https://imgur.com/a/1gukKub

I'm very excited to have hit this milestone! It was a lot of work, but I am happy with where it is at. I will post a factoriomaps link when it gets put up, but that usually takes a few days.

First, thank you to LethaK Maas for his top-notch rail blueprint book - https://factorioprints.com/view/-LE0_ttF6cJPoiFi5l6u. I believe that's the only blueprint I used beyond belt balancers. I also used it on my last map and after a lot of experience with it I'm not sure how it could be improved, which is awesome.

Next, the backstory here. This map is more or less a continuation of the map I had previously posted about here. I used the mod New Game to nuke my map and keep my tech so I could basically just redesign everything. You might notice that the starting area in the screenshots is wonky. This is because I had intended to play this game with Alien Biomes as well, but when I loaded the new world my framerate dropped into single digits and didn't recover. I disabled the mod and it made the starting chunks a bit weird. No harm though, I prefer the grass biome... lol.

Mod list:

• AutoDeconstruct
• Enhanced Map Colors
• FNEI
• LTN
• Rail Tools (this mod seems little-known but is awesome, highly recommend)
• Squeak Through
• Todo List
• Long Reach
• radarplus for RSO
• RSO
• Upgrade Planner

Map settings:

• RSO
• Rail world
• Biters off
• Resource richness bumped up 1 notch.

So yeah, I have biters off. I made that decision after a lot of thought and playing a lot of maps with biters on. To me, with respect to the prospect of building a factory on this scale, biters are just grindy and annoying. I lost interest in a few maps because of the boredom of grinding out the killing of zillions of biter nests to clear new territory. I don't find that particular part of the game very interesting in this context. Once you have all the late game techs, it's not especially difficult to kill them, it just takes a lot of time. Time I would rather spend building/designing things.

And yeah, the resources are bumped up. Also a conscious choice for a similar reason. I still had to go out pretty far to get to gigantic resource patches, so the logistical challenge was not trivial, I just didn't have to spend hours walking thousands of chunks in the other direction to actually start building my base. Again, not that interesting.

Design constraints/principles:

• I have built city blocks which have internal space of 10x10 chunks. Same as my last map, I was pleased with this setup because it gives plenty of room for everything.
• I designed everything myself other than the rail book. The main lines and enter/exit ramps are LethaK Maas' blueprint, all of the loading/unloading docks and stations are my designs.
• I don't take sides on the bots/belts debate, as you can probably see. I tried to use both when it made sense. It's hard to beat bots for unloading trains, so I did that pretty much everywhere once I had the resources to mass produce logistics bots. I like designing with belts because it gives you somewhere to start (I want to make a full blue belt of red chips... etc). The game is also designed so that very many ratios are in line with belt throughput, so you are almost incentivized to use belts in a lot of cases.
• Everywhere possible the designs are moduled/beaconed.
• Almost everything is moved using 3-8 trains. 3 engines because I think 4 is overkill. 8 cars because it seems like the sweet spot for my designs. 11 cars is pretty long, but it is manageable, and you can move a lot of material per trip. There's a few exceptions like train fuel, lubricant and sulfuric acid. I moved those with 1-1 trains.
• I used nuclear power because gigantic solar fields are super tedious to me. It was a gamble, but I'm running 60UPS still so it seems like it paid off.
• I did my best to compress the raw materials everywhere possible. Green chips, gears and steel all have dedicated outposts and are moved directly to the consuming factories. This was incredibly effective at reducing train traffic. I think I could scale this base quite a bit more.

Finally, thank you to the denizens of this subreddit for being an awesome community and inspiring me to reach this goal. And thank the universe for Mr. Kirk McDonald for his amazing calculator: https://kirkmcdonald.github.io/. I made pervasive use of it.

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EDIT: Forgot that I also used the Tesselated Bot Miners blueprint - https://factorioprints.com/view/-Kv8rBZzEyPORtZh4nz4