 to x3). Dump too much of one thing and its price floods. A side panel shows what pays right now.
• Between shifts you shop. Contracts (30 Balatro-style rule-benders: five slots, three offers per break, some of them traps), Factorio tech bought outright, buildings by orbital drop pod, and land: new plots rise out of the sea.
• Every shift rolls a twist: gremlins jamming machines, earthquakes, union strikes, meteor showers, a solar eclipse, biter raids, picky clients.
• The last shift is The Audit. It has a boss. Survive it and you're promoted, then it's Endless for as long as you can keep up.

Two modes. Simple is 8 shifts and everything is for sale. Complex is 10 shifts, deep chains pay up to 2.6x, and tech is zoned by how much land you own.

Everything is switchable on the setup screen: difficulty, every threat (one switch each), run length, quota size, shift length. There's a Race the Clock preset that turns off every threat, so it's just you, the market and the timer.

Install: mod portal, then New Game → Scenarios → QUOTA. It does nothing in any other save, so it's fine to leave enabled. Factorio 2.1, single player, works with or without Space Age.

Source: https://github.com/dested/factorio-quota

Assembler on an assembler

Hi everyone, making my first attempt at making a train base on Nauvis. I've set up all my raw ingredients onto a main train line, but I'm struggling to figure out how I should make the mall. Might be a stupid question but how do I actually make one?

Do I just set up trains to load into a ton of provider chests which then go into a bot mall, or do I just set up extra production at each area and leech off my main designs (like making a couple extra engine assemblers in my blue science, essentially having a mall spread around my whole base)
Also slightly unrelated but how do I know how much power and pollution my base will use/make (I'm planning on turning it all on once I've finished building, I haven't switched any part on aside from outposts to fill their buffers). Should I just make a tileable nuclear reactor so I can stamp down it as and when. Should I just nuke every single biter base on the map and then build a flamethrower laser turret perimeter once I've finished, or is there a more effective defense method for larger bases.

For context, this is my first serious Space Age run, I've attempted to finish a run multiple times but ended up getting burnt out. I haven't gotten to Gleba yet I want to make this base first then do Gleba and Aquilo back to back at the end. I'm aiming for around 1kspm (not doing quality packs, are they worth it?), not sure if that's too ambitious or not.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! This is my first "large" scale base and I'm having an absolute blast but a couple issues are starting to lessen my motivation and I'm trying to resist the call to start from the crashed ship again lol.

This is part 5 for the guide. Here are part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. Blueprint book is here.

In the previous post we got Gleba going with agricultural towers, bioflux and biolabs going. We still need to make science here and launch it back to Nauvis. We also need to produce carbon fiber, which is required for rocket turrets, which we need for our trip to Aquilo.

Since Agricultural science spoils, there's little point in letting it buffer; so we start by getting launch infrastructure ready, which means we want a mall going.

Gleba Mall

Let's address the elephant in the room: You can just shuttle whatever you need from Nauvis or Vulcanus. Both should have enough industry to send LDS and blue chips for rocket launches (we already make jet fuel for power), and whatever infra you still need. This is probably the fastest way to do this.

To me this feels like a cop-out. The idea is to conquer each planet in the short amount of time, and conquering means self-sufficient. To each his own, but for me building industry in Gleba felt like the right way. It also means that we get some more error room: we're less stuck waiting on our ship to shuttle things, and if something goes wrong when we're off planet we have local stuff to fix it with.

Everything we made so far is organic. Industry requires iron, copper, and plastic, which means working with bacteria on Gleba.

Copper bacteria and iron bacteria have practically the same production stack, but we'll start with iron kickstart.

This bootstraps the iron bacteria production if a nything ever backs up or goes wrong. But it's a very inefficient way to produce iron bacteria. So this is supplemented by the iron bacteria extendable stack:

Note that this has two inputs: one underground belt on the right, which brings in iron bacteria from out bootstrap; and one underground belt on the left, which brings in iron ore from other stack if we have them.

It also has two outputs: an underground belt going left, sending iron bacteria to the next stack for bootstrapping, and an underground belt going right, sending iron ore.

Two requester chests bring int nutrients and bioflux. The belt immediately to the right of the biolabs gets iron bacteria and bioflux, and the one after that is for nutrients. Iron bacteria comes out of the other side, and goes right back into the input belt, so this feeds itself! Only when bacteria decomposes it starts filtering to the output belts, which happens when the production becomes saturated.

You can start by putting one or two of those side-by-side, and add more to get more ore. That way you can slowly start building up iron production.

Copper has a mirrored blueprint:

You'll note this blueprint is mirrored - I like extending iron to the left and copper to the right, so their output meets in the middle.

Then the output goes into a regular furnace stack, same blueprint we used on Nauvis. The furnace output becomes iron and copper plates, and then we can just put down the Nauvis mall blueprint!

We're only missing one piece: making red chips requires plastic. Luckily, Gleba comes with a recipe.

This setup may require a few trips for supplies, mostly belts. But after that, you should have belt and inserter production locally.

The mall will take a while to warm up - that's OK. You don't really need much at first, and you have the shuttle to help. But the belts and buffer chests will start filling up and give you some headroom if you're suddenly out of something, so you don't have to wait for the shuttle to make the round trip.

Carbon Fiber

It's really important ot remember to get it going. You don't need much - just enough to make some rocket turrets for the Aquilo and Solar System Edge trips. You'll need to research it, but it's a good idea to have the blueprint ready so you don't forget. There's a pretty simple blueprint pair:

Not much to say about these, but I'll mention a few notable things relevant to many Gleba blueprints:

* Anything that can spoil has a cleanup blueprint at the edge to remove spoilage (note the carbon blueprint uses an underground belt to only pickup spoiled nutrients; otherwise the bots will bring spoilage back and forth across the belt)

* Nutrients and bioflux are supplied by bots

* We can use efficiency modules to reduce the nutrients used by the biolabs, thus saving on nutrients and on bots having to bring nutrients in

With carbon fiber production buffering - we can move on to rocket parts

Gleba Rocket parts

Now that we have copper, iron and plastic going, we can use the Nauvis LDS recipe.

Before we get blue chips however, we need sulfuric acid. Luckily Gleba provides:

No particular reason this blueprint produces its own nutrients instead of bringing it in. I used it to move nutrients around by belt and save the bots some work wherever something was close enough. Note that you need to bring in some iron plates as well, and water.

Then we can put down the blue chips blueprint from Nauvis:

Jet fuel is easy - we use the same recipt we did for power.

Now, after wiring everything in, we should have everything flowing for the rocket silos. To construct the silos themselves, we need some concrete. We can shuttle some in, or funnel some iron ore and stone to craft it. I built two rocket silos.

Leaving Gleba

As you're leaving, send the Enterprise to Vulcanus to load up for Fulgora. The Fulgora colonization logistic group is below, but we should start filling it in while we're finishing up.

As the enterprise is filling up, you could put down bots after you leave, but if you want bot supply to be stable, you can put down a setup similar to Vulcanus before you leave. However, that requires a Lubricant setup:

This is also necessary if you want blue belt production, though I don't recommend it. Blue belts take up a lot of gears, and it can easily eat up all your iron.

Once you have lubricant, you can put the bots setup from Vulcanus - but replace the foundries with the mall:

This works with a circuits similar to what we have on Nauvis and Vulcanus: if there are less than 100 available construction/logistic bots, more are added. This means we don't overproduce, but don't have bot shortages either.

Finally, you need to put down the science blueprint. This is placed on top of the biolab blueprint, expanding it to give science as well:

This modest amount is more than enough for the run. If you need more you can put down another blueprint like this, but you probably won't.

These are the Gleba techs you need to get (in this order preferrably):

1. Carbon Fiber (500 science)
2. Rocket Turret (1000 science)
3. Advanced Asteroid Processing (2000 science)
4. As much "Stronger Explosives" as you can get. I got to 12 - which is just the threshold so big asteroids only take 2 rockets to destory (see the handy chart in this page))

You could also get Captivity and go for Biolabs, which is something I did. But in retrospect - probably not worth the time.

I was sure dealing with the natives in Gleba was going to be a big deal. I certainly remember struggling with them in my playthroughs. I put down this blueprint:

I got those all over the place, but the truth is: I don't think I got attacked even once in my playthrough. My initial scout with my tank took out all the egg sacs that were near, and my towers were making so few spores, that it just wasn't an issue at all. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but the pentapods were pretty much absent after the initial battles to get eggs and fruits.

At this point, the Gleba shuttle should be ready in Nauvis:

The bioflux request is only necessary if you go for Captivity and Biolabs - otherwise it's pointless. I'm also requesting LDS and blue chips as backup, especially for early on where Gleba industry isn't chugging yet (in my run, I left Gleba with the mall barely working). I also requested logistic bots - our Gleba build needs lots of them to shuttle everything back and forth.

You should call in enterprise. Here is the Fulgora cololnization pack I had prepared:

You'll notice the Nuclear Reactor. Power on Fulgora can be a problem in the beginning, I found it easiest to bring nuclear as I'm setting up. Later we'll rely on lightning and batteries, but it takes a while to get enough batteries. We won't need to shuttle in more fuel - if worst comes to worst, we'll build a heating tower, and use the infinite amount of solid fuel to power it.

I left Gleba with the clock at 24:43:31, after having left Vulcanus at 19:56:19. So I spent a little under 5 hours in Gleba, though I definitely left it partially cooked (bots took care of everything that was left).

To Be Continued

I'm almost out of images - so that's it for now.

The next parts will be about Fulgora, getting to Aquilo, beating Aquilo, and finally getting to the Edge and finishing the game.

I'll post the link here when it's ready.

What are your thoughts? I was wondering - did you have trouble with the Pentapods in your speedrun attempt, or in your first playthrough? I was surprised how much of a non-issue they were and I'm not sure why.

Im trying to get into it and its taking a good while to finish loading. I mean, I think i messed up some settings when it comes to loading time and turned on remembering atlas thing or something like that which should make future more bearable, but its been like 45 minutes and it's on 94% what the hell? I mean, 8gb ram is the main bottleneck but still.

P.S. I'm trying to play on Linux rather than Windows, but Windows took like 5 minutes, 10 minutes tops to load.

After my nullius run I went through the patch notes of the upcoming 2.1 patch and was amazed to see what possibilities for challenge runs are now enabled in regard to pumps and trains.

Liquids

Before 2.1 you could not connect a chemical plant or refinery to rails on both side:

The reason is, that the rail grid is on a 2x2 grid and the chemical plant (3x3) and refinery (5x5) have both an uneven size. Pumps didn't help either, as they are 2 tiles long.

However, with 2.1 we now get the possibility to have pumps attach to curves. If we place the rails somewhat diagonally, for example in an S shape like this:

Now we can connect buildings requiring liquids on both sides!

If a recipe needs solids and liquids, it is easy to use a cargo wagon instead of one of the fluid wagon. Long handed inserters works where pumps work and are way more flexible.

With refineries it is a bit harder to do, but there are multiple options:

You can simply use option 3 with a single train with one wagon for each of the three liquids, and just move it forward once the buffer in the refinery has filled. The most produced fluid in a refinery is petroleum gas without modules at 11/s, and the buffer of the refinery + in the pump is 565, so you only need one full rotation every 51 seconds to continuously produce. It requires a train with wagons with all 3 liquids, multiple trainstops with a timed schedule, and turning off 2 of 3 pumps every stop via combinators because you cannot filter liquid wagons but that still doesn't seem too bad.

This enables completely pipeless / tankless challenge runs, at least as soon as trains are available. Amazing times!

(Technically that was possible before doing some of this nonsense:

But that just seems boring)

Solids

With solids thanks to filtered wagons creating a sushi train with wagons containing every item needed in the game to launch the rocket is possible since a long time:

So solids are already resolved easily.

The Challenge

For 2.1 challenge runs if spawning in train parts at the start:

I think it is quite doable now to do a completely beltless + pipeless + botless run without direct insertion, without pump / inserter chains or tanks.

In theory using all of the above would even allow to beat the game with only one insanely long train.

Did I miss any other solution? Which refinery solution would you choose?

Who will do it? We need volunteers!

The two mods used here is:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/mining-patch-planner

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/stock-quality-upgrader

The first one plans out the mining patch, the next one puts all my best quality miners to use, without me placing them 1 by one of using an upgrade planner than I then have to cancel the upgrades of if I run out. I love mods for Factorio. I have no common quality drills when I first start placing the miners, the mod just selects the "best" quality, starting with the highest quality unlocked first.

I just want quality modules and I hate bots.

I feel like my Fulgora plan has gone main bus -> sushi belt -> back to main bus. The Avadii video showed me the sushi belt archetype and it was so good, but I wanted circuits to be prioritized so I put them on their own belt. I kept trying to mitigate clogging until I basically just recreated a main bus from first principles, since a lot of the outputs are only used by one sub-factory (eg holmium line, stone into refined concrete, etc)

I'm still having problems through with clogging on the line, and circuit control to generate things like refined concrete only as much as I need it. I have way too much holmium, I just want more circuits so I can make quality quality modules and quality EM machines. Any tips? Do I need to just do a full logistic bot setup?

Tested for 3 hours, never dropped below 75 SPM. Please tell me about you own designs, I'd like to learn more tricks!

Blueprint: https://factoriobin.com/post/9iovds

Im fairly new to factorio, i cant warp my head around why this belt balancer isnt belt balancing

This would be really nice for early game Factorio on Gleba when you have a small, variable number of trees per tower until unlocking the first landfill which gives you another random, variable number of trees per tower until you finally get the final land fill. Having the tower tell you how many active plots it has would be very nice for making it easy for early game clocking the inserters to smooth out the tree harvesting so you don't get all the fruit in 1 min then wait 4. It's a bit tedious to count each one. Once i get the final land fill I limit them to a 4 stack fast inserter every 32 ticks which is exactly 1/8 an unstacked green belt, but before then I need to know the tree count.

I might just make it a historical building

You know how Space Platforms have air-drag, right? (Even though it doesn't make sense?)

Well, that made me think: "What if this is just the upper atmosphere, rather than space?"

Which made me realize that EVERY PLANET COULD REALISTICALLY JUST BE A DIFFERENT CONTINENT ON THE SURFACE OF NAUVIS!!! (With the Shattered Planet potentially being a destroyed Moon instead)

Hello everyone.

Ever since space casinos were removed in 2.1 I have been trying to bring them back.

After the update the only way to get quality asteroids is with recyclers. While they do have twice the module slots, they return only 25% of asteroids, unlike the 80% that crushers gave. So to get one legendary asteroid now it takes about 2600 common asteroids, unlike the 420 in 2.0. However the recyclers have one more advantage, they are way faster. One legendary recycler takes 32 asteroids/s, so you only need 2 for a full belt.

Still you need 500% more asteroids than before, and no matter how hard I tried to design a platform there was just no way to get so many asteroids without going to the shattered planet.

That all changed in the version 2.1.21 when platform drag was changed from width to weight, which completely changes the balance of asteroid spawning. Now you can make your space platform wider without any drawbacks, which means we can get a lot more asteroids.

With that in mind I designed this:

It can reach a maximum speed of 579 km/s where as in 2.20 it would reach just 180 km/s, so it is 200% faster now and consequently it spawns 200% more asteroids. It has 20 upcyclers like the one shown above, which means it can go through 1200 asteroids/s (900/s from asteroid collectors). But I will admit it is badly balanced, as it only goes trough about 720 asteroids/s which is less than ideal.

When constantly traveling from Vulcanus to Gleba and back it yields 67 legendary calcite per minute which is about 42 legendary stone/s (I was too lazy to make plastic). Is that good? I don't know, because I only ever used space casinos, so you can compare that to your own favorite method and see which is better. (Note that the asteroid rates bellow aren't fully accurate because of asteroid reprocessing)

Blueprint link:
https://factoriobin.com/post/13mvir

Do note, that I used researches asteroid productivity 25 and laser weapons damage 25.

Edit: Changed rate for asteroids

It produces 45 SPM, and also makes additional foundations with leftover iron and copper wire shipped from the ground. Not sure whether it's more resource-efficient to ship copper wire into space or make foundations on the ground tho, haven't compared the numbers yet.

The only thing I'm not too happy about is how I'm handling backing-up asteroids. Right now I have circuit logic to discard asteroids if their corresponding crushers aren't operational, but maybe there's a way to build up some buffer... But don't spoil it for me! I'll figure out on my own, just wanted to share my thoughts

Having some issues with understanding how to index the selector combinator, currently it's always outputting either the first ascending or descending input item.

Edit: For anyone finding this post in the future, solution was to use a constant value 1 slider at the bottom of the signal menu, NOT the "Signal #"'s that are in the list.

What are your go-to techniques for capturing biter nests remotely? I normally go back to Nauvis in person to do it, but in my current game I decided to try to do it by spidertron. I equipped a spider with capture bots and a bunch of shields and sent it through the nest cluster to capture all the biter nests, then the plan was to send a squad of spiders carrying normal rockets to mop up the spitter nests and bugs.

To my surprise that is when I realized that capture bots will also target spitter nests. 3k+ hrs in this game. SMH. Sadly, this means that the spitter nests become flagged for immunity even though they aren't capturable, meaning I had to end up flying back to Nauvis personally to clean them up because the spiders wouldn't touch them anymore.

Edit: I think I have discovered what was happening. Took a video of a nest raid and watched the replay, and it looks like the bugs and worms all focus-fire the spitter nest capture bots in the second or two before the rocket spiders arrive to clean them up. I was only seeing the biter nest captures survive, because the spitter nest captures were killed first. Any spitter nest capture that *does* finish converts to a biter nest so I was missing that part.

Since I first started playing Space Age, I assumed that biter eggs came from biter nests and so I just always killed the spitter nests by default. TIL, don't kill your spitter nests.

*Gif inside* First published mod to test out how the process works. Enjoy.

Canal Belts - Factorio Mods