Factorio Forums

My friend and I are starting over and this time we'd like to utilize trains and specialized towns sort of. We're thinking that we'd have one main smelting area and transport the copper and iron and coal via train to the other towns. But I'm thinking about it and how practical is that? Would it work?

Is very unpractical and very funny!!. If you are 2 you may get it done after all.

How would you do it better?

Chess wrote:Is very unpractical and very funny!!. If you are 2 you may get it done after all.

How so?

My thought - practical? Yes, if done correctly.
Most efficient? Probably not, but then again - most people play for fun, not for 100% mos efficient build (although some find it most fun to do just that )

I tried something like this a while ago, but never completed it because I discovered a few things I should have done better... Here it is, nevertheless: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=8593

There is a youtuber busy with a playthrough like that: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... jyMyGPoPgF

Yeah Mangled Pork. I don't think he's doing it quite like I described though. But I'm not sure lol.

What would be a more efficient way to do it while still having specialized towns and trains?

It's not really useful. Everything worthwhile needs some combination of every type of resource. You can't take a pure copper base and build much, nor a pure coal base, and you can't transfer refined oil either.

The only really viable independent outposts are:

- A pure iron base for making steel
- A pure oil base for making sulfur/plastic/fuel

Moving resources around the map costs resources. Building further apart costs resources. Building tightly knit factories incurs no special penalty. This is why players focus on building a central megabase.

making a smelting outpost with large intake station tuned for small 1-2(-1) trains and a few large 2-6(-2) output trains is viable. Especially as the stack size for plates is larger than for ore.

I try not it is certainly viable. As mentioned by rachetfreak the stack size for plates is double that of the stack size for ore which makes transporting it via trains pretty good.
Granted a lot of stuff does take more than just copper and iron but you can still manage. For example... You could send copper and iron to an outpost or "town" to make circuits. Make the copper cable on-site there and then just ship the circuits off to where they need to go so on and so forth.
If you wanted to get really crazy you could send copper to one town that only makes cables and then send the cables to a circuit town via train. Lol That however would not be very efficient. :p

Honestly, I'm not a fan of the "smelt it where you mine it" mentality. I understand the concept. Truly I do. However, that's more for aliens to attack and you have to build a lot more each time you want a new mining location. What I do is build a central processing plant and a central mega-city fairly close (by rail) to it. So, when I find an ore field I want to mine, I simply build my rail to it, drop some defenses, drop my drills and put the ore on trains going back to my central processing plant. There I offload all coal, iron, and copper and run it through a set of ovens. Coal just bypasses the electric ovens and flows through. Stone tends to stop everything up though as it must be smelted in loads of two stone, so I simply have a second drop off for it with a few ovens devoted just for it. You could have it dropped off at the same location and simply route it to the specialized ovens, but it's up to you. After central processing though, everything goes to the mega-city.

Not sure if this is kind of what you had in mind, but it makes expanding and grabbing new fields quite a bit simpler in my opinion.