RE: Setting your factory platform at an optimum height: There's actually a pretty big hint they gave us to do that: Station Victor has a mid-level plateau, with all the inputs and connection points, and much of your early building here is easy to do by extending off from that nice flat plateau. This level is ideal for building your main platform that leaves enough room for your power generation underneath, space for you to walk underneath, and will not conflict with any machines or core composers. You broke it by overthinking it.
Thank you for this video. Also wanted to let you know that I saw devs linking people to your video. I think that should go to show you did a good job. :D
You can setup the icepines or whatever they're called (im french so my game is set in french so idk whats its in english) the blue plants. Basically, put the seed in the planter, then get it to go out onto a conveyor leading to a tresher. Now the filter inserters will have to be used. Separate the extract icepine or whatever it is from the biofuel. Now connect it to the machines. Also, if youve got a shite ton of calcium or the white powder you get from mining with the mole, put it in a container. Then, link the calcium to a fabricator (the thing that crafts stuff automatically) selected to craft biobrics. You will also need to connect the plant fiber to it. Biobrics have a better rating, meaning they last longer.
This is a pretty forgiving factory game, and the story helps break up the build-build-build that some other factory games have. I'm not surpised you like it, it's pretty good!!
So quik tip! Make a storage box for limestone!!! I found out if you automate atlantum it also produces limestone which makes the drills kinda unnecessary
@@darthlego7511That's crazy inefficient. That's something you should use early game if you're a long way from any limestone or atlantium but later game that's just way too slow. You'd need to build dozens of planters, threshers and smelters to do what 1 miner does
You need a lot of limestone if you want to automate base parts too. I have 4 Mk2 drills feeding 6 Mk1 smelters, feeding 3 Mk2 assemblers, feeding 3 storage boxes with cement (bc I haven’t set up the actual assembly line yet)
REALLY nice build! I liked the discussion of the various implementation tweaks too. Personally I prefer factory games with plenty of choices; more things to tweak make the building more fun. Steam tells me Techtonica isn't available for a couple hours still -- so thanks for giving us a little teaser while we wait.
Thank you for the math! I'm going to try something similar now but I think I'd split it into half - with only 3 planters. That setup will not load the first thresher 100% but should reduce complexity since you would not need 2 second-line thrashers nor 2 smelters but just one. And probably eliminate limestone bottleneck issue...
This is probably ok as, one thing I mentioned above that isn't mentioned in this video....the stage 2 thresher actually can't be fully cleared (for either fiber nor extract) with 3 filter inserters...so your stage 2 thresher will eventually get "full" and lose a bit of efficiency. If you are cutting the input in half this should never happen.
Instead of fueling the miners with biobricks would using the excess plant matter be more efficient as it would mean the wasted plant matter is used long before the first biobrick is produced
I'm loving this game, my 9 year old and I have a save file we play together. I have my own that I play solo because I can't wait for him to come over to play. But as per usual my base is a freaking mess. I need to demo it and rebuild now that I have mk2 miners and smelters and have learned how to use the system that they setup for us. I need to make about 1,000,000,000 power floors first rip.
Personally, 5 planters are enough. Just make the kindlevines go into a box and have a bit extra in there. That would act as a buffer allowing threshers to work at full capacity.
You could get rid of the Long Inserters if you move the drills a few blocks back (3 or 4 max I think but maybe more) away from the limestone. The drills reach out pretty far and then you can run the fuel directly to the front side of the drills, up against the limestone, with a line parallel to the line that takes away the ore. Then with conveyor junctions into that line you can send fuel directly to each drill.
Could you cook up a version where the limestone comes from kindlevine while the plant matter comes out of shiverthorn (with the possibility to actually opt out the limestone miners in the end)? Because out of my calculations, one kindlevine seed produces 3 plant matter (at the end of the line), but one shiverthorn seed produces 4 plant matter (that's higher yield and doesn't need extra assembler to produce). And we need a lot of plantmatter fiber, kindlevine extract and shiverthorn extract a lot for other things.
Hrm, Either I'm doing something wrong or they reduced the amount of plant mater produced by plant fiber as I am only getting 2 plant matter not 8... Edit: Yeah they've definitely nerfed this to hell as I'm also only getting 3 Plant fiber per thresher run.
dont understand how someone could comprend this type of thing i wish i could lmao good video it was hard to start i messedd it up 3 times but it def works
Hmmmn, I've found out though that 2 threshers processing wood can feed 3 assemblers well enough to saturate a mk1 belt with plant matter. Oh and if you merge belts you can avoid the inserters screwing up saturating the belt too. Though definitely I need to redo the biobrick floor of my biobrick megafactory :P Found the above out while building the megafactory, which is still driving me nuts due to building it over 3 floors....
Actually I think this game has a lot more endgame purpose and a lot smaller scope than say, Dyson Sphere or Satisfactory. It's a pretty solid starting point if you want to try the genre out without diving into an enormous world just yet. For most players (including myself) this is a type of game where you start, make a large mess out of your factory, and then start over to make it more efficient and organized. And then do that again, but better. You don't need to build a perfect factory on your first try ;) If this looks interesting to you, I would highly recommend to just jump in!
Now show that the threshers for stage 2 are not fully cleared and eventually stop a bit, because 3 filter inserters (for each material) can't clear the output in time LOL
Doesn't this get stuck at some point as you are feeding a full belt of limestone from the miners and the smelters can't output converted kindlevine to limestone anymore?
I did a build similar to this but instead of 2 normal inserters taking biobrick from the machine i did 1 fast inserter and used the open port for a 5th limestone inserter then split the line from the drill line to feed only the 4th and 5th inserters, so far from what i can tell it seems to solve the bottlenecking issue but it is no where near as clean as your build.
My guess would be that you're having an issue with the output. If the thresher output gets full (due to it not being processed fast enough), nothing new will be put inside it. You need like 2-3 secondary threshers. Which in turn will cause issues if you don't have anywhere for THAT output to go.
belt speed for sure! There's plenty of limestone to go around, but the MK1 belts aren't particularly fast. That's something you can solve by simply putting in a secondary line, but that messes up the aesthetics of the build for me ;)
You might be able to separate the smelted limestone and mined limestone onto separate belts feeding different inserters without adding another belt of depth? Not doing a good job of describing that, I don’t think…
Ummm... I'm extremely lazy and I'm sure you already did the math. So I will just ask. Dose 25 pieces of plant matter really burn less than one stock biobrick?
I want to watch this video but damn is your gamma and brightness both at max? Why is everything so blindingly bright? This game is in caves, it's supposed to be dim light so why does this look like midday on the surface of the sun?
It's on the default settings, but what you're seeing is probably the effect of the lights I've put around the base. I actually prefer having things fairly bright :D
TL;DR Expect to put many hours of manually feeding things and pushing buttons for power before you get to actually automate anything. An then expect to spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources making fuel specifically for your drills and smelters because they thought it was a good idea to not let you power those with electricity like everything else. The early game of this feels absolutely awful. So awful in fact that I'm the kind of person who loves these factory building games and I stopped playing after 6 hours and haven't touched it since. The amount of things you have to do manually at the beginning of the game is absurd. Either manually feeding fuel or manually activating the cranks alone would have been plenty, together they are just too much. Between running around feeding drills and smelters and clicking a button for power, I don't get much time for building. Even then, almost all of my buildings are devoted to producing bio bricks, and even then that isn't enough to keep my drills and smelters going without significant delays. Slow drilling leads to slow production which leads to less fuel which leads to slower drilling and so on. This is just a downward spiral until everything grinds to a halt until I either go manually collect and feed production of biobricks, or just use the plant matter as fuel. All of which eats up even more of my time. And talking about time, if I leave my base to go exploring or following a waypoint then also it completely grinds to a halt because I'm not there to push a button. That wastes so much time it should be making things. Not to mention my drills and smelters will go through all of the fuel in them and I will have very little fuel with which to star them up again because production hasn't been working because I wasn't there to push a button. (Can you tell how asinine I think it is to force the player to push a button every 5 minutes to have their factory work?) I was hoping this video would assuage my fears and get me playing again. Quite the contrary. Hearing that I'm going to never be able to power miners or smelters with electricity is incredibly disheartening. I continued the video hoping there was some trick to automating biobricks at a reasonable speed. No such luck. That is one large build to provide enough fuel to feed what like 4-5 drills at best? So to have a single belt of each raw resource (iron, copper, and limestone) it would take two of those builds. That is a ton of space taken up, not to mention that it still isn't actually automated until you have waterwheels. How long does that take? No idea, but from my experience at least 6 hours. And that is only 3 miners on each resource. Add in possibly more kinds of resources and more drilling demand and I can see the space and resources needed for fuel production alone spiraling out of control fast. Not to mention most tech is literally locked behind THREE different locks: tech level, scanning parts, and science. And god help you if you miss a scan somewhere. You had better hope you can remember where it was because you can be locked out of entire branches of the tech tree if you don't get it. Oh, and science? Yeah those are big blocks that get placed in the world taking up a ton of precious space (they do look pretty cool though). And speaking of space. In a game where you are stuck underground in extremely limited space, somehow they went forward with the decision to require inserters take up a whole block of space and some buildings can't even be placed close enough together for direct inserting. While I do like the inserter method, as opposed to the Satisfactory method, there are far better ways to implement it than they did. For examples see Factorio and especially Dyson Sphere Program. Both games give you ample space and allow you to build far more compact builds that this game. Suffice it to say that all of these things, and more, make this game supremely unfun to play, at least in the early game. Especially considering I came from Dyson Sphere Program where you get a completely automated power source that powers everything basically from the start. where you get to see the whole tech tree from the start. Where tech unlocks are only behind one thing, science. Even if in this game you eventually get to power drills and smelters with electricity, we shouldn't have to sink a dozen or more hours into a game before it actually gets fun. But that's just my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
It's just a few hours until you get the water wheel if you beeline for it and if you set up your biofuel setup keeping this in mind, you'll be fully automated rather quickly. My single biofuel setup was able to power much more drills and smelters than what you mentioned, although I admit I haven't tested exactly how many so far. Mostly because it didn't feel like a problem thusfar, so hopefully that says something :) Also, later on you get better drills and other ways to automate things, the biofuel setup is just a stepping stone.
There are a series of upgrades that increase the efficiency of biofuel quite dramatically, making it last significantly longer, so you wouldn’t necessarily need to constantly scale up your biobrick production.
@@PostMortalForm True, but i've found that i'm increasing the amount drilled faster than the biobricks are upgrading (but that definitely helps to avoid having to build too many of these facilities!)
If you like infinite biobricks, you might like infinite Iron & Copper ingots as well: th-cam.com/video/H1WCjDZb2Cs/w-d-xo.html
RE: Setting your factory platform at an optimum height: There's actually a pretty big hint they gave us to do that: Station Victor has a mid-level plateau, with all the inputs and connection points, and much of your early building here is easy to do by extending off from that nice flat plateau. This level is ideal for building your main platform that leaves enough room for your power generation underneath, space for you to walk underneath, and will not conflict with any machines or core composers.
You broke it by overthinking it.
Overthinking is what I do here! But yes, it turns out that the height of this particular building is a nice guideline!
Thank you for this video. Also wanted to let you know that I saw devs linking people to your video. I think that should go to show you did a good job. :D
They did? :O
You can setup the icepines or whatever they're called (im french so my game is set in french so idk whats its in english) the blue plants. Basically, put the seed in the planter, then get it to go out onto a conveyor leading to a tresher. Now the filter inserters will have to be used. Separate the extract icepine or whatever it is from the biofuel. Now connect it to the machines. Also, if youve got a shite ton of calcium or the white powder you get from mining with the mole, put it in a container. Then, link the calcium to a fabricator (the thing that crafts stuff automatically) selected to craft biobrics. You will also need to connect the plant fiber to it. Biobrics have a better rating, meaning they last longer.
Your builds are awesome.
Tnx. I just started playing this game and I love it, surprised that I like a factory game.
This is a pretty forgiving factory game, and the story helps break up the build-build-build that some other factory games have. I'm not surpised you like it, it's pretty good!!
So quik tip! Make a storage box for limestone!!! I found out if you automate atlantum it also produces limestone which makes the drills kinda unnecessary
Bro just use kindevline extract 😂
@@darthlego7511That's crazy inefficient. That's something you should use early game if you're a long way from any limestone or atlantium but later game that's just way too slow. You'd need to build dozens of planters, threshers and smelters to do what 1 miner does
Atlantum powder no longer produces limestone with new update.
You need a lot of limestone if you want to automate base parts too. I have 4 Mk2 drills feeding 6 Mk1 smelters, feeding 3 Mk2 assemblers, feeding 3 storage boxes with cement (bc I haven’t set up the actual assembly line yet)
REALLY nice build! I liked the discussion of the various implementation tweaks too. Personally I prefer factory games with plenty of choices; more things to tweak make the building more fun. Steam tells me Techtonica isn't available for a couple hours still -- so thanks for giving us a little teaser while we wait.
Thank you for the math! I'm going to try something similar now but I think I'd split it into half - with only 3 planters. That setup will not load the first thresher 100% but should reduce complexity since you would not need 2 second-line thrashers nor 2 smelters but just one. And probably eliminate limestone bottleneck issue...
Yup, and still easy to scale!
This is probably ok as, one thing I mentioned above that isn't mentioned in this video....the stage 2 thresher actually can't be fully cleared (for either fiber nor extract) with 3 filter inserters...so your stage 2 thresher will eventually get "full" and lose a bit of efficiency. If you are cutting the input in half this should never happen.
Instead of fueling the miners with biobricks would using the excess plant matter be more efficient as it would mean the wasted plant matter is used long before the first biobrick is produced
I'm loving this game, my 9 year old and I have a save file we play together. I have my own that I play solo because I can't wait for him to come over to play. But as per usual my base is a freaking mess. I need to demo it and rebuild now that I have mk2 miners and smelters and have learned how to use the system that they setup for us. I need to make about 1,000,000,000 power floors first rip.
Personally, 5 planters are enough. Just make the kindlevines go into a box and have a bit extra in there. That would act as a buffer allowing threshers to work at full capacity.
You could get rid of the Long Inserters if you move the drills a few blocks back (3 or 4 max I think but maybe more) away from the limestone. The drills reach out pretty far and then you can run the fuel directly to the front side of the drills, up against the limestone, with a line parallel to the line that takes away the ore. Then with conveyor junctions into that line you can send fuel directly to each drill.
Shiverthorn makes plantmatter on the second threshing
Yup! And that build is self-sufficient as well, so combining the two makes for even more fun :)
Could you cook up a version where the limestone comes from kindlevine while the plant matter comes out of shiverthorn (with the possibility to actually opt out the limestone miners in the end)? Because out of my calculations, one kindlevine seed produces 3 plant matter (at the end of the line), but one shiverthorn seed produces 4 plant matter (that's higher yield and doesn't need extra assembler to produce). And we need a lot of plantmatter fiber, kindlevine extract and shiverthorn extract a lot for other things.
I'll need to revisit this game soonish because many things got rebalanced (and improved)!
that was a huge help thank you.
An actuary gaming? Same here! Working on my associateship with the SOA.
*actuarial high five!*
@@TheDutchActuary how are you balancing exams, work, and youtube?
Balancing, what's that? :D@@raingaming8
Hrm, Either I'm doing something wrong or they reduced the amount of plant mater produced by plant fiber as I am only getting 2 plant matter not 8... Edit: Yeah they've definitely nerfed this to hell as I'm also only getting 3 Plant fiber per thresher run.
6 planters 1 thresher makes sense because you can upgrade Thresher speed.
Yup!
dont understand how someone could comprend this type of thing i wish i could lmao good video it was hard to start i messedd it up 3 times but it def works
Hmmmn, I've found out though that 2 threshers processing wood can feed 3 assemblers well enough to saturate a mk1 belt with plant matter. Oh and if you merge belts you can avoid the inserters screwing up saturating the belt too. Though definitely I need to redo the biobrick floor of my biobrick megafactory :P
Found the above out while building the megafactory, which is still driving me nuts due to building it over 3 floors....
I would do a 3 and 3 of kindlevine for the lime and silverthorn for the plantmatter with that size set up
That's a solid way to do this as well! Just don't mix the belts, as I found that is a LOT more hassle than its worth
Nice.
noboby ever mentions you gonna need like 2000 accumelators wants 20745 kj and something like 5000 research cores. its a good game ive been enjoying it
I need like a grid map layout of the main area so i can just copy along XD
These games fascinate me
They also frighten me with logistical overload
Still looking for one that has an endgame purpose and a smaller scope
Actually I think this game has a lot more endgame purpose and a lot smaller scope than say, Dyson Sphere or Satisfactory. It's a pretty solid starting point if you want to try the genre out without diving into an enormous world just yet.
For most players (including myself) this is a type of game where you start, make a large mess out of your factory, and then start over to make it more efficient and organized. And then do that again, but better. You don't need to build a perfect factory on your first try ;)
If this looks interesting to you, I would highly recommend to just jump in!
Now show that the threshers for stage 2 are not fully cleared and eventually stop a bit, because 3 filter inserters (for each material) can't clear the output in time LOL
It not giving me the option to craft plant matter did they update?
Since you have to rely on external limestone sources, it's not infinite, is it?
Doesn't this get stuck at some point as you are feeding a full belt of limestone from the miners and the smelters can't output converted kindlevine to limestone anymore?
I did a build similar to this but instead of 2 normal inserters taking biobrick from the machine i did 1 fast inserter and used the open port for a 5th limestone inserter then split the line from the drill line to feed only the 4th and 5th inserters, so far from what i can tell it seems to solve the bottlenecking issue but it is no where near as clean as your build.
If it works, it works! I sometimes sacrifice a tiny bit of efficiency for the clean look, but that's just me ;)
voor mij loop die tresher al vast met 2 planters en ik gebruik rode inserters en filter, dus ik weet niet hoe jij bij 5 bent gekomen xD
My guess would be that you're having an issue with the output. If the thresher output gets full (due to it not being processed fast enough), nothing new will be put inside it. You need like 2-3 secondary threshers. Which in turn will cause issues if you don't have anywhere for THAT output to go.
Stack inserters
youi can have unlimited biobricks using the kindlevine extract to make limestone
Which is actually what i'm doing here - But you don't get enough limestone that way to make the build run at full capacity.
@@TheDutchActuary ahhhhh got you i was wondeing why mine was going so slow
Would you say the Limestone is the bottleneck or the belt speed?
Im still relatively new to factory games so trying to learn a lot 😀
belt speed for sure! There's plenty of limestone to go around, but the MK1 belts aren't particularly fast. That's something you can solve by simply putting in a secondary line, but that messes up the aesthetics of the build for me ;)
You might be able to separate the smelted limestone and mined limestone onto separate belts feeding different inserters without adding another belt of depth? Not doing a good job of describing that, I don’t think…
You'll get faster belts later, I'm sure...
Why not just use the other plant which breaks down into plantmatter without the extra step?
That's definitely an option!
Ummm...
I'm extremely lazy and I'm sure you already did the math. So I will just ask. Dose 25 pieces of plant matter really burn less than one stock biobrick?
Yes, biobricks are more efficient (and they get even better once you upgrade them)
I want to watch this video but damn is your gamma and brightness both at max? Why is everything so blindingly bright? This game is in caves, it's supposed to be dim light so why does this look like midday on the surface of the sun?
It's on the default settings, but what you're seeing is probably the effect of the lights I've put around the base. I actually prefer having things fairly bright :D
TL;DR Expect to put many hours of manually feeding things and pushing buttons for power before you get to actually automate anything. An then expect to spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources making fuel specifically for your drills and smelters because they thought it was a good idea to not let you power those with electricity like everything else.
The early game of this feels absolutely awful. So awful in fact that I'm the kind of person who loves these factory building games and I stopped playing after 6 hours and haven't touched it since. The amount of things you have to do manually at the beginning of the game is absurd. Either manually feeding fuel or manually activating the cranks alone would have been plenty, together they are just too much. Between running around feeding drills and smelters and clicking a button for power, I don't get much time for building. Even then, almost all of my buildings are devoted to producing bio bricks, and even then that isn't enough to keep my drills and smelters going without significant delays. Slow drilling leads to slow production which leads to less fuel which leads to slower drilling and so on. This is just a downward spiral until everything grinds to a halt until I either go manually collect and feed production of biobricks, or just use the plant matter as fuel. All of which eats up even more of my time. And talking about time, if I leave my base to go exploring or following a waypoint then also it completely grinds to a halt because I'm not there to push a button. That wastes so much time it should be making things. Not to mention my drills and smelters will go through all of the fuel in them and I will have very little fuel with which to star them up again because production hasn't been working because I wasn't there to push a button. (Can you tell how asinine I think it is to force the player to push a button every 5 minutes to have their factory work?)
I was hoping this video would assuage my fears and get me playing again. Quite the contrary. Hearing that I'm going to never be able to power miners or smelters with electricity is incredibly disheartening. I continued the video hoping there was some trick to automating biobricks at a reasonable speed. No such luck. That is one large build to provide enough fuel to feed what like 4-5 drills at best? So to have a single belt of each raw resource (iron, copper, and limestone) it would take two of those builds. That is a ton of space taken up, not to mention that it still isn't actually automated until you have waterwheels. How long does that take? No idea, but from my experience at least 6 hours. And that is only 3 miners on each resource. Add in possibly more kinds of resources and more drilling demand and I can see the space and resources needed for fuel production alone spiraling out of control fast.
Not to mention most tech is literally locked behind THREE different locks: tech level, scanning parts, and science. And god help you if you miss a scan somewhere. You had better hope you can remember where it was because you can be locked out of entire branches of the tech tree if you don't get it. Oh, and science? Yeah those are big blocks that get placed in the world taking up a ton of precious space (they do look pretty cool though). And speaking of space. In a game where you are stuck underground in extremely limited space, somehow they went forward with the decision to require inserters take up a whole block of space and some buildings can't even be placed close enough together for direct inserting. While I do like the inserter method, as opposed to the Satisfactory method, there are far better ways to implement it than they did. For examples see Factorio and especially Dyson Sphere Program. Both games give you ample space and allow you to build far more compact builds that this game.
Suffice it to say that all of these things, and more, make this game supremely unfun to play, at least in the early game. Especially considering I came from Dyson Sphere Program where you get a completely automated power source that powers everything basically from the start. where you get to see the whole tech tree from the start. Where tech unlocks are only behind one thing, science. Even if in this game you eventually get to power drills and smelters with electricity, we shouldn't have to sink a dozen or more hours into a game before it actually gets fun.
But that's just my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.
It's just a few hours until you get the water wheel if you beeline for it and if you set up your biofuel setup keeping this in mind, you'll be fully automated rather quickly.
My single biofuel setup was able to power much more drills and smelters than what you mentioned, although I admit I haven't tested exactly how many so far. Mostly because it didn't feel like a problem thusfar, so hopefully that says something :)
Also, later on you get better drills and other ways to automate things, the biofuel setup is just a stepping stone.
Poor baby. Better uninstall until the V1.0 release comes out so as to not upset your delicate nature.
OR he uninstall Techtonica *immediately* with no reason at all.
There are a series of upgrades that increase the efficiency of biofuel quite dramatically, making it last significantly longer, so you wouldn’t necessarily need to constantly scale up your biobrick production.
@@PostMortalForm True, but i've found that i'm increasing the amount drilled faster than the biobricks are upgrading (but that definitely helps to avoid having to build too many of these facilities!)