Factorio BA Play through #5

Welcome back to the base. If you are not sure what happened last time, then check here for the previous post!

The first thing I decided to do, just to grease the wheels was return to the mining patches, ripping out all the old steam miners and installing the Electric Mining Drills. Almost immediately the first few miners ran out. These patches aren't big, and some parts aren't that rich. I've also spent time running up belts of Jivolite and Crotinnium, into the now complete Crusher build. They go in order of left to right, Stiratite, Bobmonium, Crotinnium, Jivolite, Rubyte and Saphirite.

Whilst I'm here, an updated mining table for Electric Mining Drills. For my goals right now, I need 6.5/s of each ore. That means, at most, I need 5.2 miners on Crotinnium and Bobmonium, which I have about twice as many.

Looking into the requirements of the ferrous sorting, whilst I can handle the inputs, at 3/s of each ore, I soon start running out of sides for the outputs. Whilst fast inserters will be along after this, I still wouldn't be able to get all 9/s ferrous mixture out of the crusher fast enough. I have two options: admit defeat and install loaders, or admit that output will be my bottle neck. The maximum I could achieve would be 7.2 mixture/s, with my current inserters. This is going to be real ugly though.

One thing that I love about BA runs is the size you have to build, you notice that some deforestation has appeared, this is reserved space for crushed stone output and allows for distributing crushed ores elsewhere, for pure ore sorting or such like.

For the sorting of the crushed ferrous, its two in, one iron and one manganese out. Four inserters per sorter, and I need 10 sorters to make it all look pretty. I cannot say how much better things are with the filters on inserters. Each side produces slightly more than one side of a basic transport belt, but when I get the near inserter options from Bobs Inserters, then this can get fixed for good.

've not taken into account the input belts or limits of the crushed ferrous outputs. Crud. For 9.5 iron ore/s, I need 19 crushed ferrous/s, which is two and half basic transport belts, or 1.2 transport belts. To produce the 19 crushed ferrous/s I need three crushers running, not the current two, due to the output constraints of the inserters. This is difficult, because I really like how compact the two crusher setup is and I can improve the output rates when I unlock fast inserters, so I'll keep it for now. Same with the ore sorting, trying to setup three belts through the middle will be a huge pain, compared to just two transport belts and upgrade when I unlock them.

And this is where I caved, and installed blueprint shotgun. After researching it, I found that the shotgun itself requires Electronic circuits, to my extreme disappointment. So I carried on, chopping trees, making belts lanes, setting up all the bits and here is the complete ferrous and cupric sorting along with an overview of the whole crushing setup.

I'm so desperate to turn it on, and prove it all works, but I can't until the smelting setups are in, as I still need the iron supply to feed the belt assembler to build everything. That and the crushed stone setups will need a good looking at. To recap the whole process, I mapped it out below. Colour code is: Blue is overbuilt, Green is equal or slightly over the target amounts, Red is where issues are. As you can see, I've not made the crushed mixtures correctly, so I will have to go back and fix them when I get upgrades. The other issues are belt throughput issues and inserter speeds, all obtainable fairly quickly once the research starts.

And that’s all I had time for. I've finished the crushing and sorting process, for now anyway, and identified where I need to come back to for the upgrades. Now to prepare for smelting, next time. And that’s it for now, if you want more of this content, don't forget to subscribe below. It really helps show how this format it doing. Any feedback can be left in the comments below. Hope to see you next time!

Playtime: 11:08:46