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 got halfway through the post before I realized it wasn’t about over-engineering a Java application.
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
I created stackable blueprints that include a specific type of building, for example constructors. They have an input and output on the ground and i can build them higher and higher as long as the belt is fast enough to push in and out the materials.
By doing that i normally have one or more towers for each component, similar to your mentioned microservice architecture.
On the ground i connect these towers to build the downstream components, essentially creating your mentioned microfactories out of the towers/microservices. Perhaps Manyfactories is a better name, as it’s somewhere in-between micro and mono.
It’s fast, scalable throughout the research tiers and pretty enough for my own standards.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between a love of blueprints and a preference towards closer together infrastructure. Because my friend also loves blueprints, but I generally don’t like them.
I always tell him he’s like King Neptune and I’m Spongebob. He’s shuffling out gigafactories in minutes and I’m here tucking in my conveyor belts and reading them stories. Each one is a special snowflake to me
During my first playthrough I eventually came to the conclusion that I’ll never progress much further if i keep building every small item one by one. I do not have much time to play the game, so blueprints came in handy. Since then I have never looked back.
You’re totally right though, there are many ways to play the game and they are all enjoyable. I bet there’s even players roleplaying a nomadic, explorative playstyle.
