Hello, long time no see!
Today we are going to talk about the expansion which is called Factorio: Space Age.
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What is Factorio: Space Age?kovarex
Factorio: Space Age continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms.
Vanilla Factorio ends by launching the rocket into space, so I always expected it to be quite obvious what we are going to do next.
Honestly the space platform related gameplay was actually planned a very long time ago, and we had shown a little bit in FFF-74.
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The 3rd science pack is probably the hardest leap forward. But purple/yellow science are difficult too (just not “as hard” as blue IMO).
The 3rd science pack requires mastery of oil refining. The 4th and 5th (purple/yellow) science packs are “just” about scaling up to exceptionally large bases, which is easier IMO than trying to figure out oil (though still somewhat difficult, and the scaling is of two grossly different stuffs. Purple science requires a ton of stone-and-steel, while yellow science requires a ton of copper).
Once you recognize that purple and yellow need way more space than you originally expected, its actually really easy. Just build “bigger” than you ever had before, but otherwise the basics are the exact same as red/green science. Don’t build a “few” assembly machines, you need to be thinking of at least 50+ assembly machines for the entire purple / yellow chains, and possibly need ~2 or ~3 belts of raw iron ore (for purple) or ~2-to-3 belts of raw copper ore (for yellow). Meaning you need maybe 200+ furnaces (I’m not joking). But… “big designs” are just big, they’re not actually difficult to think about.
3rd / Blue science is difficult because its the only time you ever have to master fluids in Factorio. Fluid trains, fluid wagons, fluid containers, etc. etc. You pretty much have two designs: you either bottle everything up into steel drums so that you can “stick with belts”, or you learn to properly use pumps+pipes+trains (fluid wagons) to move things around. In both cases, its complex but its the only way you get past blue-science.
I can’t recall but I know it was somewhere around when you started messing with oil. Honestly the problem was space for sure. You build this massive complex factory but then you have to start making adjustments to try and fit new parts in and it just got so complex that in order to proceed I was gonna have to gut entire sections and restart, just lost interest.
Still an amazing game and I loved every minute of it. I did the same thing with rimworld. I have dozens of hours and I’ve never once launched the rocket lol.
You build this massive complex factory but then you have to start making adjustments to try and fit new parts in and it just got so complex that in order to proceed I was gonna have to gut entire sections and restart, just lost interest.
Ah. You haven’t learned the most important rule of Factorio.
Don’t “erase” your old factory. Its far more efficient to instead “abandon” it. Space is infinite in Factorio.
“But the biters will attack and destroy the factory” ?? Well, guess what? You don’t care. Automated cleanup. Just abandon it and move somewhere else.
And when you “abandon” a factory, its not a big deal to “undo” your decision, walk back, fix the few broken parts to grab the 400 belts you need for the new factory, and then “re-abandon” the factory. Deciding which parts are abandoned / not-abandoned is a state of flux. You can always reuse / repair the old factory as you spin up your new one. Just do whatever is easiest.
Bonus points: try to abandon your factory after the research of Construction Bots. At this point, you can CTRL-C your good designs into blueprints, and then CTRL-V the “good parts” of your factory over to the new base with very little effort.
But really, the answer is rarely to abandon your working factory. Instead, you use belts to pipe out every useful element of those factories (ie: iron, copper, circuits, gears, steel), and then expand your factory to a new location.
Which science did you get stuck at?
The 3rd science pack is probably the hardest leap forward. But purple/yellow science are difficult too (just not “as hard” as blue IMO).
The 3rd science pack requires mastery of oil refining. The 4th and 5th (purple/yellow) science packs are “just” about scaling up to exceptionally large bases, which is easier IMO than trying to figure out oil (though still somewhat difficult, and the scaling is of two grossly different stuffs. Purple science requires a ton of stone-and-steel, while yellow science requires a ton of copper).
Once you recognize that purple and yellow need way more space than you originally expected, its actually really easy. Just build “bigger” than you ever had before, but otherwise the basics are the exact same as red/green science. Don’t build a “few” assembly machines, you need to be thinking of at least 50+ assembly machines for the entire purple / yellow chains, and possibly need ~2 or ~3 belts of raw iron ore (for purple) or ~2-to-3 belts of raw copper ore (for yellow). Meaning you need maybe 200+ furnaces (I’m not joking). But… “big designs” are just big, they’re not actually difficult to think about.
3rd / Blue science is difficult because its the only time you ever have to master fluids in Factorio. Fluid trains, fluid wagons, fluid containers, etc. etc. You pretty much have two designs: you either bottle everything up into steel drums so that you can “stick with belts”, or you learn to properly use pumps+pipes+trains (fluid wagons) to move things around. In both cases, its complex but its the only way you get past blue-science.
I can’t recall but I know it was somewhere around when you started messing with oil. Honestly the problem was space for sure. You build this massive complex factory but then you have to start making adjustments to try and fit new parts in and it just got so complex that in order to proceed I was gonna have to gut entire sections and restart, just lost interest.
Still an amazing game and I loved every minute of it. I did the same thing with rimworld. I have dozens of hours and I’ve never once launched the rocket lol.
Ah. You haven’t learned the most important rule of Factorio.
Don’t “erase” your old factory. Its far more efficient to instead “abandon” it. Space is infinite in Factorio.
“But the biters will attack and destroy the factory” ?? Well, guess what? You don’t care. Automated cleanup. Just abandon it and move somewhere else.
And when you “abandon” a factory, its not a big deal to “undo” your decision, walk back, fix the few broken parts to grab the 400 belts you need for the new factory, and then “re-abandon” the factory. Deciding which parts are abandoned / not-abandoned is a state of flux. You can always reuse / repair the old factory as you spin up your new one. Just do whatever is easiest.
Bonus points: try to abandon your factory after the research of Construction Bots. At this point, you can CTRL-C your good designs into blueprints, and then CTRL-V the “good parts” of your factory over to the new base with very little effort.
But really, the answer is rarely to abandon your working factory. Instead, you use belts to pipe out every useful element of those factories (ie: iron, copper, circuits, gears, steel), and then expand your factory to a new location.