My friend and I routinely have conversations about factory design.
His ideal factory ships every ore in its raw state to a single building, which can then move the ore to different floors/sections for processing. He goes further than most and separates each product into its own “room”, so all steel bars are made in one room then shipped to the steel beam and steel pipe rooms. Importantly the factory should be designed so that you can “infinitely” expand a room if you need more of that resource.
I prefer what I call “microfactories”, where each component is created in a small, independent factory and the result is shipped to a main repository for builder use and for the space elevator construction. If you need modular frames, for example, you would find a group of ores and build a small factory on it and build every sub-component you can in it. Ideally, it would not rely on any other microfactory’s outputs, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. Often I will have a small cluster of microfactories all dedicated to shipping their output to a final microfactory for processing.
So what do you all use?
Note: He claims his design is more analogous to microservices (from software architecture) than mine, and that mine is something apparently called “pirate architecture”. I think he’s out of his mind on that one.
Is “Flying Spaghetti Monster” a valid answer?
So I’ll throw in that there’s a performance hit for huge factories. The game chunks the world state, it’s why your frame rate goes up when you walk to a new area. A huge mega factory in one area will limit you in that area, and it will start to feel sluggish later on. Separating your factories across multiple areas helps because it will spread the load across the CPUs cores, and it will feel faster. Your gpu will also be happier to not need to render everything
I think if I make that argument he’s going to just reference the fact that we both have very powerful computers. Although he’s never experienced auto-save hell yet, so maybe when that starts happening he’ll see the light
Yeah we made that argument too, and we upgraded the server to the top of the line AMD and it still chugged. It’s an incremental thing, it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still in one chunk, so you’re entire factory is still just on one core. Spreading out means you’ll spread the load out too. What’s the point of all of those cores if most will sit idle?
Plus when you hit 500 hours in a factory the entire world becomes a mega factory anyway. Eventually what you thought was a mega factory just is one of many of those factories. Oil processing alone for me can span the entirety of the Gold Coast if i really want to maximize it.
I used to be at your extreme where I would have huge microfactories building e.g. screws and train them all over the place. I was also at your friend’s extreme at one point, doing only a single item on each floor, ending up building as high as the top of the space elevator.
The last playthrough before 1.0 dropped (and the one before it), I have adopted more of a hybrid approach where the only micro factories I tend to build are aluminum, oil processing, and energy production… plastic/rubber, coal plants, fuel processing, turbo fuel, etc.
Then I train it to the megafactory. I also haul in all raw resources except the ones mentioned. The hybrid approach I am liking is to smelt on floor 1, constructors on floor 2, assemblers on floor 3, etc. So I mix things on different floors. It makes it harder to manage, so I have to keep the megafactory smaller. Then I go build another megafactory somewhere else.
I very much lean towards the microfactory approach - locate a cluster of resources within reasonable belting/piping distances, design a factory which can consume the cluster’s entire production of the limiting resource (clocking others to match) to make 1 output or maybe 2, then provide that output to the rail network. Some production chains make it easier to have certain inputs taken from the rail network.
Within one of these factories, items are refined further for each floor they ascend but I rarely enforce a 1 product/floor rule - in particular I find it convenient with many Assembler/Manufacturer recipes to have an input that is directly fed from a single Constructor using clock speed to match production with consumption. This usually means each microfactory underclocks its most power hungry buildings a fair bit which keeps their consumption moderate. Each microfactory ideally has a single priority power switch to turn off its entire production chain if its consumption is becoming a problem and I set up a priority sequence for them.
I did both… never could settle on one or the other.
But finding areas suited to intermediate components (such as oil to plastics, fuel byproducts, etc in one area) then using trains to send them to be used in more complicated factories was fun.
So extraction to intermediate for some things across the map and then all those shipped to a mega factory for larger and final products could be a compromise
