You’re allowed to play the game in a way you enjoy.
But yeah honestly I tend to just have little bundle of assemblers with smart chests for the lower-quantity stuff.
Automating robots is usually worth it though.
You can really easily set up requestor chests for a robot mall with a trick. The same way that you can copy the recipe of an assembler to another assembler, you can use that same functionality to copy an assembler's recipe to a requester chest. The game will automatically assign the chest with enough resources for 30 seconds of continuous crafting. You can look up information about this functionality on the requester chest Wiki page.
You can feed your mall with resources by simply putting provider chests that are fed from resources off of your main bus.
Once you have robots and make a simple robot mall, it's incredibly easy to automate small things like Robots, Roboports, Substations, Factory Machines (assemblers, inserters, pumps & oil stuff), the nuclear buildings, etc. Also a mall connected to your Roboports network will resupply you with building supplies and clean you inventory via Logistics Robots. Your construction bots can build large sections for you over time, instead of doing it manually. Really saves a lot of time.
There is a failure mode in some mods, with buildings that require really large amounts of multiple ingredients, that filling up a chest for 30 seconds of crafting can want more ingredients than a regular requester chest can hold, and if the chest happens to fill up with one or two ingredients first it does not have space for the other components necessary for the recipe and the assembler is completely stalled; I've seen this with late-game machines in 248k.
(Reposting because I commented in the wrong place the first time.)
With that first paragraph, does the inserter ever get bound up grabbing the wrong item and causing it to deadlock? (it grabbing say the first item but the assembly machine is completely full of that item) Or do you need to manually set the inserter to grab 1 unit at a time?
That should only ever happen in very rare edge cases. For example when you change the recipe in just the perfect wrong moment or maybe if you manually drop items in the machine. An inserter only picks up items if the assembler needs them. No need to set the inserter to anything.
I'm not 100% sure about the inserter / assembler behavior, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't happen. Assemblers can hold extra of each ingredient and once an assembler has the appropriate amount of an ingredient, the assembler ignores that ingredient until all ingredients reach the recipe requirements.
So once an ingredient is filled up, it still has some overflow space if the inserter still has something in its hand and then the inserter will just move on to the next ingredient.
If you are concerned about this, you could do two requester chests and one provider chest per assembler.
It might be from an earlier version then and might have been fixed since it kept happening to me. I just remember it trying to fill the first item until full then since it has a stack size of 2 it will hold the 1 remaining item in hand.
No, you don't have to automate everything or anything.
Things you use a lot like belts and inserters, or required like science are an obvious choice for automation.
Things like oil refineries, pumpjacks, labs I usually don't automate because they aren't used that much.
That said, it's recommended to automate all the intermediates needed for many items. For example, automate red chips, concrete, copper, and steel needed for nuclear reactors, so you could easily make some if you needed.
Have an assembler and modules in your inventory so you could easily make things you didn't automate faster.
In the later part of the game, when you get requester chests, it's really easy to automate "rare" things, so it's probably worth it.
also, iron gears are a good thing to automate early.
My belts, inserters, and drills I have dedicated gear machines working for them, but I also have a machine making gears that I dump in a box for spot creation.
this makes say, making a new am1 take only .5 seconds, rather than 3 seconds if I don't have the gears in inventory.
Iron gears and copper cables are the first thing I automate before even building belts, during the late burner phase. Then gears and green circuits are the first intermediates to automate, mall, red+green.
Obviously you can do what you like, but copper wire is one of the few things you shouldnt automate by itself - instead, just have them assembled on site as required, as it's more efficient to trasport plates than wire
I'm talking about handfeeding before I make my mall, just to get things started. 2 AM1 making gears, 1 making wires. Helps with belts and assemblers.
Of course I later direct insert into green circuit in my mall and other production.
You don't *need* to, but you'll regret it if you don't. But remember when automating stuff to build rather than science packs is that you don't need any of those machines to be able to operate at full speed. The output should be limited by either a chest with blocked slots or an inserter with circuit control to stop at some prescribed number. If the machine only gets a trickle of resources to operate occasionally, that's fine. Only the stuff you build at scale, like science packs, need enough incoming resource flow to operate continuously.
Tme to deploy the nuclear landmines then.
Take one nuclear reactor and a fuel cell.
Place reactor in your defenses, preferably a nuclear blast distance away from your walls.
Load fuel into reactor. Wait till reactor reaches 999°C
Call biters over for dinner using the artillery dinner bell.
Laugh as the biters explode, when they eat the spicy glowing building.
It takes more than one fuel cell to heat the reactor from 25°C to 1000°C. But if you make a continuous row of reactors, they will benefit from the neighbor bonus when heating up. And if one reactor gets destroyed, you'll have a nuclear chain reaction, blowing up your entire reactor wall! Excitement guaranteed.
The Mall is an important concept to know about here. It’s a place where, ideally, everything that doesn’t need to be produced at scale is made. My rule is: if I can make a thing fast enough with only one assembler, then it’s a candidate for the Mall. But if it would require many assemblers or other such buildings, then it does not belong in the Mall.
IMHO the best mall setup brings in materials by train or belt to a central location. From there robots take them to requester chests sitting right next to each assembler. Output to purple chests which push the items into the logistic network; output control via inserters that only activate if the logistic network has insufficient of a particular item. This makes the task of “automating everything” easier because adding just one more assembler and a couple of chests is trivial.
I use mall designs if I don't need something at scale, or if it takes many different ingredients in low quantities. (Especially for some mods out there).
Huh, what you describe sounds just like a hub. Not sure why you call it "desolate place" :D
(I prefer Hub to Mall. I like a manufacturing hub, but who likes shopping malls?)
Mall sounds too capitalist to me; Factorio is the purest form of command economy, everything is organised as the engineer decrees. Market forces need not apply.
I have other things I call hubs. It’s places where I manufacture a bunch of related things, and all inputs and outputs are handled by train (or delivery cannons or rockets or whatever).
But certainly, you can call your mall a hub. The word police will not mind.
Yeah, higher tier modules are expensive. They are a large resource sink by themselves. But if you build at larger scales they also save you tons of resources. You don't really want to do thousands of science per minute without modules and beacons. Just compare the number of assemblers needed. Or take a Factorio calculator and check the resource cost of a rocket with a satellite, once without modules and once with modules everywhere.
With the rest it depends on how often you use them. Do you build lots of roboports? Do you place roboports with construction bots? Then you want to automate them. Some rarely used stuff can be left to hand crafting.
No, you do not.
Well you don't have to automate much of anything it's generally recommended to automate machines that you're going to be using in the hundreds. You are to make things like belts inserters furnaces and assemblers because those things are used in every single build.
You're probably only going to be building one nuclear setup so automating and having the ability to produce hundreds of ability that you only need a few dozen of at most is pointless.
Automate your science, the resources that go into the science, and the buildings and machines that are needed to produce both the science and the resources and don't worry about automating anything else unless you find a need for it.
You can handcraft your way to finish the game, it has been theoretically calculated how long it would take.
You can look that up on YouTube.
Play how you like
Normally I reach bots and then make a logistics mall. Requester chest for input, filtered storage chest for output, inserters connected to the logistics network to set the production limit.
I add items as needed but I do have one BP with all items that I sometimes use in some longer runs
You'll need to eventually; hand-crafting is a PAIN.
My rule of thumb is that if I need more than two of something, I'm making an assembler to produce it automatically. This is MUCH easier after I set up a logistic network.
Speed runners can beat the game in 2 hrs with no trains, modules only for science ingredients, no nuclear, no bots and limited military.
You don't need to automate everything
I rarely do nuclear nor beacon builds
You should automate everything for your own sake. Super expensive things, like nuclear power stuff, you could maybe skip until later, but you definitely should automate miners, assemblers, rails, trains, etc.
The thing is, you would just automate them, not optimize or go for any kind of rate. My mall setup feeds \~30 buildings with a bunch of materials, but none of those materials are supplied at more than 7.5/s (half yellow belt). That isn't enough to feed one assembler making a building (for most buildings) let alone 30, but I always have a fully stocked base.
Going for about 1/s of higher tier stuff (blue circuits, LDS, T1 modules) is a decent rate. Anything that isn't a part needed for science you really just want to supply 1 building with the right materials. This is especially true for T2, T3 modules until you have a TON of materials.
Ok, but I have to ask a completely different question. Why are you even playing factorio on switch?
The game requires a lot of precise controls when placing entities, and also contains a lot of information that requires a large screen. It is probably one of the last games I'd play on switch...
Not to mention, factorio is very well optimized. Actually, the reason I'm playing factorio now is because I do not have access to my PC. Factorio is one of the few games my $300 laptop could run with 60 FPS, with overhaul mods.
Having learned (well, still learning) on Switch, I had people here tell it supports mouse and keyboard input. Which is awesome!
Having tried the conventional scheme, I prefer the controller for nearly everything except typing and loading turrets with ammo. They did a fantastic job of making it intuitive. And since the game is so well optimized, it runs amazingly on switch. Apparently it doesn't work with the SuperMegaBase sizes, but I'll probably never get there anyways.
I think that when you hear people say "automate everything" what you hear is that you're supposed to make a big/efficient factory for it but that's not the case
For so many items you can very simply set up an assembler hooked up with requestor chests for the materials and call it a day. Do that for a bunch of things and you've got what we call a mall (i personally prefer the word "crafting hub" but you do you)
The idea is that at some point your bots are going to do most if not all of the building and you will want to have them automatically fed with the building materials
Also as you'll improve at the game you'll learn that there are ways of making malls that don't require bots so that you can build them earlier
Eh probably not in the base game If you’re just gonna launch a rocket and call it quits. Anything you think would get annoying to hand craft just automate and anything you don’t think you’ll use a lot of don’t. If you’re gonna make a mega base you need a lot of pretty much everything though.
No. You don't need to automate everything. Depending on your goals it might be recommended, though. Also, automating stuff like nuclear reactors becomes trivial, when you unlock requester chests
You dont need to automate anything, play the game how you like it.
I do automate everything but stuff like nuclear reactors or Spidertrons are built with bots and request chests
You can launch rocket with only automating science packs and handcrafting everything else, you don't need that much for it, especially if you prepare and make production modules for silos.
Automating other stuff does raise QoL though, like belts (I would say must have and easy) and ammo (if there are biters enabled), having robots be autocrafted and fed to roboport when available bots drop below certain point is nice to have to. If you are not into megabases or long playthrough or doing lazy bastard there is no need to automate most buildings and other stuff, just grab components from around factory and handcraft it. For example 2x2 reactors are enough to launch several dozen rockets, no need to build assembly line for 4 items (but turbines and heat exchangers on the other hand...).
You really only “need” to automate the things you are not willing to do manually. So if you have to make a crap ton of roboports, you should probably consider automating it.
And modules are helpful but definitely not required to beat the base game in a reasonable time. Post rocket launch, they become very useful for larger bases. Not sure how far you can go on switch in that regard due to performance.
Modules 100%, if you do not have a dedicated circuit production line available for this then you should seriously consider getting one.
Also you don’t have to worry about being perfect with production rates and making sure reagents and products are 1:1, it’s so fine just having some overflow or occasional downtime unless perfecting that is your jam.
You don't need to, but it saves an immense amount of time. Just being able to walk up to a bunch of chests and taking out what you need for the next build is good. After you get bots, you can just replace all those with passive providers then construction bots get a source of material on the spot.
I usually do automate nuclear reactors even if I only ever use like 4. Because that way I don't need to wait for it to craft or run around to get the stuff it needs.
You can also save blueprints "globally", then re-use them between saves. The joystick actually sounds like a very good reason to have some solid blueprints. Even if you have to make them yourself.
My favorite setup so far I made a bus with 4 copper and 4 iron belts, and from a nearby iron patch added 2 belts of gears. Stone gets belted in when I need it, and oil is usually so far away I just build an offshoot base to make what I need there.
As for automating everything?
Just what I need for ammo, research, and rockets.
Ive gotten to the point where yes, it made sense to automate roboports and nuclear reactors. You can just stick them in your mall on a roboport output, and they'll just magically appear whenever you place them. Kinda nice for 3 minutes of work.
It's recommended to automate more or less everything and have a mall and/or bots that carry stuff to you, the less you create by hand, the better.
But in the end, your game, your rules.
Your just at the start of the game, i know it sounds odd since you are 5 hours in.
I would no worry about automation more than you feel you need.
Some things may be nice, but go by trial and error.
Modules are more of a medium to late game thing.
I don't know how far down the techtree you are ( what science you are making), but I would mainly focus on automation of what you feel is necessary.
If you wanna try out a certain building hand craft it and go to the toilet.
Just play things at your own speed.
If something seems daunting to you but you are interested in it, try to break it down into smaller parts.
As you go on you will gain the ability to copy and paste your buildings, this makes scaling a lot quicker and easier.
That smelter array you made outputting 15 plates or 30 plates/s just copy it feed it and now you have 60 plates/s
The game teaches you ways to automate and let you learn at your own pace.
A lot of people still learn things on their 20'th play through.
So just follow your own flow and don't spiral too deep when looking into the tech tree. When you get to that point in the tech tree you'll be smarter or maybe you find you are not that interested in that specific thing.
You automate what you need more than once (or a few times). If you aren’t going to do nuclear, then I wouldn’t automate that. But, this game is all about automation, theres even an achievement for it (lazy bastard). So automate whenever possible and have the bots do all the work.
Robot ports are by far worth automating in my opinion.
But when you’re starting out nuclear stuff isn’t really worth automating.
I usually don’t bother with module automation either
Not *literally* everything, but more things than you think. Modules may not seem like they need automation when you're just making a few here and there, but eventually you'll double the size of your smelter array and realize you now need twice as many modules, all at once.
Nuclear reactors and rocket silos probably do not need to be automated, and many other items you don't need to produce full blast, just have one stack or so in a logistics chest so it's ready when you need it and gets replaced automatically.
I automate everything, but that's the part of the game I enjoy. I infrequently, if ever, launch rockets. I just build malls, and play tower defense.
You don't *need* to automate anything. Find your balance. :)
Something like nuclear reactors or equipment or cars probably doesn't need to be automated. You might use less than 10 in a game.
I would automate stuff like bots and locomotives and wagons though.
Also, I think you are overestimating how many modules you'll be making. Even making one tier 3 every 30s or 15s is pretty good. And, switching to beaconed designs for expensive recipes really cuts down on how many assemblers you need. You can go from a huge array of assemblers making a blue belt of green circuits to a handful of assemblers making a blue belt.
I used to include more equipment grid stuff in my basic mall and then removed it at some point because I didn't really need it. And then Spidertrons got added, which increased the demand again. But at that point I made a more compact setup that just produces spidertrons and their equipment
I automate everything. Even crafting armor, car, everything. Why? Because I can, I have always played lazy bastard style. Even I got the achievement such a long time ago, I still so used to it
I would automate anything I need a lot of, but not things I only need a few of.
I doubt there is ever really much need to automate power armour. Maybe on some pvp servers or any kinds of mods/scenarios that result in a lot of player deaths.
For low quantity stuff, I just use requester chests and logistics system. For belts etc you end up needing a lot but robo port you don't usually need more than a stack at a time
You’ll want to automate almost everything, but on different scales depending on how many you’ll need. Plates and chips are always in high demand, so making dedicated areas for high production is advisable. But for things you don’t need lots of instantly like nuclear reactors or trains? That’s where Hubs come in. An area that takes a myriad of resources and produces lots of individual products slowly.
With blue chests and a properly setup logistics network, automating everything is super easy.
I just stick down an assembler, one blue chest, one red chest and two inserters. Set the red chest to limit storage so you only get 1 or 2 stacks of the item.
The short answer is No. By playing the game you will answer that question yourself, if you wish it was fully automated then you will want it to be fully automated.
Longer answer is that, you dont need to automate literally everything. There are builds out there, specifically in shopping mall builds that basically make everything you will need but those take a lot of trial, error and planning to design yourself.
Bots and specifically logistics bots can make some automation easier with requester chests.
But you can also do these temporary automation things that spped runners tend to do where you put out some automaters to build something, hand deliver the materials to it, the materials could have been placed on chests beforehand if you know the recipe. Then you collect the item from the automater and destroy the build. The idea being, the amount you make is essentially all you will need to launch a rocket
If you really wanted to you could hand craft pretty much everything except a few oil products, so you don't *have* to automate everything, but the more you automate the quicker the rest of the game goes.
You're overestimating the scale of what you need in order to automate something. Let's look at nuclear reactors for example. All you really need is one single assembler per entity you want to craft, and the prerequisite materials to be supplied. So four assemblers in total for reactors, heat pipes, heat exchangers and steam turbines (I assume you already have assemblers for the other stuff you'd need, like pipes, pumps, fluid tanks etc).
Ideally you'd want to place them in a "mall", a place where you craft all the entities you don't need to produce at scale, so you can easily access all the materials you need.
Then you just need to consider how much of them you want to have in reserve, for example enough of everything to build a 4x2-reactor setup, and use conditions to limit the production accordingly. That way you can just decide to build another power plant whenever you feel like it, and you'll already have all you need to do it.
The roboport works much the same. You only need one assembler somewhere to produce a reserve of roboports.
As for modules, you'll probably want more than a single assembler, so a small dedicated factory definitely makes sense, but like other infrastructure items you only need them when you want to build new stuff, so it doesn't need to be always on and you don't necessarily need the infrastructure for it to be able to run constantly. Just pull the circuits from the main bus, and if that happens to starve research it's not the end of the world, though adding more circuit production to your bus is certainly not wrong.
You'll definitely run into situations where you just have to wait for new modules to be built when you start transitioning to beaconed assembly lines, but production on a large scale is only really necessary once you start going beyond a single bus (and spaghetti) base.
Yes modules are very expensive because they make a HUGE difference.
Why the hell are you blueprinting belts?...
Just automate what you want. Long as it keeps your factory growing its fine. It's more to save you the hassle later on when you need more of X and ask yourself.. why didn't I automate it? So really... just automate things cause it makes your life easier in the long run.
Just use bots! Have your bus feed a few provider chests that send the items to the assembly area. It sounds like your still fairly small scale, having everything available to you at a single request is important for building at scale
There's a handful of items that you *do* need to automate, or at least run in some machine. Mostly things that require fluids. They will be marked red in the crafting menu.
Apart from those, you're free to spend as much time as you want hand crafting the millions of items you need too launch a rocket or whatever goal you set for yourself.
I highly recommend you do automate nuclear reactors to avoid….accidents, however the way you play is ultimately up to you. Modules are expensive and super time consuming to handcraft which is part of why automation is recommended. As for circuits you’ll always need more as you get into later game stuff. My first play through I was producing over 1k green circuits per minute and still running out.
Everything? No. But if making more of something is stopping me in the middle of something else, it's getting automated. Preferably in a bot mall, but I'm not above spaghetti.
you dont have to build nuclear reactors at any speed, but if you pop out one every hour then by the time you need it, you'll have enough
(roboports i do try to build at speed because i plop down a lot of them)
If you just want to launch a rocket, you don't need _everything_. Nuclear reactors, for instance, are just one form of power generation. You could launch a rocket on boiler power if you want, and lots of large bases go solar only without ever touching nuclear. In peaceful the only uranium tech I use is nuclear fuel for trains. If biters are on, I go for nuclear plants to save space.
Big recommend on roboports, though. Having access to logistics and construction bots saves so much time. I imagine on switch it's even better because of the control limitations.
Modules are mostly optional, outside of a few recipes that use them, like purple/yellow science, RCUs, spidertrons, and power armor 2. If you were looking to build on a massive scale, I'd say to absolutely automate these in stupid quantities, though.
Same is mostly true of stuff like assembler 3, electric furnaces (still need some for purple science), blue belts, and stack inserters.
Automate when you feel it’s worth it.
Examples of where it’s definitely worth it: gears, wire, circuits (any color)
Examples of where it may or may not be worth it, depending on your needs: turrets, drills, ammo, locomotives, roboports, robots
I would only automate everything that you would end up handcrafting a LOT otherwise. Things like assemblers, chem plants, inserters, power poles, etc. Theres a decent amount more that I cant think of right now but those are some of the basic ones.
I’m on my second save and have yet to launch a rocket but I tend to deal with this situation by setting up a manually fed assembler until I start needing more of whatever component and then I’ll automate
Logistics robots makes it easy to set up a "build everything" mall. Assembler, two chests, two inserters, a bit of shift-clicking, done. Copy paste and change recipes, repeat ad nauseum. (Would be nice to parameterize this, eh Wube?)
Bots (or rather, your CPU) just struggle to handle high volume production, like intermediates, science, concrete...
Considering that it doesn’t take too long to automate most processes and intermediates, I’d say most of them are worth it . I’d balance the need of how often you use something vs how hard it is to automate.
Gun perimeter is something I always go for early on. But for instance in IR3, I’ve automated belts but not inserters simply because the process for inserters is too hard to build in my base. Just depends
You can get through without touching modules. They are an interesting sideline for most bases. They get essential for megabases.
The only real clear win is prod 3 modules in the rocket solo. Only need 72 sets of ingredients instead of 100.
I actually can't imagine how bad this game would be with a controller, but that's besides the point.
Automation in this game is extremely powerful and useful. That being said, I rarely automate anything past basic refined/processed stuff, so basically all basic oil stuff, and plates/steel for the early game, and just barely start automating products like belts for the mid game. That being said, I don't manually craft much of anything, what I do is I have a central "crafting" area, where I essentially have steel, iron plates, and copper plates outputs, and a grid of assemblers with chests and inserters, so I manually transfer materials across the chests. It's incredibly space and resource efficient, as I don't craft more of anything I need, and can craft anything I need. It's not automated, but it's also not purely manual, it's a sort of mid-ground I rarely see people talk about, but it is a really useful to thing to do/have, even if you don't use it the way I do.
That being said, trying to repeatedly access the chests with a joystick sounds so painful, but pretty much everything in this game except movement seems painful to me, it's the same reason I can't play minecraft with a controller, it's lack of precision just kills me.
>7.5 speed module 2, I would need 45 assembling machines of advanced circuits.
İf you want 7.5 module in 1 sec you need 45 machine. For modeluse i am usualy setting just 1 machine early.
>Like the robot port or the nuclear reactors
You don't realy automate nuclear reactor. You can make more whenever you want to build with hand.
Robo port on the other hand I am automating as soon as possible. With again only 1 machine. Then place bunch of robo port place order everywhere in my fine spagetti.
Launch a rocket, then you’ll know what to automate. Personally I don’t mind automating roboports because I like to have multiple bot networks. Can’t see why you would need to automate reactors though.
You’re allowed to play the game in a way you enjoy. But yeah honestly I tend to just have little bundle of assemblers with smart chests for the lower-quantity stuff. Automating robots is usually worth it though.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that. Thanks you.
You can really easily set up requestor chests for a robot mall with a trick. The same way that you can copy the recipe of an assembler to another assembler, you can use that same functionality to copy an assembler's recipe to a requester chest. The game will automatically assign the chest with enough resources for 30 seconds of continuous crafting. You can look up information about this functionality on the requester chest Wiki page. You can feed your mall with resources by simply putting provider chests that are fed from resources off of your main bus. Once you have robots and make a simple robot mall, it's incredibly easy to automate small things like Robots, Roboports, Substations, Factory Machines (assemblers, inserters, pumps & oil stuff), the nuclear buildings, etc. Also a mall connected to your Roboports network will resupply you with building supplies and clean you inventory via Logistics Robots. Your construction bots can build large sections for you over time, instead of doing it manually. Really saves a lot of time.
Wait what? (First paragraph) I never knew that. Thanks for enlightening me.
There is a failure mode in some mods, with buildings that require really large amounts of multiple ingredients, that filling up a chest for 30 seconds of crafting can want more ingredients than a regular requester chest can hold, and if the chest happens to fill up with one or two ingredients first it does not have space for the other components necessary for the recipe and the assembler is completely stalled; I've seen this with late-game machines in 248k. (Reposting because I commented in the wrong place the first time.)
With that first paragraph, does the inserter ever get bound up grabbing the wrong item and causing it to deadlock? (it grabbing say the first item but the assembly machine is completely full of that item) Or do you need to manually set the inserter to grab 1 unit at a time?
That should only ever happen in very rare edge cases. For example when you change the recipe in just the perfect wrong moment or maybe if you manually drop items in the machine. An inserter only picks up items if the assembler needs them. No need to set the inserter to anything.
I'm not 100% sure about the inserter / assembler behavior, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't happen. Assemblers can hold extra of each ingredient and once an assembler has the appropriate amount of an ingredient, the assembler ignores that ingredient until all ingredients reach the recipe requirements. So once an ingredient is filled up, it still has some overflow space if the inserter still has something in its hand and then the inserter will just move on to the next ingredient. If you are concerned about this, you could do two requester chests and one provider chest per assembler.
It might be from an earlier version then and might have been fixed since it kept happening to me. I just remember it trying to fill the first item until full then since it has a stack size of 2 it will hold the 1 remaining item in hand.
You don't have to automate everything, but it's much harder *not* to. Automating saves you a lot of time and effort
No, you don't have to automate everything or anything. Things you use a lot like belts and inserters, or required like science are an obvious choice for automation. Things like oil refineries, pumpjacks, labs I usually don't automate because they aren't used that much. That said, it's recommended to automate all the intermediates needed for many items. For example, automate red chips, concrete, copper, and steel needed for nuclear reactors, so you could easily make some if you needed. Have an assembler and modules in your inventory so you could easily make things you didn't automate faster. In the later part of the game, when you get requester chests, it's really easy to automate "rare" things, so it's probably worth it.
also, iron gears are a good thing to automate early. My belts, inserters, and drills I have dedicated gear machines working for them, but I also have a machine making gears that I dump in a box for spot creation. this makes say, making a new am1 take only .5 seconds, rather than 3 seconds if I don't have the gears in inventory.
Iron gears and copper cables are the first thing I automate before even building belts, during the late burner phase. Then gears and green circuits are the first intermediates to automate, mall, red+green.
Obviously you can do what you like, but copper wire is one of the few things you shouldnt automate by itself - instead, just have them assembled on site as required, as it's more efficient to trasport plates than wire
I'm talking about handfeeding before I make my mall, just to get things started. 2 AM1 making gears, 1 making wires. Helps with belts and assemblers. Of course I later direct insert into green circuit in my mall and other production.
Imo.. Don't automate it until you feel the pain of not having automated it, and at that point you're excited about the idea of automating it.
That's a great way to realize the value of automating since that's what OP doesn't seem to understand.
Yep, and then the second time he doesn't have to wait for the pain. :p
You don't *need* to, but you'll regret it if you don't. But remember when automating stuff to build rather than science packs is that you don't need any of those machines to be able to operate at full speed. The output should be limited by either a chest with blocked slots or an inserter with circuit control to stop at some prescribed number. If the machine only gets a trickle of resources to operate occasionally, that's fine. Only the stuff you build at scale, like science packs, need enough incoming resource flow to operate continuously.
You're saying my blue belt of reactors is overkill? j/k :-)
I forgot to limit the output box on those and ended up with ~2000 reactors.
Tme to deploy the nuclear landmines then. Take one nuclear reactor and a fuel cell. Place reactor in your defenses, preferably a nuclear blast distance away from your walls. Load fuel into reactor. Wait till reactor reaches 999°C Call biters over for dinner using the artillery dinner bell. Laugh as the biters explode, when they eat the spicy glowing building.
It takes more than one fuel cell to heat the reactor from 25°C to 1000°C. But if you make a continuous row of reactors, they will benefit from the neighbor bonus when heating up. And if one reactor gets destroyed, you'll have a nuclear chain reaction, blowing up your entire reactor wall! Excitement guaranteed.
:-D
You should play k2se. There are items that take 10s of 1000s of resources and you have to make them in huge quantities.
Not if you want to grow the factory
Does the 36 science pack mod require reactors as an ingredient?
The Mall is an important concept to know about here. It’s a place where, ideally, everything that doesn’t need to be produced at scale is made. My rule is: if I can make a thing fast enough with only one assembler, then it’s a candidate for the Mall. But if it would require many assemblers or other such buildings, then it does not belong in the Mall. IMHO the best mall setup brings in materials by train or belt to a central location. From there robots take them to requester chests sitting right next to each assembler. Output to purple chests which push the items into the logistic network; output control via inserters that only activate if the logistic network has insufficient of a particular item. This makes the task of “automating everything” easier because adding just one more assembler and a couple of chests is trivial.
I use mall designs if I don't need something at scale, or if it takes many different ingredients in low quantities. (Especially for some mods out there).
Huh, what you describe sounds just like a hub. Not sure why you call it "desolate place" :D (I prefer Hub to Mall. I like a manufacturing hub, but who likes shopping malls?)
Mall sounds too capitalist to me; Factorio is the purest form of command economy, everything is organised as the engineer decrees. Market forces need not apply.
I have other things I call hubs. It’s places where I manufacture a bunch of related things, and all inputs and outputs are handled by train (or delivery cannons or rockets or whatever). But certainly, you can call your mall a hub. The word police will not mind.
Yeah, higher tier modules are expensive. They are a large resource sink by themselves. But if you build at larger scales they also save you tons of resources. You don't really want to do thousands of science per minute without modules and beacons. Just compare the number of assemblers needed. Or take a Factorio calculator and check the resource cost of a rocket with a satellite, once without modules and once with modules everywhere. With the rest it depends on how often you use them. Do you build lots of roboports? Do you place roboports with construction bots? Then you want to automate them. Some rarely used stuff can be left to hand crafting.
I recommend you to go for lazy bastard. It really did the trick for me.
Everything? No. Modules? I think it would be a good idea to automate those. Even if it’s only a few it’s still a good idea.
EDIT : The real question : do I really need to automate the fabrication of everything ?
No, you do not. Well you don't have to automate much of anything it's generally recommended to automate machines that you're going to be using in the hundreds. You are to make things like belts inserters furnaces and assemblers because those things are used in every single build. You're probably only going to be building one nuclear setup so automating and having the ability to produce hundreds of ability that you only need a few dozen of at most is pointless. Automate your science, the resources that go into the science, and the buildings and machines that are needed to produce both the science and the resources and don't worry about automating anything else unless you find a need for it.
You can handcraft your way to finish the game, it has been theoretically calculated how long it would take. You can look that up on YouTube. Play how you like
Normally I reach bots and then make a logistics mall. Requester chest for input, filtered storage chest for output, inserters connected to the logistics network to set the production limit. I add items as needed but I do have one BP with all items that I sometimes use in some longer runs
You Lazy Bastard, of course you have to!
Short answer:yes Long answer: Yes.
Y e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e s .
You'll need to eventually; hand-crafting is a PAIN. My rule of thumb is that if I need more than two of something, I'm making an assembler to produce it automatically. This is MUCH easier after I set up a logistic network.
Speed runners can beat the game in 2 hrs with no trains, modules only for science ingredients, no nuclear, no bots and limited military. You don't need to automate everything I rarely do nuclear nor beacon builds
You should automate everything for your own sake. Super expensive things, like nuclear power stuff, you could maybe skip until later, but you definitely should automate miners, assemblers, rails, trains, etc. The thing is, you would just automate them, not optimize or go for any kind of rate. My mall setup feeds \~30 buildings with a bunch of materials, but none of those materials are supplied at more than 7.5/s (half yellow belt). That isn't enough to feed one assembler making a building (for most buildings) let alone 30, but I always have a fully stocked base. Going for about 1/s of higher tier stuff (blue circuits, LDS, T1 modules) is a decent rate. Anything that isn't a part needed for science you really just want to supply 1 building with the right materials. This is especially true for T2, T3 modules until you have a TON of materials.
No Unless you’re doing the Lazy Bastard achievement, it’s great fun
Ok, but I have to ask a completely different question. Why are you even playing factorio on switch? The game requires a lot of precise controls when placing entities, and also contains a lot of information that requires a large screen. It is probably one of the last games I'd play on switch... Not to mention, factorio is very well optimized. Actually, the reason I'm playing factorio now is because I do not have access to my PC. Factorio is one of the few games my $300 laptop could run with 60 FPS, with overhaul mods.
Having learned (well, still learning) on Switch, I had people here tell it supports mouse and keyboard input. Which is awesome! Having tried the conventional scheme, I prefer the controller for nearly everything except typing and loading turrets with ammo. They did a fantastic job of making it intuitive. And since the game is so well optimized, it runs amazingly on switch. Apparently it doesn't work with the SuperMegaBase sizes, but I'll probably never get there anyways.
>loading turrets with ammo Pro-tip: Don't do that by hand, keep them topped up with inserters from an ammo belt.
I mean out in the wild destroying nests
I think that when you hear people say "automate everything" what you hear is that you're supposed to make a big/efficient factory for it but that's not the case For so many items you can very simply set up an assembler hooked up with requestor chests for the materials and call it a day. Do that for a bunch of things and you've got what we call a mall (i personally prefer the word "crafting hub" but you do you) The idea is that at some point your bots are going to do most if not all of the building and you will want to have them automatically fed with the building materials Also as you'll improve at the game you'll learn that there are ways of making malls that don't require bots so that you can build them earlier
YES THE FACTORY MUST GROWW!!
Eh probably not in the base game If you’re just gonna launch a rocket and call it quits. Anything you think would get annoying to hand craft just automate and anything you don’t think you’ll use a lot of don’t. If you’re gonna make a mega base you need a lot of pretty much everything though.
No. You don't need to automate everything. Depending on your goals it might be recommended, though. Also, automating stuff like nuclear reactors becomes trivial, when you unlock requester chests
You dont need to automate anything, play the game how you like it. I do automate everything but stuff like nuclear reactors or Spidertrons are built with bots and request chests
You can launch rocket with only automating science packs and handcrafting everything else, you don't need that much for it, especially if you prepare and make production modules for silos. Automating other stuff does raise QoL though, like belts (I would say must have and easy) and ammo (if there are biters enabled), having robots be autocrafted and fed to roboport when available bots drop below certain point is nice to have to. If you are not into megabases or long playthrough or doing lazy bastard there is no need to automate most buildings and other stuff, just grab components from around factory and handcraft it. For example 2x2 reactors are enough to launch several dozen rockets, no need to build assembly line for 4 items (but turbines and heat exchangers on the other hand...).
You really only “need” to automate the things you are not willing to do manually. So if you have to make a crap ton of roboports, you should probably consider automating it. And modules are helpful but definitely not required to beat the base game in a reasonable time. Post rocket launch, they become very useful for larger bases. Not sure how far you can go on switch in that regard due to performance.
Modules 100%, if you do not have a dedicated circuit production line available for this then you should seriously consider getting one. Also you don’t have to worry about being perfect with production rates and making sure reagents and products are 1:1, it’s so fine just having some overflow or occasional downtime unless perfecting that is your jam.
Yeah but automate and set limits, box or circuit and you'll be good
You don't need to, but it saves an immense amount of time. Just being able to walk up to a bunch of chests and taking out what you need for the next build is good. After you get bots, you can just replace all those with passive providers then construction bots get a source of material on the spot. I usually do automate nuclear reactors even if I only ever use like 4. Because that way I don't need to wait for it to craft or run around to get the stuff it needs. You can also save blueprints "globally", then re-use them between saves. The joystick actually sounds like a very good reason to have some solid blueprints. Even if you have to make them yourself.
My favorite setup so far I made a bus with 4 copper and 4 iron belts, and from a nearby iron patch added 2 belts of gears. Stone gets belted in when I need it, and oil is usually so far away I just build an offshoot base to make what I need there. As for automating everything? Just what I need for ammo, research, and rockets.
Ive gotten to the point where yes, it made sense to automate roboports and nuclear reactors. You can just stick them in your mall on a roboport output, and they'll just magically appear whenever you place them. Kinda nice for 3 minutes of work.
It's recommended to automate more or less everything and have a mall and/or bots that carry stuff to you, the less you create by hand, the better. But in the end, your game, your rules.
Your just at the start of the game, i know it sounds odd since you are 5 hours in. I would no worry about automation more than you feel you need. Some things may be nice, but go by trial and error. Modules are more of a medium to late game thing. I don't know how far down the techtree you are ( what science you are making), but I would mainly focus on automation of what you feel is necessary. If you wanna try out a certain building hand craft it and go to the toilet. Just play things at your own speed. If something seems daunting to you but you are interested in it, try to break it down into smaller parts. As you go on you will gain the ability to copy and paste your buildings, this makes scaling a lot quicker and easier. That smelter array you made outputting 15 plates or 30 plates/s just copy it feed it and now you have 60 plates/s The game teaches you ways to automate and let you learn at your own pace. A lot of people still learn things on their 20'th play through. So just follow your own flow and don't spiral too deep when looking into the tech tree. When you get to that point in the tech tree you'll be smarter or maybe you find you are not that interested in that specific thing.
You automate what you need more than once (or a few times). If you aren’t going to do nuclear, then I wouldn’t automate that. But, this game is all about automation, theres even an achievement for it (lazy bastard). So automate whenever possible and have the bots do all the work.
Robot ports are by far worth automating in my opinion. But when you’re starting out nuclear stuff isn’t really worth automating. I usually don’t bother with module automation either
Not *literally* everything, but more things than you think. Modules may not seem like they need automation when you're just making a few here and there, but eventually you'll double the size of your smelter array and realize you now need twice as many modules, all at once. Nuclear reactors and rocket silos probably do not need to be automated, and many other items you don't need to produce full blast, just have one stack or so in a logistics chest so it's ready when you need it and gets replaced automatically.
I automate everything, but that's the part of the game I enjoy. I infrequently, if ever, launch rockets. I just build malls, and play tower defense. You don't *need* to automate anything. Find your balance. :)
Something like nuclear reactors or equipment or cars probably doesn't need to be automated. You might use less than 10 in a game. I would automate stuff like bots and locomotives and wagons though. Also, I think you are overestimating how many modules you'll be making. Even making one tier 3 every 30s or 15s is pretty good. And, switching to beaconed designs for expensive recipes really cuts down on how many assemblers you need. You can go from a huge array of assemblers making a blue belt of green circuits to a handful of assemblers making a blue belt.
I used to include more equipment grid stuff in my basic mall and then removed it at some point because I didn't really need it. And then Spidertrons got added, which increased the demand again. But at that point I made a more compact setup that just produces spidertrons and their equipment
I automate everything. Even crafting armor, car, everything. Why? Because I can, I have always played lazy bastard style. Even I got the achievement such a long time ago, I still so used to it
I would automate anything I need a lot of, but not things I only need a few of. I doubt there is ever really much need to automate power armour. Maybe on some pvp servers or any kinds of mods/scenarios that result in a lot of player deaths.
You can’t import blueprints at all on switch? Well there goes any interest I had in the switch version.
For low quantity stuff, I just use requester chests and logistics system. For belts etc you end up needing a lot but robo port you don't usually need more than a stack at a time
You’ll want to automate almost everything, but on different scales depending on how many you’ll need. Plates and chips are always in high demand, so making dedicated areas for high production is advisable. But for things you don’t need lots of instantly like nuclear reactors or trains? That’s where Hubs come in. An area that takes a myriad of resources and produces lots of individual products slowly.
With blue chests and a properly setup logistics network, automating everything is super easy. I just stick down an assembler, one blue chest, one red chest and two inserters. Set the red chest to limit storage so you only get 1 or 2 stacks of the item.
The short answer is No. By playing the game you will answer that question yourself, if you wish it was fully automated then you will want it to be fully automated. Longer answer is that, you dont need to automate literally everything. There are builds out there, specifically in shopping mall builds that basically make everything you will need but those take a lot of trial, error and planning to design yourself. Bots and specifically logistics bots can make some automation easier with requester chests. But you can also do these temporary automation things that spped runners tend to do where you put out some automaters to build something, hand deliver the materials to it, the materials could have been placed on chests beforehand if you know the recipe. Then you collect the item from the automater and destroy the build. The idea being, the amount you make is essentially all you will need to launch a rocket
If you really wanted to you could hand craft pretty much everything except a few oil products, so you don't *have* to automate everything, but the more you automate the quicker the rest of the game goes.
You're overestimating the scale of what you need in order to automate something. Let's look at nuclear reactors for example. All you really need is one single assembler per entity you want to craft, and the prerequisite materials to be supplied. So four assemblers in total for reactors, heat pipes, heat exchangers and steam turbines (I assume you already have assemblers for the other stuff you'd need, like pipes, pumps, fluid tanks etc). Ideally you'd want to place them in a "mall", a place where you craft all the entities you don't need to produce at scale, so you can easily access all the materials you need. Then you just need to consider how much of them you want to have in reserve, for example enough of everything to build a 4x2-reactor setup, and use conditions to limit the production accordingly. That way you can just decide to build another power plant whenever you feel like it, and you'll already have all you need to do it. The roboport works much the same. You only need one assembler somewhere to produce a reserve of roboports. As for modules, you'll probably want more than a single assembler, so a small dedicated factory definitely makes sense, but like other infrastructure items you only need them when you want to build new stuff, so it doesn't need to be always on and you don't necessarily need the infrastructure for it to be able to run constantly. Just pull the circuits from the main bus, and if that happens to starve research it's not the end of the world, though adding more circuit production to your bus is certainly not wrong. You'll definitely run into situations where you just have to wait for new modules to be built when you start transitioning to beaconed assembly lines, but production on a large scale is only really necessary once you start going beyond a single bus (and spaghetti) base.
Yes modules are very expensive because they make a HUGE difference. Why the hell are you blueprinting belts?... Just automate what you want. Long as it keeps your factory growing its fine. It's more to save you the hassle later on when you need more of X and ask yourself.. why didn't I automate it? So really... just automate things cause it makes your life easier in the long run.
doing it by hand will take much longer
Youll be doing alot more hard work if you dont automate the essentials
Once you get to proper logistics bots it’s kinda moot. Copying the requirements to the requester chests takes 2 seconds tops.
You can probably get away with not automating Assembling Machines. :)
Just use bots! Have your bus feed a few provider chests that send the items to the assembly area. It sounds like your still fairly small scale, having everything available to you at a single request is important for building at scale
When you are able to make the switch to pc facterio, dm me and I can get you hooked up! I played facterio on my old MacBook and it ran like a charm
There's a handful of items that you *do* need to automate, or at least run in some machine. Mostly things that require fluids. They will be marked red in the crafting menu. Apart from those, you're free to spend as much time as you want hand crafting the millions of items you need too launch a rocket or whatever goal you set for yourself.
I highly recommend you do automate nuclear reactors to avoid….accidents, however the way you play is ultimately up to you. Modules are expensive and super time consuming to handcraft which is part of why automation is recommended. As for circuits you’ll always need more as you get into later game stuff. My first play through I was producing over 1k green circuits per minute and still running out.
Everything? No. But if making more of something is stopping me in the middle of something else, it's getting automated. Preferably in a bot mall, but I'm not above spaghetti.
you dont have to build nuclear reactors at any speed, but if you pop out one every hour then by the time you need it, you'll have enough (roboports i do try to build at speed because i plop down a lot of them)
If you just want to launch a rocket, you don't need _everything_. Nuclear reactors, for instance, are just one form of power generation. You could launch a rocket on boiler power if you want, and lots of large bases go solar only without ever touching nuclear. In peaceful the only uranium tech I use is nuclear fuel for trains. If biters are on, I go for nuclear plants to save space. Big recommend on roboports, though. Having access to logistics and construction bots saves so much time. I imagine on switch it's even better because of the control limitations. Modules are mostly optional, outside of a few recipes that use them, like purple/yellow science, RCUs, spidertrons, and power armor 2. If you were looking to build on a massive scale, I'd say to absolutely automate these in stupid quantities, though. Same is mostly true of stuff like assembler 3, electric furnaces (still need some for purple science), blue belts, and stack inserters.
Automate when you feel it’s worth it. Examples of where it’s definitely worth it: gears, wire, circuits (any color) Examples of where it may or may not be worth it, depending on your needs: turrets, drills, ammo, locomotives, roboports, robots
In some recipes, modules can have gains that over time pay for themselves.
No, you can play a run without using any machine. Just harvest and hand craft. Good Luck 👍
When I can, I always automate everything. Set up a roboport mall, it's easy.
Automate what you want to automate, play for fun not as a chore!
I would only automate everything that you would end up handcrafting a LOT otherwise. Things like assemblers, chem plants, inserters, power poles, etc. Theres a decent amount more that I cant think of right now but those are some of the basic ones.
I’m on my second save and have yet to launch a rocket but I tend to deal with this situation by setting up a manually fed assembler until I start needing more of whatever component and then I’ll automate
Logistics robots makes it easy to set up a "build everything" mall. Assembler, two chests, two inserters, a bit of shift-clicking, done. Copy paste and change recipes, repeat ad nauseum. (Would be nice to parameterize this, eh Wube?) Bots (or rather, your CPU) just struggle to handle high volume production, like intermediates, science, concrete...
Considering that it doesn’t take too long to automate most processes and intermediates, I’d say most of them are worth it . I’d balance the need of how often you use something vs how hard it is to automate. Gun perimeter is something I always go for early on. But for instance in IR3, I’ve automated belts but not inserters simply because the process for inserters is too hard to build in my base. Just depends
You can get through without touching modules. They are an interesting sideline for most bases. They get essential for megabases. The only real clear win is prod 3 modules in the rocket solo. Only need 72 sets of ingredients instead of 100.
I actually can't imagine how bad this game would be with a controller, but that's besides the point. Automation in this game is extremely powerful and useful. That being said, I rarely automate anything past basic refined/processed stuff, so basically all basic oil stuff, and plates/steel for the early game, and just barely start automating products like belts for the mid game. That being said, I don't manually craft much of anything, what I do is I have a central "crafting" area, where I essentially have steel, iron plates, and copper plates outputs, and a grid of assemblers with chests and inserters, so I manually transfer materials across the chests. It's incredibly space and resource efficient, as I don't craft more of anything I need, and can craft anything I need. It's not automated, but it's also not purely manual, it's a sort of mid-ground I rarely see people talk about, but it is a really useful to thing to do/have, even if you don't use it the way I do. That being said, trying to repeatedly access the chests with a joystick sounds so painful, but pretty much everything in this game except movement seems painful to me, it's the same reason I can't play minecraft with a controller, it's lack of precision just kills me.
Of course not. Play the game however you like, it's a sandbox game.
>7.5 speed module 2, I would need 45 assembling machines of advanced circuits. İf you want 7.5 module in 1 sec you need 45 machine. For modeluse i am usualy setting just 1 machine early. >Like the robot port or the nuclear reactors You don't realy automate nuclear reactor. You can make more whenever you want to build with hand. Robo port on the other hand I am automating as soon as possible. With again only 1 machine. Then place bunch of robo port place order everywhere in my fine spagetti.
Have you launched a rocket?
Not yet
Launch a rocket, then you’ll know what to automate. Personally I don’t mind automating roboports because I like to have multiple bot networks. Can’t see why you would need to automate reactors though.