Heading to the Solar System Edge in Factorio: Space Age

I reached Aquilo, and I can now (more or less) run fusion power and produce cryogenic science.

All that’s left is to head for the edge of the solar system.

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Spaceship Design#

Past Aquilo, big asteroids start showing up. To destroy them, you need railgun turrets.

Further out, promethium asteroids appear. They’re needed to make promethium science packs, and the ingredients for those include quantum processors and biter eggs.

To produce quantum processors, you have to deliver specialty goods from every planet to Aquilo at high throughput. That’s a huge project in itself, but the real problem is the biter eggs.

Biter eggs can only be produced on Nauvis, and 30 minutes after harvesting they spoil and hatch into biters. Let that happen on a spaceship and you’ve got a catastrophe.

There are two ways out.

The first: after harvesting the biter eggs, reach the solar system edge within 30 minutes and produce the promethium science packs on the spot.

The second: bring promethium asteroid chunks back to Nauvis.

The latter looks easier, but the stack size of asteroid chunks is 1, so you can’t haul much of anything.

While I was wondering what to do, I came across the idea of using belt weaving to store asteroid chunks on belts. Apparently that packs more per unit of area than even a legendary cargo bay.

The former was frightening just to think about, so I decided to go with this approach.

I set up throttle control with a simple PI controller so the ship cruises at 200 km/h.

Building Out the City Block Rail System#

The general-purpose rail network has been working wonders on Nauvis. The rail network itself acts as a gigantic buffer, so each sub-factory doesn’t have to worry about supply and demand outside of it.

As I kept developing things that way, a near-grid structure started to emerge on its own.

That’s when I finally understood the benefits of the city block system I’d heard so much about.

Each block basically uses only input from the rail network and outputs only back to the rail network.

If the blocks and their inputs and outputs follow a common standard, then whenever something runs short, you can fix the bottleneck by just copy-pasting an existing block.

That is the strength of a general-purpose rail network plus city blocks!

So I decided to make a city block blueprint.

After nearly 50 hours of trial and error, I ended up with the following block cell.

Block Cell Specs#

One cell has roughly 100x100 tiles of freely usable area, not counting the rails, and four stations. Each station is designed so that trains don’t spill out onto the main line as long as the train limit is 2 or less.

At first I considered dynamically adjusting station priority based on stock levels, but it turns out that causes a swarm of trains trying to reach faraway stations, and the main line deadlocks. What matters isn’t tuning the distribution to match demand. It’s to oversupply, period.

So I scrapped the idea. The “circuit that outputs the number of seconds since a station last had a train present” was built and then rendered unnecessary, so I decided to put one at every station as a visualizer for spotting bottlenecks.

Making Legendary Modules, Substations, and Bots#

Reaching Aquilo made it possible to produce legendary items.

First, I decided to start producing the various legendary modules.

The block cell above is also designed on the assumption that it uses legendary substations, so I need to set up a production line for those.

And to make logistics on Aquilo easier, I want legendary logistic bots, which have low power consumption.

That’s where things stand right now.

Maybe I Should Do the Space Casino#

I tried upcycling legendary substations, and the yield was much worse than I expected. Even if I drained the supply from all of Vulcanus’s production lines, I could only make a few dozen per hour.

The space casino is a strategy where you recycle asteroids on a space platform using a huge number of crushers loaded with quality modules, produce legendary asteroid chunks, and crush those to get high-quality basic materials of every kind.

It’s a pretty cheaty strategy, but when you look at efficiency, it’s overwhelmingly better. So I’m now designing a space platform for the space casino.

The to-do list just keeps growing…