This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/amishengineer on 2026-08-11 18:47:13+00:00.

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This game was about 2-3 years in the making. I would come back to Factorio every 6-12 months and expand a little more. If you care to listen, I feel like talking about the evolution of my game.

Sidebar: My save file was old enough that I have red wire in a chest... it just goes poof when you touch it.

My starter base. Where it all began. It bootstrapped the rest of the game. I haven't really changed anything here except to add more nuclear power near the base and to change the train stations from the original 1-1 to 1-4 so that I didn't have a mix of trains and train stations all over the place. It is still the only place I create my level 3 Speed and Productivity Modules. As well as housing all of the components for new nuclear power generation and fuel for trains. Basically everything nuclear related is here and nowhere else.

I can't claim I did all of the work myself. I leaned on blueprint books from other people for my rail network (At least the backbone of the network is 99.9% consistent. I did make a few off by one alignment errors that I found 10s of hours after I made them I just had to add or remove a single rail segment to re-align), nuclear power stations (I really didn't understand how to get it right when I first research it and just got a blueprint book for 4x, 8x, 16x and 24x reactor designs from someone a few years ago). I used some train loading/unloader BPs for my 1-4 trains. Granted I made some changes as I needed to make it work for me. And of course BP book for dozens of X-Y splitter / balancer designs. And a "compact manufacturer cell" design that I made changes to as needed.

Everything else was basically my well intentioned organized layout that slowly turned more spaghetti-like it various forms.

As you can see I started with just 1-wide resource bus (sorta). I wanted to up my SPM so I explored until I found a strip of land with enough space (or so I thought) for an expansion base with 4-wide green circuit/iron/copper plates busses plus 2-wide for things like gears and other less used resources.

I was originally smelting iron and copper at each ore location. I didn't stop doing that until relatively recently.

I wanted a train stacker at the expansion base be cause I thought that was the "right thing" to do.

My forever busses. I was never going to need more...

Expansion base: Originally made on site. More green circuits than I could ever use...right?

My plan was relatively simple. I was going to manufacture all of the science on the right side of the bus (plus any specific items I needed in mass quantities like ammo for military science. Everything else was manufactured on the left side. I didn't always follow that directive.

Each science was put into a passive logistics chest and bots moved it to the research corner of the base

As I started to try and increase the research output, my bus belts started running dry further down the bus. Too much demand near the start of the bus. So I ended up adding more plate drop off locations near the top and then later sides of the expansion base and injecting more resources in the middle of the bus. That got me a little more headroom but I was still periodically running low and there didn't like the idea of building ANOTHER base with 8 or 16-wide busses.

I made the decision to get more serious. I was going to start by creating green circuits off-site. They sucked up a lot resources and I needed a lot of green circuits for...almost everything.

Before I could get serious about green circuits, I need to get serious about my iron/copper ore smelting.

Meet 'Mega Smelter' - The double-sided doubled-ended d... train loadin' beast. Based off a BP for smelting a single blue belt of ore. I laid out eight of these smelter chains in two groups of four. 8x balanced the outputs and then split that off into 12-chests per train car. Once I had the first smelter laid down I realized I had just enough room to lay down a second separate smelter operation next to it.

Same design as the previous green circuit factory just doubled up with an independent resource supply.

I'll spare you the details and screenshots of each dedicated resource module that came next. Petroluem Gas, Plastic, Red Circuits, Sulfuric Acid, Blue Circuits, Low Density. Used the Mega Smelter design for bricks and steel.

Using some BP books for science layouts I added dedicated areas for the different sciences. I manually laid out the science factories for Blue and Yellow since I couldn't find anything I liked. Yellow was by far the worst to get going in high volume. I had to make a dedicated area for each of these resources: engines, electrics engines, and flying robot frames before putting it all together to make Yellow. I still don't like my lubricant production but it works as long as petroleum volume remains high.

One by one I was sending a 1-1 train of each science to a drop off area close to my research area. Each time I'd added dedicated science production, I'd expose the next slowest science production in my expansion base. So I knew what to target next for dedicated science.

Beautiful.

And this was my reward.

As I was writing this though it seems Low Density's reserve held on for a few hours before it's slower production caused Yellow Science to stall. So I guess I'll have to double up on that resource since I can't expand the current manufacturing module.

Here it is, my organically grown free-range spaghetti rail 1000 SPM base. The starter base is in the Northwest, Expansion base in the South. The mega smelters and other dedictaed intermediate products are mostly in the Southeast desert area. Science production is in the green areas between Starter and Expansion bases. I lay down my rails with plans for a city blocks or anything with a standard dimension. It just grew as I wandered and looked for resources. I used the water as natural barriers and walled off the choke points where I needed them.

This was the typical border defense. Face melting fire turrets and more laser pointers than a dollar store.