Awkward Building Constraints

[antichaos]

What's worse than being stranded on a planet infested with ravenous beasts, with only a few bits of iron and the ability to craft universal assembly machines with your bare hands? Being forced to build those machines in accordance with strict and awkward layout rules! Actually it's a lot more fun than you might imagine.

Currently I'm labouring under the following conditions:
1. The mono-factory: Every assembler and smelter that can produce a particular product must be touching another which produces the same thing. Only ONE such group is allowed for each product in the factory. Note, every machine in the group must be capable of producing, ie it must have valid inputs and outputs, but it doesn't have to be running if there is insufficient throughput. You may add that as a condition for extra challenge.
2. The sqare-factory: Every group of assemblers or smelters must be arranged such that its most extremities lie on a square. They don't have to form a complete square, but all machines must fit within a square, with at least one machine touching each side. You'll see form the pictures what this means. It's really to avoid long straight lines of machines, which are boring.
3. The packed-factory: unused space within the square of machines must be minimized. pack in as many machines as possible.

The choice to avoid or rely on long handed inserters makes a big difference to the layouts. I generally avoid them for the sake of throughput, but more symmetric and aesthetically pleasing layouts may be obtainable using them. Perfect symmetry is not a goal here. I'm not OCD about such things. If you are, go for it. I'm sure the results will be beautiful.

This is what I have so far. This is just early experimentation with layouts. I'm playing on peaceful and not really trying to build a complete factory.

Basic 8 smelter square

Basic 8 smelter square

smelt8.png (457.93 KiB) Viewed 9232 times

Packing 17 smelters in a 4 by 4 square

Packing 17 smelters in a 4 by 4 square

smelt17.png (645.86 KiB) Viewed 9232 times

Basic 4 assembler block

Basic 4 assembler block

assm4.png (330.07 KiB) Viewed 9232 times

Coil and circuits. The coil assemblers are still technically within a square. I'm not claiming this is a sensible ratio or anything. This is NOT about the sensible way to build anything! However, with some fast belt, this will run all the circuit assembler at a good rate.

Coil and circuits

circuits.png (1.76 MiB) Viewed 9232 times

A nice symmetric 8 assembler layout with 2 fast inputs per machine. Not sure what to use this for yet.

Symmetric 8 assembler block

symm8.png (550.57 KiB) Viewed 9232 times

I'm pretty new to all this, so I'm sure others can do way better.

[ssilk]

This is interesting, cause I got similar designs, when using the boxing mod. https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =94&t=7481

I know why: In the boxing mod you need to unpack, then move the items to the assemblies but not too much, assemble and then repack again. This leads to compact design. Which looks quite similar to yours...

[Xterminator]

This is a really interesting way to play/build! I am always fascinated by the ideas people come up with playing differently. Haha

It certainly does look like a challenge though. I think my brain would explode trying to so this sort of thing.

[gizmo]

Won't we be obligated to do such things when more space stuff is added to the game ?