Request For Formatting Assistance, will edit for formatting as time goes by

For TLDR, scroll to bottom two sections, “Primary Challenge” and “Discussion” -- modmins, this is one of the longest posts I've ever typed. I did attempt to work with spoiler tags to allow each section to collapse individually, but whatever I was doing wasn’t working. If this length of post is a rule violation, please don’t hesitate to message me to fix it. If no comments exist on the post by that point, then feel free to consider nuking it and I’ll repost in a better format (I have the text saved in a word document on my end); if there are comments and replies, I’d prefer to work with you to correct the issue by editing instead of delete-replace.

New project idea -- not a mainbus, BUT A MESHBUS!

Preliminary Abstract

Factorians tall and short, rested and sleep deprived, socially functional and Factorio-addicted; come one, come all, and witness my hubris!

I am setting for myself a somewhat ambitious endgame design goal for myself. Life, work, and an occasional desire to have sex with something other than my own fist, will likely intrude at several points, but I will eagerly accept inquiries from anyone who would care to keep tabs on my progress. At this time, I anticipate that I will create a follow-up post with an imgur album, full write-up, and maybe a few minutes of YouTube walkthrough.

The elevator pitch: Not spaghetti, not a mainbus. A ‘meshbus.’ All in-game manufacturing and production lines will be broken down into isolated and disconnected modules contained inside city blocks. Importantly, each city block / module will have dedicated rail dropoffs for ingredients, and pickups for all first-stage products. No module will consume any intermediate product on site! Using the LTN mod, truly all intermediate products will be shipped by train to another module for consumption.

Edit 1, prompted by u/winkbrace: The chief distinguishing feature of my idea here, as compared to more established city-block meta, is to treat this more like an actual research and design experiment instead of something along the lines of a Let's Play. Some of my offline work experience is as a part-time adjunct professor at a public university local to where I live. My actual in-game results will obviously fascinate me, and I have full confidence that results from me being just a frickin weirdo to begin with. Joking aside, I think I'll be in a much better position at time of beta release to better explain and highlight some of the things that I learned through this process. Parallel to that, however, will be my attempt at capturing lots of expository data, particularly about the player-experiences in front of the keyboard and mouse. Put another way, I am attempting to demonstrate that gameplay experiences with titles like Factorio can be used to shed light on that game-immersion experience as a means of developing rigorous controlled testing into the human mind, human cognition and learning, and other fields of knowledge. I hope to establish some basis to suggest that computer games can be used to develop practical applications toward things like tutorial design, using techniques of the scientific method. Gaming environments might not be otherwise readily thought of as a great alternative to experimentation on rats in cages, human volunteer test subjects, control group survey testing, etc. Among other goals, I hope to suggest that this represents new opportunities to make human lives better through the use of computer games in controlled-environment research.

Background

Early in the year 2019, I joined forces with my long-established primary gaming buddy to do some preliminary tinkering and live multiplayer gameplay that brought us to a point just prior to worrying about yellow science. We had to back off from that after about three weeks of progress due to offline reasons on both of our ends. Contributing to that timing was the fact that we hadn’t entirely troubleshot the UPS losses we were experiencing as a result of our connection method. So as to roughly suggest an estimate of the scope of lategame UPS:

• Savefile 40-45 MB (Slightly more terrain explored and generated due to an in-game overshoot)
• Original mapgen settings of;
  • No enemies
  • No enemy structures
  • No evolution
  • No pollution
  • No cliffs
• With some in-game time spent dilly-dallying with errata / tedious details, we were basically on the cusp of achieving yellow science
• Gameplay performance;
  • Desktop towers at both ends
    • In troubleshooting, experimented with swapping or alternating hosting duties
    • No ability to justify hassles / expense of external server, such as MultiPlay.com or similar
  • My rig was Win7, nominally higher benchmark scores
  • Partner’s rig was Win10, respectable gaming rig despite comparative benchmarks
  • In solo play, stable UPS > 57
  • In multiplay host with both players active
    • Game.speed=1, fluttering UPS ~ 30-35
    • Game.speed=.4, stable-but-not-bulletproof UPS > 50
      

Current State

I am now embarking on the tedious mapgen settings stage of finding a new map, whereupon I intend to construct my first fully fleshed out prototype.

I have a definite sense of what I would consider to be a “presentable beta” for upload to you fine factorian degenerates. Despite my rather firm (but not inflexible) sense of what level of progress I would consider that ready-for-beta release, I don’t think I could describe it very well here. Indeed, my work earlier this year with my friend in the proof-of-concept stage, and this prototype project, are intended to help me hone such articulable descriptions. Truly, I know of no other example of anyone attempting to do this, at the in-game scale I intend, with the same intended design features and design limitations, blueprint-documented rather thoroughly in near-real-time, with the condition that the blueprints shared would be vanilla or near-vanilla. Near-vanilla blueprints may or may not be included with the beta release.

When I achieve that “beta” stage, I intend to compose a full set of write-ups, with imgur album, annotated or mostly-annotated blueprint books, the savefile itself with mapstring, and hopefully some walkthrough footage with voice commentary posted to my defunct YouTube page.

Please keenly note that I will incorporate feedback into my designs, and especially into my documentation and eventual (high hopes) possible walkthrough.

Intended Mods

The majority of mods I intend to run will be irrelevant or moot for blueprinting purposes (RSO, Vehicle Snap, etc.) One of the driving purposes for this project, starting all the way back in October 2018 (at time of this writing it is mid-December 2019) when I began researching rather heavily for any forum posts, reddit posts, Facebook shitposts, YouTube videos, or any other evidence of a largescale attempt at something similar to my idea (including second-string YouTubers that receive much less algorithm promotion than the first-string names such as Xterm, Nilaus, etc.) My initial thought process for this only gradually served to entirely overtake my Factorio time, and by Valentine’s Day 2019 I’d become convinced that this is either an attempt at a truly original innovation, or that might instead become the Factorio equivalent of a money pit that will stall, go nowhere, and drag my aspirations and street-cred from this post down into the catacombs of Factorio Hell that we would otherwise refer to as “Minecraft.”

• Goal is to have approximately three blueprinting tiers
  • Roughly calibrated against yellow / red / blue belt tech
  • May or may not be polished in time for my beta release
• QoL mods will include RSO, FNEI, Helmod, Vehicle Snap, etc.
• Mods with light or moderate relevance to blueprints
  • Angel’s Addon: C.A.B. (MAP WILL BE VANILLA , NOT ANGELBOB)
  • Angel’s Addon: Warehouses (next prototype will be an AB run)
  • Asphalt Roads
  • Loader Redux
  • LTN!!!
    • This mod will be critical with respect to beta
    • Later work (post-beta) will investigate feasibility for a version based on VTN
  • Miniloaders (Yes, I will attempt to run both this and Loader Redux)
  • Nanobots
  • Nixie Tubes
  • Power Armor Mk 3
  • Power Armor Mk 4 (Not entirely sure these two won’t conflict)
  • Space Extension
  • Text Plates
  • Vehicle Wagon 2
• Generally speaking, the final modpak will likely not be beyond the above
  • No intent to use mods with significant relevance to blueprints (especially no AngelBob, no Py, no IR, etc.)
  • No SqueakThrough!!! High-secondary design goal is to specifically remove this mod’s usefulness (pipe and assemblers positioned with spaces sufficient to walk through without SqueakThrough)
  • Unlikely to use Waterfill, opting instead to develop reliance on water provided by tanker trains (possible limited-scope or edge-case usage of water barrels)
  • Will almost definitely not be running:
    • Compressed Fluids
    • Storage Tank Mk2
    • Longer Underground Belt Aligned
    • Belt Stacker

Intended Mapgen Settings

• Railworld preset to begin with
• Default enemy / enemy structure settings, with enemy expansion intentionally re-enabled
• Maximum size for Starting Area
• No cliffs
• High water frequency;
  • Hopefully a map with respectably sized landmasses
  • Even better if easily sealed at a small quantity of chokepoints, especially toward the earliest stages of expanding outward beyond Starting Area
  • Ideal map would provide large lakes / seas / small oceans
  • Will definitely increase stone frequency
    • Map will likely demand extremely large quantities of landfill...
    • ...but exact extent or magnitude of increase in map slider is not yet known
• No intent to generate in-game materials or supplies from console commands; stone procurement and landfill production will dictate path of later Starter Base progress (yellow or purple science)

I was separated from Factorio for several months following our abandonment of the proof-of-concept almost a year ago. For the past week or two, the time available to playing Factorio has been spent poring through my saved browser bookmarks, saved posts from the Factorio Facebook group, posts I’ve saved from r/factorio, YouTube, and some other errata that I’ve encountered in my internet travails over the course of year 2019.

Again, it’s generally not a good idea to prove, or claim to have proved, a negative. That said, I very confidently presume that my design here will be the first of its kind, at least with respect to anything shared online with others. With the proof-of-concept from before, I encountered obscure spacing issues, LTN-mod interface quirks (including my own baseline learning curve in my first go at using it), and other details that I would never have anticipated or predicted. With this prototype, I’m optimistic that I won’t run into anything hugely destructive to my will to invest precious and scarce gameplay time. That said, I recognize that I’m rather likely to end up having learned things that would greatly improve time efficiency with the next go around.

Design Goals

• Starter base will be a mainbus design through the first rocket, and hopefully through all of the non-infinite researches
• City block sizes will be huge, likely 10 chunks per side
  • All trains will be either L-CCCC or L-TTTT (too early to speculate ratio between the two fleets)
  • Most trains will be LTN-controlled, but not all (may or may not explore multiple LTN network IDs)
  • All train tracks will be chunk-aligned
  • Feasibility of chunk-aligning all blueprints will be studied
• No roboport network will merge with any other roboport network from a different city block, and some city blocks will have no roboports at all
• Moderate biter pressure
  • Will allow for opportunities to design and test defensive perimeter blueprints
  • Military / defense oriented blueprints will hopefully be applicable to modded and extreme biter threat (Rampant, Swarm, Near Evolution, etc.)
  • Full exploration of military designs may or may not fall within scope of beta release
• Original Spawn Location will be marked at game start with a ghost-entity placeholder
  • Backup save made of first seconds in the game world with ghost-marked location
  • Console command to reveal 2048 tile radius around start location to verify map feasibility
  • Backup save made of revealed terrain; enable Creative Mod on map with cheated map revealed
  • Third backup save made of revealed terrain with Creative Mod active; revert to first backup
  • Working savefile created to prevent any possibility of accidentally overwriting the original backup
• Starter base will use mainbus to launch initial rockets and unlock all non-infinite tech
  • Full transition from mainbus to meshbus will allow for the central mall to be centered (chunk-aligned) on the Original Spawn Location
    • This will benefit efficiency in heading out to loot corpses from train or biter deaths
    • Post-beta design goal will feature some significant changes to the mall module
      • Mall module design responds to "30-Stack Challenge" and "Sisyphean Deliveries Mod", links in comment
      • Train pre-loaded and ready for quick hop-in-and-go
      • Logistic auto requests will likely flood player
      • Train will have some empty wagons in tow, plus some items in inventory
        • Armor / battle-kit waiting in steel dumb-chest (weapon, spare armor, kits of ammo, tank)
        • Extra wagons will be for anticipated inventory overflow from respawn autorequest bots
  • City blocks will at least be externally chunk-aligned
    • Internal chunk-alignment will probably be post-beta
    • City blocks will be square, 10 chunks to a side / 100 square chunks of city block space
  • Rail will be chunk-aligned
    • RHD
    • Either 2-lane or 4-lane
    • Post-beta will receive greater attention to rails, possibly with LHD option
    • Hopefully, rail blueprints will be overstamp compatible (the 2-lane layouts with poles and signals won’t block an expanded blueprint for 4 / 6 / 8 rail upgrades)
  • Beta will feature LTN, post-beta may or may not feature VTN or other train solution
  • Some feasibility testing or rough thumbnail sketching of possibly enlarging rail intersections
    • Tertiary goal to allow for longer trains with intersections large enough to prevent jams
    • Likely to be either post-beta or postponed entirely
  • No train station names will be duplicated, ever
    • Required by LTN, at least with respect to LTN-enabled stop locations
    • Primary design goal is user friendliness of train gui / station lists
  • All city blocks will have either approximately 2 or exactly 2 (not sure yet) PAX stops, non-LTN
  • Roboports will only be placed within city blocks that call for them
  • Any city block capable of taking in player's trash-logistics inventory items, will then feed those auto-trash items via non-LTN trash train
  • Defense / wall modules will receive supply and feed auto-trash by non-LTN train (not sure if defense resupply train will incorporate auto-trash capacity, or would instead use dedicated trash train)
  • Defense modules will feature non-LTN stops, separately, for PAX and artillery train patrol

Primary Challenge

The megabase will be the consuming focus. The challenge will be to design ALL modules to receive all intermediate products by train, and to send all intermediate products by train, dispatched for the beta by the LTN mod. That means that no city block will use any ingredient in an assembler / chemplant that was initially generated within the same city block. First stage refineries will receive water and crude by train, to load outgoing trains with mono-cargoes of heavy / light / pet respectively. Steel furnace smelt blocks will receive smelter fuel and ore, outputting smelted plate. (I may or may not make an exception to “no intermediate product produced and used on site” for the steel smelt.)

Discussion

This write-up is quite ridiculously long, and quite ridiculous in its level of detail. Considering that some people are known to literally keep notes related to Factorio with physical notepads and writing utensils by their computer, or even to indulge in drawing sketches of new layouts and designs, again by hand on paper, during periods when that jonesing factorian is unable to play directly.

That said, this derives mostly from my own working notes from the last two weeks I spent during my workplace’s busy season in researching my bookmarks from here and other locations. The act of proofreading and [attempt at] formatting it with section headers, itemizing my indented lists, etc. All of that helps me work from a coherent, “distraction-resistant” (every one of you knows exactly what I’m talking about) design schematic. Also, truth being told, putting this self-challenge out there is a pretty good disincentive for me to give up and return to dealing with relatives over the upcoming holidays.

As always, I leave responses to the discretion of each individual reader.

Cheers, u/RolandDeepson, FhD (Factorio-Hobbled Degenerate)