Factorio Modded Playthrough

With the recent release of Angel's mods for Factorio 2.0, I can now restart a fresh new Bob's mods and Angel's mods play through. If you've not played these mods before, they add significant complexity to the processing chains making the whole game a lot more interesting, at least to me.

For world generation, I'm using this one below. The starter ores are well clustered together, and the other ores are not too far away. There's maybe a few too many trees but there's a lot of clear land to build in. I've disabled Biters from spawning as I find them too annoying during a BA run. The seed is 463593080, with everything left at default (except Biters).

Once again, crash landing on this barren planet. It seems I'm always revisiting this place every six months.

Scavenging the debris leaves me with one iron plate short of another burner miner. I best get straight to mining then. First miner on coal, into the burner crusher and leaving me to hand feed the furnace. Not before long, I've got the start of a burner miner coal snake and a single burner miner on Saphirite ore.

If you're not used to Angel's Refining, then all ores have been replaced by Saphirite, Stiratite, Jivolite, Rubyte, Bobmonium and Crotinnium. These ores get crushed and sorted as you progress to give you all the ores you then require. However, with the current setup, I'm just focused on the Saphirite. A burner miner has 0.25 mining speed, and across the various ores that produces the following amounts a second.

A burner crusher has a 1 second crafting time, making all the numbers easy. All crushed ore recipes require two ore in to provide two crushed ore and one crushed stone out. To saturate the beginning burner crusher, I would need two ore a second, with Saphirite that would be 4 burner miners working constantly.

As I constructed these miners, I completed the Basic Logistics science , unlocking Basic Undergrounds and Basic Splitters. These are still a little ways off yet though. Steam power will not be far behind now, especially with the now maxed out burner crusher.

Crushed ore is great, but plates are way more useful. A stone furnace has a crafting speed of 1. The recipe for iron plates take 7 seconds, and needs three crushed ores to produce 2 iron plates. This means 0.285 plates out per second and 0.428 crushed ore in per second. The burner crusher now produces 2 crushed ore a second which means it can sustain 4.6 furnaces running. This sounds like the start of the first furnace block...

During all this construction, Steam Power research was completed. This unlocked offshore pump, a bunch of pipes, boiler, steam engine but also steam powered inserters and steam powered mining drills. Steam powered equipment depends on the temperature of steam you put into the device. A boiler provides steam at 165 °C, which will provide 20% of the maximum speed of the equipment. For a miner, that a mining speed of 0.4, and the inserter has a speed of 0.6.

A burner miner uses 150 kW of fuel a second, and coal provides 4 MJ which therefore means a burner miner consumes 0.0375 coal a second. However, it costs 300kJ of fuel to heat one unit of water and produce 10 units of steam 165 °C in a boiler and therefore 0.075 coal per 10 units of steam. A boiler produces 60 units a steam a second, so 0.45 coal a second. It could be argued then that burner miners are more efficient than steam miners. But...

A steam powered miner consumes 4 steam a second or 0.03 coal a second through the boiler. Since one boiler can supply 15 steam powered miners and the miners work faster, it could be considered as useful to use these machines for mining, especially at hotter temperatures of steam.

Whilst I've been working that all through however, I have noticed an issue with the first furnace block. The easier issue is that the output from the crusher is blocked, due to forgetting both the crushed stone output and that burner inserters are slow at 0.77 items per second. Producing 3 items a second each burner crusher needs 3 inserters, which I should have spotted earlier. The second issues is the crushed stone blocking the belt, which would have been fixed by splitters if I had any copper for the basic splitter recipe. In the meantime, I've just set the inserters to blacklist crushed stone. This now means I only need 2 inserters for the crusher, oh well.

I've also added an output line and buffer to store the 1.3 iron plates a second, needing two burner inserters. And who here spotted my gross mistake above? A burner crusher needs 8 burner miners to be saturated, not 4. I forgot to double it for the 2 ore a second. No worries... Time for steam powered miners I think.

Steam travels in pipes, however there are three choices of pipes available to me right now, compared to the usual base game. The options are: Copper, Iron and Stone. With all three having near identical properties, the main difference is the cost. Stone pipes require stone bricks, which is made from stone, which is made from crushed stone. Finally a use for that crushed stone by-product. Each crushed stone equals 0.25 stone brick, which means I'm making half a brick a second. But that means since I don't have assemblers yet, I need to hand craft all the stone myself. Joy.

Now that I have the process for making pipes, its time to increase the outputs of the saphirite patch. At 0.4 mining speed, I only need five to keep the burner crusher busy. The max steam consumption is 20 per second. I couldn't wait that long for the stone bricks being impatient, so I used iron. I have plenty of it anyway, and will be making way more now.

It's also worth making sure that coal keeps flowing, so upgrades to steam powered miners and a output belt now ensures that steam will keep flowing to all the miners. Each steam powered miner produces 0.4 coal a second, so in total I have 2 coal a second, increasing my max steam demand to 40 per second. Maybe I should check how much the furnace block consumes? And I also now need to get some start up copper for belt splitters to truly automate my iron supply.

Each furnace consumes 90 kW of fuel a second, which equates to 0.0225 coal a second, whilst the burner crusher consumes 100 kW of fuel, or 0.025 coal a second and a burner inserter consumes 144 kW or 0.036 coal a second. That's a total coal consumption of 0.88 coal a second, with the maximum of 0.45 coal for the boiler, I'm only at 1.33 coal a second, so more expansion is needed. After copper.

Stiratite is slightly harder to mine so will need a few more steam powered miners, each producing 0.266 ore a second. To saturate a burner crusher, I need to use 7.6 miners. This would bring my steam requirements to 72 steam a second, which means another boiler. Reusing the same template as the iron, I quickly put up a stack of furnaces, and almost instantly as the copper flows, I get the Basic Electronics research complete.

Before my arrival into the electric age, I will be upgrading to steam as much as possible. This hopefully means I can keep a decent throughput whilst I start the automation for base building.

And wow, am I glad I did. It has to be a bug. No way that an early technology has a 3 item a second throughput. Right??

Well, I'm gonna use it till its fixed or gets declared a feature. With this little bootstrap, I'm managing 70 plates a minute of both iron and copper. This should hold for a little while whilst I get electricity and automation running, next time.

I hope you've enjoyed this narration of the play through, if you have any feedback please let me know below.

Playtime: 1:14:18

Research Complete:

• Basic Logistics: 10:03
• Steam Power: 11:31
• Basic Electronics: 54:05

Milestones:

• Basic Belt: 12:53
• 10 Basic Belt: 13:11
• 100 Basic Belt: 44:29

Ed: This post was written prior to the entire site being released, along with a few more posts. Expect things to grow and develop here as I get used to blogging on Ghost.