This is an incredible mod that greatly extends the length of the game, making you go to space and handle a ton of logistical complexities, and I love it. Just today, it got updated for Factorio 2.0 after almost a year of waiting, and so I’d love to start a game with all the new QoL introduced in it.
This will be a very long thread as I will be posting my progress of the campaign, and I am very excited to begin this thread. This mod often takes people around 400 hours to complete, it is much longer than the DLC Space Age. And of course, I will be upping the difficulty even more, I'm playing with a 20x multiplier to technology! Meaning that every tech will be super expensive to research and I'll have to scale up my production much more than usual.
Before starting the game, I want to show the mods I'm using and the game settings. Besides SE, most mods are quality of life/for fun, they don't add new buildings and machines.
As for the settings, the most important change that makes my run more challenging is that I am using a 20x multiplier for all technologies. To compensate a bit, I have also turned up the size and richness of ore patches on Nauvis by 1.5x, and removed biters and cliffs because I really don’t find them fun.
[0:23h] I just made my first red science! I made a tiny mall in a hex pattern with one machine for everything, but right now it’s all very manual. At the start of SE, all the assemblers, miners, inserters and even the lab use coal. But researching splitters costs 400 science and electricity will cost me 1100 more… There’s a long way to go until I can automate this still!
[1:44h] And... I got electricity! I took the time to make a fancier mall with lots of assemblers for science packs since we need so many. Also, I’ve done something I never did before: I brought belts of fuel to burner miners since I needed so many. Right now I have placed 250 burner miners and 500 burner inserters, and the first order of the day is replacing the inserters and assemblers with their electrical counterparts! The miners will come later, as that requires 500 more science. This is my current base at almost 2 hours! All those miners for just two belts of ore…
[4:28h] Green science: done! While I was waiting for the techs, I took the time to electrify most of my base, including the miners. I have also started the main bus now, and started adding the basic items to it: iron, copper, motors, green chips, and so on. Having the TinyStart mod is a godsend because it gives me 20 bots that will build stuff for me, as otherwise it would get monotonous, and I've done this part of the game hundreds of times at this point already.
If you look at the previous picture, the huge blueprint you see up north is for the final edition of the shopping mall (before I have logistic chests, that is). This behemoth took me 3 hours to design in creative mode, but it can make pretty much all the items I need to reach space and even a bit more. The next project will be to build it, and to scale my production because this needs a ton of resources!
The way I designed this was to write down all the products I wanted to make, then check all their ingredients. For the 16 most used ingredients (iron, copper, chips, etc), I can have two belts at each side of every assembler bringing it close. For the less used ones (coal, stone, multi engine cylinders, etc) I tried to fit all the products that needed them in the same row, so that I only need one belt for them.
I used a similar setup for my previous K2SE run and it worked very well, I am happy with how this one has turned out and I will be using it for many hours!
[7:50h] I reached the next milestone: make petroleum! After building the hub, I spent some time expanding my base. I expanded copper from 1 to 3 belts, and I tapped my second iron mine to make gears and burner engines. This allowed me to scale my science by a lot, and I reached the target I set for myself in this run of 300 of each science per minute. Then I was kinda short on power so I moved from burning coal to steam power (which I had just researched) and also expanded the coal mine. Finally, I’ve started to make way towards blue science by refining oil into petroleum. It’s closer than it looks!
I’ve added a bunch more stuff to the bus. In this order: plastic, sulfur, batteries, red chips and multi-engine cylinders. The latter are required to make locomotives, so as soon as I connected them to the bus, the first train on this planet got crafted. The first of many! Trains are one of the two things required to really scale up this base. For the other I’m gonna need blue science…
[9:12h] …which I start making immediately after! However, due to all the new buildings I’m facing massive shortages of base resources. I’m down to around 100 science per minute when I used to be getting 300. So before advancing, I’m going to expand my copper, gear and steel productions.
[10:19h] And… I’ve reached the first very important milestone in the game! I have unlocked bots!! This will let me build much faster and remotely, everywhere, and it’s the biggest change in the vanilla game in my opinion. Time to plop down roboports everywhere and connect all the chests to the logistic network!! Woooo!
…or maybe not, since I hadn’t realized that roboports need concrete, so that’s another 5000 science I need to use to be able to build them… whoops!
And so, after unlocking the two required tools, it's time for a big refactor! I am going to stop expanding my current bus base and create a new base that uses city blocks. This scales much better and while it will take me a long while to change, it will save me time in the long run. And also: trains!!
First thing is designing the city block. I am choosing to go with 1-4 trains. While in my previous SE game I used 1-2 and it was enough, I don't think it will be here with the 20x multiplier. So with this in mind, I created a city block that can fit 3 train stations on each side, and it ended up being 130x130 tiles. Here it is, the back bone of my definitive Nauvis base!
A few considerations: First, the corners are beveled because I will eventually switch to using elevated rails for the intersection and I need the room. This is also why I made the intersections only able to turn right, as turning left would complicate the logic significantly. I have created blueprints for size 1, 2 and 3 station stackers that work very well together and can be pasted over each other very easily. All blueprints are snapped to the grid so I don't have to align them every time I paste them.
As for the station blueprints, I have four designs, for items/fluids and for loading/unloading. They are all parametrized (amazing 2.0 feature) so all I need to configure the station is choose which item is supposed to go there. Oh and also, the warehouses are perfectly centered in the block, so the designs will all be symmetric and beautiful. It's all so incredibly easy to set up and I'm very happy with the result.
Also, another important detail: I am using the cybersyn mod for the train logistics. This mod automatically checks for requester and provider stations, and sends a train when it can send a full load from a provider to a requester. I know vanilla 2.0 has lots of cool features but it's not a replacement for this mod and also it's cumbersome to set up. This also means I get to have a cool depot where all the trains go to sleep.
Anyway, with all of that, I am going to start pasting these blocks all over my base! I'll have one block for each product, from simple to complex, and I will also progressively replace the setups in the old base, which eventually will be used only for the shopping mall.
I'll be showing the designs I make for blocks as I make them. First things first, here's the iron/copper, steel, motors and stone bricks. They are all pretty simple, I just adapted the designs I am using in the bus base.
Next are the blocks for sand, glass, concrete and green circuits. I considered putting the sand and glass in the same block, especially given how few machines are needed to make entire red belts of it, however later I remembered that in Space Exploration there are plenty of planets that produce sand as a byproduct, and I should consume that sand first. So I put sand in trains and I'll be using Cybersyn's priorities when necessary.
[14:23h] I've started pasting all the blocks and I'm getting a bit overwhelmed. I don't have that many robots yet so they take a while to build. Also, I barely got the techs necessary to build the city blocks, and I just realized I'm going to need more than the coal patch to power my base and my robots... so it's time to rush the solid fuel technology, and make blocks for solid fuel and for power.
The fuel block can make both solid and rocket fuel. Solid fuel is funnily enough more energy efficient than rocket fuel, so I'm gonna be using that to power my base, but I'll eventually need rocket fuel to go to space.
The power block can receive either coal and solid fuel, converts them to SE's fuel which is 10% more efficient, and makes 255MW. It seems like a lot but my base is pushing to 300 MW already...
As a final note, it's SO GOOD that refineries and chemplants can finally be flipped. Pipe spaghetti is now gone!!
(And sorry that I don't have a pic of my base at the moment, I forgot to take it)
Power is fixed for now, but I'm worried about the future... I don't have that many oil and coal patches and I'm using a LOT already. I don't know if I will last until nuclear energy, that requires the next science pack which is still far away...
To remedy this somewhat, I'm now rushing core mining. SE adds core seams over the planet, and the fragments they extract can be processed into all ores and even oil and a new thing called pyroflux. The good thing is that they are infinite so they will alleviate pressure on my miners.
However, the more core miners I put down, the slower they go, so overall they only scale with the square root of the amount of miners I have.
For now I've put 6, which were the ones close to my base, and they make decent production. Oh and each miner uses 25MW, which is A LOT.
Shortly after putting the core miners down, my whole base died. Apparently 150 extra MW was too much for it to handle and it spiraled until nothing was on... what a disaster!! I added another improvised power plant next to some oil patch to remedy this, but it will not last very long.
(Again, I don't have pictures of my base here, I was pretty stressed out)
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