I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:
- I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
- I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
- I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
- Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.
Then:
- Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
- I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
- Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
- All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.
Oh and:
- Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.
Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.
That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.
themusicman@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Factorio sucks for perfectionists. You have to be able to embrace the spaghetti, and not everyone can
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.
themusicman@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah same. I’ve seen other people stockpile intermediate resources to try and smooth out bottlenecks, but I think that’s wasteful. Build extra throughout, and have as little product sitting there as possible.