Satisfactory (Early Access)

[BinnZ]

Very interesting indeed!

[Art Blade]

cheers

I just set up my first production line, copper. Essentially it comprises four modules: getting copper (drill), smelting ore to ingots, producing copper wire and copper sheets. All machines and everyhing nicely packed, neat and tidy, and no waste of "office space" That was the whole purpose of building my YellFac. Properly organised and efficient.

I got that drill sitting inside the building, it's been in the same place since my very first setup even though I dismantled everything around three times. I built the fab around it and later the YellFac around it. That drill goes from half a story on the ground floor (AE: 1st) which isn't even, one side is 3 windows tall, the other side only 2, through the ceiling and occupies floor to ceiling on the floor above as well. So that ground floor is "problematic" since I can't just build everything everywhere there. And the first floor (AE: 2nd) is also limited thanks to the drill occupying a chunk of that room as well.

However. I decided to set up the smelters on the ground floor where it's 3 windows tall and boosted my only copper drill to produce 240 copper ores per minute. There are more copper nodes out there but so far, copper hasn't been a problem and one drill produced enough for me. I can still add more drills if needed, and run more conveyor belts to the factory lol

After smelting ore to ingots, I sent the whole stuff straight to the floor above, smashing through only one tile of the ceiling (unlike previous builds that caused gaps of one to four tiles) and feeding two modules upstairs that w0#k with copper ingots: copper wire and copper sheets.

Turns out that machines which produce wire only need 15 ingots per minute while those sheets need 20 ingots. The output of the smelters is 240 ingots. So how to make the best of that, or, be efficient?

I split the ingot stream in half. One half split in 8 for 8 wire machines (8x15=120), the other half in 6 for the sheets machines (6x20=120) so I get 100% efficiency.

Then I created an output which is the exact reverse setup: merging 8 and merging 6 outputs and lead the wire and sheets to their respective industrial storage for now. I can later use that storage as an input source for machines that need copper wire and/or copper sheets.

Then I "flipped the switch" on my fuse switch board and ran around checking the drill, the smelters, and every machine producing wire and sheets, then ran outside to check the conveyor belts and the storage containers (that were not empty thanks to the remaining stuff from my previous factories) and then I thought:

Oh Goodness Gracious, it WORKS!

first modules working
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[Dweller_Benthos]

That's pretty cool. So is each floor going to be reserved for a specific thing, copper on one floor, iron on another, etc? Then I suppose the more manufactured goods on another, like motors and what not. One thing I've learned from watching you guys and some videos is that no matter how much space you think you need for something, multiply by ten lol.

[Art Blade]

I hope I anticipated enough of what's going to happen but I can always expand sideways from the upper floors and even more upwards from the roof if needed

And thank you. Yes, I want to keep floors dedicated and limited to specific things, like a food chain. Starting out with the basics on the lower floors and pushing their products up a floor or more so they may be used as basic components for more and more complicated stuff. Which is also why I made the upper floors taller so I could fit in the really big machines.

The modular setup should allow for switching off one floor and reassigning the machines if needed so I don't have to build a whole production line from scratch somewhere. I hope it won't be necessary but it should w0#k. This  is why the power switch per floor and per resource node is useful:

I can switch off the copper drill and let the whole production line run dry so there won't be any copper-based material inside any machine nor on any conveyor belt, kind of like rinsing a coffee maker, flush out the residue to get a fresh start for the next batch of coffees. So I can just reroute iron ore to the smelters and let them produce iron ingots rather than copper ingots. You see, there are only a few types of machines and each one of them can be set up to produce one item from a list of items it is able to produce. So two production lines, one for copper, one for iron, will use the same type of machines, only set up differently regarding input and output.

Since I set up the modules in a way that the products go into storage, I can reroute the outputs to different storage containers if I changed the production line setup. Also, same principle, I can use the containers which are outside the building for different production lines. All I need to do is to (re)route the container's output to a different production module.

By the way, I want to disclose something here (lol)

In the setup depicted in my prior post, I had set up those copper smelters without realising a small mistake. I had "always done it this way" so here is what I used to do, then I'll explain the mistake and the fix.

240 copper ore per minute coming from the drill need to be split and fed into machines. One smelter simply can't handle 240/min, you get sort of a buffer overflow. The overflow is actually causing something like a traffic jam: the input conveyors will fill up all the way back to the drill, then the drill's buffer will fill up and then it will stop drilling and power down to a stand-by state, power up to produce a few ores that had been used up on the other end by the smelter, fill up the conveyor until the drill chokes again. Rinse and repeat.

To split up a stream of whatever type of materials or products, there are "splitters." They look like a cube and the in- and output slots are one on each side but only 2D (only horizontally) so you typically feed it on one side and distribute the split output using two or all three outputs. So I was used to think in Threes combined with Twos. 240/3=80 or 240/2=120. Still too much for a smelter, so split that again, three times or two times. 120/3=40, still too much, so split that two more times 40/2=20. That was a little less than the default 30 a smelter can handle as a maximum input per minute. But I could lower the input ratio to 20, so I set up 12 smelters side by side, each set to only take in 20 ores/minute. Unfortunately 20 ores is 2/3 of 60 and the game prioritises % over units, so it shows 66% =19.8 units per minute. 2.4 units per minute less than the input stream, so I was slowly wasting material and slowly causing that ore jam.

You need to know that "physically" setting up 12 smelters and those splitters is easy and quickly done which is one of the reasons I had been using that all the time.

And then I realised that I could actually split 240/8=30. No weird % causing decimal point losses but a plain 100% 30 units/minute.

Which meant I had to take away 4 smelters, like 2 left and 2 right and leave 8 in the middle. But the splitting resulted in a pretty tough situation because it suddenly required more space in front (output) and at the back (input) of the smelters. And all I had wanted was to create something neatly packed and tidily set up...

So after a while I figured out how to set it up with just minimally more space than before. I think "compact design" is the right term for that

Doesn't look as simple as before any more (because it isn't) but the prize is a whopping 100% efficiency from start to end, or drill to wire/sheets, respectively

And just by the way: green lights mean "constantly busy," yellow means "starving" (not enough material input, machine runs idle and goes into stand-by mode) "red" means "no power" and white means "boosted" so essentially like green but overclocked. I try to only overclock drills because I can't randomly add more drills to get more material, drills are limited to nodes and the amount of nodes are limited.

Eight for the win (nice green lights..)
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[Art Blade]

geez, that thing is growing big

more modules working
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[BinnZ]

Massive! 

[Art Blade]

oh yes, that it is.

Funny, the more I develop the modules, the more I understand how to deal with those massive storage containers.

They're in their current position as a result from dismantling my old stuff and because I didn't want to destroy the old factory's products and resources (apart from raw materials that "naturally grow back") and because I had decided to use that area on what I consider the back side of the factory for resources. "All goes in from one side," was what I had in mind and that's how the production lines / modules are configured now.

Thing is, the stuff in those containers is actually both resource and product. So I am using the back side area for my output, too. And that creates some kind of loop. Like, get copper from the back side, produce copper wire, and stow those wires in containers on that same backside again. Then produce for instance cable that needs wire as input which I take from that backside area, stuff it into the machine and the product "cable" gets stuffed away in a new container column in that backside area. And so on and so forth.

To help with production (shorter ways between modules and storage) I am shifting around some of those containers but they all stay in that area.

And finally I have started to use up my old ingots: rather than feeding raw ore into smelters which produce ingots, I simply cut the conveyor belt from the smelters to the module and instead, directed a conveyor belt with ingots from those containers to that module. That's what all the space is good for: I have got plenty of room to do that without any problems

[Art Blade]

Here you can see what I meant, and it's even simple to recognise and understand. I will explain it.

closed copper ingot loop
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The sun happened to light up the industrial container column filled with copper ingots so that's what we're looking at. There are six industrial containers stacked up. "Industrial" is simply like two normal containers stacked up but you can use two input slots on one side and two output slots on the other side. That would be left and right when you look at the pic.

On the top of those containers, to the right, you see a horizontal conveyor belt which is connected to the upper input slot of the upper container. The conveyor belt is coming from a conveyor lift to the right which is connected to the YellFac. That's where the copper ingots are coming from. I used to feed the machines with them but now they're going straight into the containers.

When you look at the container column you'll notice something like clamps or brackets alternating left and right. Those are the shortest possible conveyor lifts (you can expand them a lot, like the one coming from the YellFac) and they are connected in a way that, starting from the top of the column, they take ingots from the upper container and feed them to the lower container. It creates a top-down flow of ingots. So the ingots coming from the YellFac enter the container from the top right and then get handed down to the container at the bottom. If that one is full, the one above it starts to fill up, all the way until all containers are full. Just like pouring water into a glass until it's full.

Now you'll understand the loop: at the bottom of those containers, to the right, you see a horizontal conveyor belt which is connected to the upper (so I can walk underneath) ouput slot of the lowest container. The conveyor belt is leading to a conveyor lift to the right which is connected to the YellFac. There the ingots are fed into the machines.

You may wonder WHY creating such a complicated loop is such a good idea rather than simply feeding the machines right away like I used to.

Essentially it is a matter of power management. I filled one container column with copper wire and another one with copper sheets. All the time I needed power for the drill, the smelters, and a large set of machines (two modules for wire and sheets) because all of them were constantly doing their job. Once the containers were filled, a "traffic jam" was created. Wire and sheets started to fill up the production line backwards, until the buffers of every machine, smelters and the drill were full, which then led to everything going into standby mode. If I take just a single roll of copper wire out of the container, it will be like a domino-effect, all the way through the entire production line, until the drill starts up to drill up one copper ore, which starts one smelter for one copper ingot, which starts one machine for one roll of copper wire, which will be sent to the end of the queue of waiting wires.

Now, with that loop, it works differently. Once the containers are full and everything ground to a halt, I switched off the drill and the smelters module. I won't need to power them up and can use the power elsewhere. The wire and sheets modules will simply grab stored ingots from that container column and you can bet that what's in stock there lasts for literally tons of wire and sheets.

There is another advantage. Some machines are really "hungry" for materials. They may consume them faster than you can produce them if you've got everything running from drill to final product. Those containers, however, can put out their content as fast as your conveyors can handle it. For example Mk4 can send a whopping 480 units per minute. I can use the time, when I'm not producing anything special, to slowly fill up massive container columns and when needed, quickly feed them to the machines.

I can also switch off the production modules individually, preventing sheets from being produced so all the ingots go into wire production. And I can switch off both modules for wire and sheets and instead use the power for the drill and smelters which I'd switch on just to fill up the ingot containers again.

And that's essentially how the whole YellFac is supposed to w0#k: only produce what's needed. First I'll fill up all those storage containers, then start whatever production I need and that will use stored goods from those container columns.

That is fundamentally different from everything I've ever seen everyone else doing. They all seem to keep producing everything, run out of space, materials, and power. They're the ones who constantly add new factories and spread out across the whole map because everything is running at full power or keeps toggling between stand-by and production, causing power consumption surges and that may be so massive that it blows the main fuse. That's what I did on a small scale. But I realised rather early that I wanted a different solution. The one you're looking at

As to this copper ingot loop shown in the pic above:

Although I didn't plan that setup, I realised I could do it, did it, and it turns out to be just perfect

It actually serves me as an example, like how I want to set up all the remaining containers and production modules.

Oh and just by the way, with all the experience I've gained by now, here's my new "Eight For The Win" Mk2 solution. Eight machines, looking at the output side. The footprint of the output (conveyors and mergers) is now only just over 1 tile deep rather than over 2.

Compact and now also elegant.

8 ftw Mk2
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[LowPolyOWG]

 

What a nice factory

[BinnZ]

Yes man, super cool! And mighty for efficient!

[Dweller_Benthos]

That is an interesting concept, make only what you need, like you said, a lot of videos I've seen have been geared toward 100% total production all the time and then trying to find a place to store it until it's needed. Unless of course, they are feeding the sink market or whatever it's called, that produces tickets to trade in for new blueprints. At least I think that's what the goal is.

Oh yeah, have you turned off spiders yet? lol

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/1999-11-30-finally-a-video-game-with-an-arachnophobia-mode

[Art Blade]

Thanks, guys.

It's going well, I keep setting up module after module now, with corresponding container columns. I'm barely peaking 600MW (out of currently 1,800 from those two coal power setups) so.. far from needing more power right now.

And I kill spiders, not cats.

[BinnZ]

Hey, isn't it an idea to store those overflow containers in hte YelFac as well?

[Art Blade]

they used to be outside. Then I built around them so they were inside. Then I thought I could use that space and moved them outside again, paving the holes in the floors where the containers were. That created a great building with lots of space. Maybe I'll build around them once more once their position is established 

[BinnZ]

 

Damn I wish I had the time to join you in this madness. It really is a materpiece of a game!