Factorio BA Playthrough #4

Pixie35

31 Jan 2026 — 7 min read

Looking back on where we left off...

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

So, the skunk works has been bashed together to just get enough things made to build more things. And that trend is going to continue, with the following buildings being added: Mining Drills, Ore Sorting Facilities, Ore Crushers, Blast Furnaces, Induction Furnaces, Casting Machines, Washing Plants, Liquifiers and Arboretums. However, most of these require basic circuits, stone bricks, iron gears and iron.

	Iron Plate	Basic Circuit	Iron Gear	Stone Brick	Iron Pipe
Mining Drill	X	X	X
Ore Sorting Facility	X	X	X	X
Ore Crushers	X		X	X
Blast Furnace	X	X		X	X
Induction Furnace	X	X	X	X	X
Casting Machine	X	X	X	X	X
Washing Plant	X	X	X	X	X
Liquifier	X	X		X	X
Arboretum	X	X		X	X

So, five inputs with all outputs into chests. If I do one full belt of iron, then put the last four onto two belts, then I can have everything in a single row. Almost bus like. This is the proposed plan, hopefully the inserters can grab off the curved belts fast enough, else I'm stuck without long inserters. Two quick upgrades for a dedicated circuit build, plumbed into the copper furnaces and a stone brick furnace update.

The simple builds feeding the glorious growth of the factory.

And now for research, starting with... Radars? Well now I have tons of power, I best get using it. The radars will hopefully reveal all the bounties that I will need for ferrous and cupric ores. This will be followed by Mining Drills for the new mining sites and then Metallurgy, Arboretums and Advanced mechanical refining. I'll also note that Algae farms also fit the above pattern and have been moved to the simple mall.

Metallurgy unlocks Advanced smelting and Casting for Iron, Copper, Tin and Lead. These require the specific ores following Ore sorting of Sapherite, Stiratite, Bobmonium and Rubyte or the use of Ferrous and Cupric sorting from Advanced Mechanical Refining. Later, in green science, you unlock pure sorting for these ores which will be very useful. However, looking at the diagram below, you can see that the Ferrous and Cupric sorting is very useful because there are no by products! I will still need to set up the other sorting to get lead in some form, but it will be easy to do.

It looks simple now, but down the line... oooo it gets complex later

With these ores, you then have to go through the Angels smelting stack, which will turn each ore into one plate. With the exception of lead requiring Oxygen for smelting, everything else will be a straight forward build, near identical chains. What will be interesting is that with Ferrous sorting providing manganese, I'll be able to start with Molten Iron Smelting 2, which will double my iron output hopefully or at least reduce the iron ore input which will be helpful for Steel later.

Straight line processing, nothing complex yet!

So what do I want to produce? This bus build will take me all through red and green science, so it will have to produce a lot of material for a while. The majority of red/green science are either 15/s or 30/s, with most of them being 1 red and 1 green pack per cycle. With the exception, oddly, of fluid wagon 2 which is 2 red and 2 green packs.

Producing Red Packs at scale will be fairly easy, producing 15/s will require 15/s copper plate and 30/s iron plate. The fact that I will need a 150 assemblers is only a problem now, later it'll only be a 100, and by then I should be fine to spend all that time building the necessary assemblers.

Producing Green Packs will need a little more maths. The base recipe is 0.167 Green packs/s, which means 0.167 inserters and transport belts a second. Each inserter needs three iron plate and 0.75 copper, which means I'll need to consume 0.501 iron/s and 0.125 copper/s. For the transport belts, more iron heavy at 7 plate and 4 tin, consumes 1.169 iron/s and 0.668 tin/s. In total, each pack consumes 1.67 iron/s, 0.125 copper/s and 0.668 tin/s and to produce the planned 15 green science packs/s, I'll need 150.3 iron/s or 10 Transport belts. Damn.

This was the point that I decided to get up and walk around wondering how on earth it was so expensive. The maths made sense, to produce 15/s packs satisfy fifteen labs, for research at one pack per fifteen seconds, I needed... one green pack a second. Not fifteen. Just one a second. I needed a break, maybe some sleep to get over my stupidity. In the morning, refreshed with a fresh attitude, Red Packs will be constructed in 10 assemblers, with 1/s copper and 2/s iron. Green packs will be 10/s iron, 0.748 copper/s and 4 tin/s, in 12 assemblers. These numbers suddenly seem more reasonable, meaning 2 basic transport belts of iron, 1 of copper and 1 of tin. The requirements so far:

	Iron Plate (/s)	Copper Plate (/s)	Tin Plate (/s)	Solder (/s)	Lead Plate (/s)
Science	12	1.748	4

For circuits, I want to produce 2/s Basic Circuits, 1/s Electronic Circuits and plan for the costs of 0.5/s Advanced Circuits as I'll need them for the tier 3 buildings. Basic Circuits will take 3 copper/s and 2 wood/s. Electronic Circuits will take 0.8 copper/s, 1.28 tin/s, 1 wood/s and 1 solder/s. Advanced Circuits will take 2.49 copper/s, 2.1 tin/s, 1 solder/s and 0.125 iron ore/s.

	Iron Plate (/s)	Copper Plate (/s)	Tin Plate (/s)	Solder (/s)	Lead Plate (/s)	Wood (/s)
Science	12	1.748	4
Circuits		6.29	3.38	2		3

And then I'll want random bits for the bus for buildings, trains, batteries or something. I think an extra belt of iron and copper will be easily useful, half a belt of tin and lead, maybe a little solder, and half a belt of wood should do. I've not added steel, bronze or any other advanced metal right now, as I'll cover those in the next upgrades to the smelting system.

	Iron Plate (/s)	Copper Plate (/s)	Tin Plate (/s)	Solder (/s)	Lead Plate (/s)	Wood (/s)
Science	12	1.75	4
Circuits		6.29	3.38	2		3
Bus	7.5	7.5	3.5	1	3.5	3.5
Total	19.5	15.5	10.8	3	3.5	6.5

So there is my final requirements. Now to convert all that into metallic ore requirements. I've not found any solder ore yet, so I'll have to make it the old fashioned way with tin and lead, which is an additional ore per second needed. Luckily, right now, one ore is one plate. So I need 19.5 iron ore/s, 15.5 copper ore/s, 11.8 tin ore/s and 4.5 lead ore/s.

With the plans to go straight to manganese and molter iron II smelting, I reduce my iron ore input to just 9.75/s. This will mean I need to produce 6.5/s crushed Saphirite, Jivolite, Rubyte. The copper to tin ratio is not quite close enough, so I will initially reduce the outputs to 11.8 copper ore/s until either pure ore is unlocked or I desperately need more copper. Using cupric ore sorting, I will need 7.8/s crushed Stiratite, Bobmonium and Crotinnium. Lead will initially be done from mixed ore sorting, with the by product of nickel. Whilst I'll plan for a 3.5 lead/s output, I'll only start with 1/s lead for solder and just warehouse the nickel for now.

Ore	Ammounts
Saphirite	6.5
Stiratite	7.8
Jivolite	6.5
Rubyte	8.5
Bobmonium	7.8
Crotinnium	7.8

Now to design the crushing setups. Six sets of four crushers, to provide well over the required amounts. Yes, overkill but this way each set is symmetrical and all of them look pretty, which is more important.

And that's where I'll call it, it's been mainly focused on figuring out requirements, and I've not even finished the research yet, but that will stand me in good stead for next time. If you have any feedback, maybe corrections to my horrendous maths (Ed: I've spotted errors everywhere).

Doesn't look that different, but it's a seed of growth!

As always, leave comments below, subscribe to get this straight into your inbox or just ping me in the Angel's mods discord! Next time, I continue with the sorting and smelting setups.

Playtime: 6:24:22

Research: