I also recently completed phase 4. I had to run the particle accelerator pretty slowly to stay in the energy budget and I’m in sort of the same dilemma as you. I ran around the world trying to find new geothermal spots and in the process I ended up finding 30 or so mercer sphere and sommersloops each as well as dozens of power slugs.
I’m pretty sure I could squeeze more power out of my blue crater oil base, but that’s already a complicated network of energy and production - since you can easily move power over the map I’ll probably just find some new place with a few good oil spots and set up a fuel plant network. Coal is too little energy per power plant to be worth building at this point.
I accidentally let myself blow the fuse at one point and I had a hard time starting up my power network again. When the power goes out, the belts still bring new material to machines that weren’t running at 100% so that when you’re ready to flip the power back on, all the machinery is all ready to fire immediately – your peak demand exceeds the average demand you were at before. I didn’t have any of the power switches set up or anything, so I took a few geothermal generators off the grid, built a bunch of energy storage batteries, charged them like 20%, reconnected the grid and fired it up. They stored enough to overcome that momentary surge in energy use.
I’m kinda thinking that too. I’ve probably only explored about half the map so far so there’s undoubtedly more oil to be found. I can pump out a new fuel power facility pretty rapidly. Pretty sure I’ll need it for the final phase–haven’t really looked at the full flow for each product (except for the nuclear pasta, which I’ll probably just leave going in the background… it’ll finish in about 10 hours, which is probably less than it’ll take to do the other stuff).
Once you’re there, might as well go all the way to rocket fuel. Almost triples your efficiency again, all for the cost of some nitric acid (and cuts your sulfur/coal requirements by 20%). A single blender can run 24 fuel gens, and a pure oil node can run a bit over two blenders. If you get crazy with alternate recipes, you can pull enough rocket fuel from one pure oil node for over 225 generators - 56GW, using only 22 production buildings.
Yes, I’m avoiding nuclear power at all costs, how did you figure it out?
I just researched nuclear power, but now I’m scared. I have a lot of untapped fuel and I’m going to explore that more fully before dipping my toes in the nuclear shenanigans.
It is possible that my factory building has been negatively impacted by a hurricane.
I actually found a use for a blueprint! Someone has put together a blueprint that you just plug belts into and it runs four nuclear generators. I haven’t actually tried it, but it seems like a better idea than mucking around with uranium on my own. That road leads to horrific spaghetti.
Oh, man. I am using blueprints all the time. I have one for four constructors, one for eight constructors, one for 4 smelters, one for 4 assemblers, and one for two manufacturers. In all cases, the belts and splitters and mergers and power lines are arranged. it saves a ton of time.
My advanced factory is six or eight stories tall, each story consisting of two rooms, each room constructing a unique part. It is completely walled in, with ports for conveyor belts, and belts sneaking up and down the walls. It is not beautiful, but it is not spaghetti. Blueprints made this so much easier.
I might have to put together at least a blueprint for smelters. A large chunk of my recent work has involved running a miner into 16 smelters. After that, things tend to diverge quickly, but that initial step is pretty common.
The four smelter design, as with all of my designs, has resource input on the left and resource output on the right. That makes it really easy to set multiple instances of the design side-by-side and hook them together. I am profligate with my mk5 belts, so that I don’t have to worry about bottlenecking resources.
I also learned, through cruel trial and error, to put a honking big sign right next to the input. Without that sign, it is really difficult on some blueprints to tell the input from the output.
When I play games like this I like to figure out everything for myself, so while I’ll look at wikis for stats and technical data, I don’t read tips or watch other people’s videos. But sometimes you end up missing stuff. I didn’t look very closely and I didn’t know smart splitters had an “overflow” option for the first 80 hours of the game and as a result I made some pretty fudged solutions to some problems that would’ve been easily solved by that. In particular I didn’t want to run multiple belts between bases because it’s tedious so I just ran one belt with multiple items and then split them back up at the end – but the whole belt stops if one ingredient is used less than the others and fills up. Smart splitter overflow is perfect for solving that situation.
I was thinking maybe it would be practical to design a blueprint with a bunch of stacked conveyors and then putting those between bases so you could run 3+ conveyors at the same time in one build, but you’d probably have to run an elevated foundation or something otherwise a straight line blueprint like that isn’t going sit well in the natural terrain.
I think my next major project is using the oil in the center of the map – there’s sulfur and coal up there too and I could probably make a jet fuel factory to power a bunch of fuel generators. The end game matter conversion stuff uses a lot of energy.
My new favorite tip for perfectionists: it’s bugged me forever that resource nodes, and thus miners, do not line up with the world grid. To fix the issue, if putting your smelters directly next to the miner - run the miner perpendicular to your smelters. That way, you can put a nice 90 degree turn straight into your conveyor hole or splitter and everything looks lined up.
And on the intersection of “stuff for perfectionists” and “stuff I didn’t find out until way too late because I like to find things out by myself”, I only just realized that the alternate build setting for conveyors (hit “R”) constrains them to a tight 90-degree bend that makes them much nicer looking than the usual straight shot. Not to mention better able to put several lines in parallel, etc.
By the way, when connecting two belt snapping points (say, a machine input and a splitter) the crook in the L shape will be in a different place depending on where you start and finish the belt.
Also, another tip. If a splitter or merger box is 1 unit high, then the normal minimum height for a vertical conveyor is 3 units. 1 for input, 1 for output, and 1 unit in the middle for the belt.
However, if you have snap points 1 unit up from one another, say if you put a merger 1 unit above the output from a machine, you can snap a vertical conveyor to both the input and output, creating a 0 length belt, for a total of 2 units instead of 3.
Couple that with the ability of the input and output of the conveyor to face in any direction, you can make really tight 90 or 180 degree turns so long as you have a bit of elevation.
This allows for some incredibly compact designs. Really handy for blueprints especially. And it allows you to keep all of your beltwork elevated.
Ahh, that lift trick would be very handy. My usual layout is buildings over the floor, conveyors below, where the resources pop out of a hole right next to where they’re needed (and I use half a lift to connect them). But sometimes I need to jog down just a bit, but the min height on the lift takes up more room than I’d like. Only trouble is that I don’t always have a destination connection available, but maybe I can make one with stacked splitters/mergers.
I have one quirk that’s holding me back. I really don’t like to undo/delete previous work. And in satisfactory you don’t necessarily have to. You can always just build new stuff rather than deleting/redesigning old stuff. But what this means is that my original base where my HAB and space elevator are is a non-foundation speghetti mess from when I first started playing the game. I set up a new factory a few hundred meters away about 10 hours in, but since my original base functioned and was still doing good work, I just left it doing its thing and sent some of its products to the new factory. But… I also used the original hab area when I had to make some sort of quick and dirty special project that needed production but not really a dedicated spot in the factory, or I needed to expand some of the production I was sending to the other base, and now it’s just this huge clusterfuck that I occasionally use and have to route my spaceport parts back to. At some point it would’ve been better to bite the bullet, flatten it, and build a useful factory out of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to delete something that was functional even if ugly.
I’ve got most of my modular factories complete, and everything train-related finished but the stations, so the next project is the logistics hub and transportation conduit. With roughly 25 different parts coming in by train, all the routing is going to take some space to keep pretty.
I also need to throw down a quick silica plant into a depot. I keep running out while building windows. After all that, I’ll definitely go clean up my starting base. Absolutely going to do that.
I make my general layout with foundations first, then lay track on top of them. Keep it level whenever possible and 1m ramps for elevation changes. If you HAVE to, some 2m ramps. A consistent 4m ramp will stall out a full train. If possible, use right angle turns only. I try to use a 3x3 grid for turns. Then just run the track down the center of the foundation. Put track ends as close to inclination changes as possible - the game will push track off or through foundations to get a smooth transition otherwise. When building curves, I’ve had good luck with skipping the curve initially and laying a bit of track past it, then connecting the two straights. Going one direction will often give a “curve is too tight” warning, but switching which side you start with generally fixes that. Once the track is laid, decide how you want to make it pretty. My main loop is currently built of unobtanium between stations. The stations are connected to the ground, and the track itself levitates between them. I gave up trying to match track to the terrain. I have super-steel, and I’m going to use it.
The train itself is one foundation wide. Train stations are four foundations wide. Build five wide and you have a space to walk on. Make sure the train station is facing the right way - trains will only enter from one direction. And if the train station has power, all train tracks connected to it also have power. So trains can be used as a power transmission device AND support a hoverpack.
Power demands start going a little nuts during the last phase especially if you start using a lot of overslooping. I’ve doubled my power demand over the last 6 or 8 hours. I decided to make a big fuel generator complex and that turned out to be pretty efficient. The three close vertical oil nodes near the lake in the center-right of the map is a good place for it. A decent amount of open space and nearby access to coal and sulfur for turbo fuel. I’m actually thinking of adding a rocket fuel stage but I wanted to get the base up and running before I hooked up the long distance nitrogen gas deposit.
I built it pretty far apart for future expansion. Pretty much all my designs early on are very close without leaving much room for future expansion. As I get better at the game, I space stuff out more and leave more room for future expansion. I think the fuel base is putting out 4MW now but I could easily double it just by hooking up some more refineries and fuel power plants down the lines.
I am pretty close to being able to access rocket fuel, and that is my current priority: get the cooling systems and turbo motors up and running, then convert all my turbo fuel to rocket fuel. Have a big nitrogen node pretty close to my fuel, so I think that should not be too hard.
I do think that I will need to expand my anlu output soon, and I am not a fan of the aluminum process. I will probably make a hugely wasteful factory, with plenty of buildings set at 50% and 75%, rather than try to economize and inevitably mess things up.