Fan Factory Showcase - Season 3 Ep.01

Fan Factory Showcase - Season 3 Ep.01

EA

The great thing about Satisfactory is everybody's factories are different! Today we're checking out State Machine's save where they focus on architecture and there are some moments that truly wow!

TotalXclipse 5147 2021-05-16

 

Fan Factory Showcase Season 3 Ep. 01 (State Machine)

 

Kickstarting season 3, we have State Machine's factory, with a focus on architecture and style. Check out the video to give you a breakdown of their world and should you wish, you can explore the save yourself by clicking the link below.

You can find the video spotlight here:
https://youtu.be/XjOV-QLzZw0

You can download the save file here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uVZ607jjtgm5C29WcTPEDvQLEeYklFgz?usp=sharing

 



State Machines Notes
 

Hi folks. Thank you for your interest in the build. I've prepared some information to answer the most common questions, including my approaches, challenges, and such in doing the build.

I am prepping to do a mega base. I have built the power infrastruture (for now), and have done the Rocky Desert biome. I'll do the Northern Forest, Grassland, and Sandy Desert biomes, then move on to the mega base.

For those that are mostly interested in engineering stuff, there are only two production areas that operate at any scale, and one of those is just a bunch of constructor production lines. There is a lot of infrastructure engineering, but if production is of interest there isn't much here.

*Mods
The save file given to TotalXclipse contained the two mods I use, Pak Utility and Smart!. Neither of these create assests in the save file so you can freely go vanilla or use any mods you fancy.

*General Information

I like building interesting looking buildings with a variety of styles. I'm generally minimalist in decoration. I try to make things look industrial even if there is a gorgeous building there. I like to use the environment to meld in with or contrast with or both at the same time. This is a pain, and I'll probably do less of that moving forward.

I like to keep the beauty of the environment as intact as possible. I do things like place the footprint of a building to preserve stuff. Or incorporate the environment into buildings. I like to play off of certain environment features - I am currenty doing a rail distribution centre in the Northern Grasslands to have the same curves as a feature in the landscape has, then expose that feature, along with the rails within the building.

I like to drive the Explorer around a lot, and have smoothed out lots of terrain and built bridges to make the driving easier. I use the steel walls to mark things to make driving in fog easier.
 

*General Information

I like building interesting looking buildings with a variety of styles. I'm generally minimalist in decoration. I try to make things look industrial even if there is a gorgeous building there. I like to use the environment to meld in with or contrast with or both at the same time. This is a pain, and I'll probably do less of that moving forward.

I like to keep the beauty of the environment as intact as possible. I do things like place the footprint of a building to preserve stuff. Or incorporate the environment into buildings. I like to play off of certain environment features - I am currenty doing a rail distribution centre in the Northern Grasslands to have the same curves as a feature in the landscape has, then expose that feature, along with the rails within the building.

I like to drive the Explorer around a lot, and have smoothed out lots of terrain and built bridges to make the driving easier. I use the steel walls to mark things to make driving in fog easier.


*Major facilities - in rough order of build.

A) Starter Factory / Main Complex / Main Base
- situated in the north, central part of the map. It's at the intersection of the Northern Forest and the Great Gulch just east of the Rocky Desert. The visual reference in-game is the tall, white tower building.
- the purpose of this facility is for Hub and Space Elevator stuff and housing my personal storage for building stuff and so on.
- the initial Starter Factory was on the ground and in the two buildings still existing. The buildings are on a few foundation orientations which is unfortunate.
- the Main Base (tall, white building) was Starter Factory MK2, and I dismantled all the ground-level stuff as soon as could, and repurposed the two other buildings to only do smelting for input into the Main Base.
- all of the close by resources are dedicated to this building including the building exploiting two quartz nodes, as well as the oil that is in the gulch being used to create plastic, rubber, and fuel for the small fuel-gen power facility.
- most of the quartz is not used, so I might figure a way of using on site and exporting the product elsewhere. Or to export the quartz from the Main Building.
- There are three train stations. 
1) "Main Base Utility" that is essentially abandoned, but looks cool. I had (and still have) a train, "Works Train", that I would manually lode construction materials in at this station.
2) "Main Base Alcad" In that takes Alcad from the Crater Lake factory into the complex for my personal storage.
3) "Main Base Staging" that, basically, takes the overflow from the Main Base to wherever the "Staging" train is programmed to go to. In other words to export my personal storage closer to whatever my current build site is at.
- I will go into greater detail on the infrastructure of the Main Base in greater detail later.
- there are two "easter egg'ish" areas in the Main Complex - they are not exactly hidden, though...
- a note on the video. TotalXclipse said that this complex was not complete. Strictly that is true, but the new release 4 stuff I have to do will probably be done elsewhere. Or maybe... The Main Base is designed to take in more inputs, but delivering the inputs to the building is the problem, and I haven't looked at what I need to do. Floor space could be a problem as well.

B) Coal Gen
- situated immediately west of the Main Complex in the "estuary". The visual reference is the coal gen farm, and the two "Houses of Black and White" buildings.
- the power generation is 48 coal generators. They were built in three builds of 16 each over time. Power details will be in it's own section.
- there are a number of decorative buildings in this area. Foundation orientation was based how things lined up vs the shoreline.
- the Houses of Black and White will be covered in sequence of when they were completed.

C) North Sea Oil Field
- situated on the sea north of the Main Complex and spanning a considerable distance to the east. The visual reference is the ocean.
- there are three main bits to this complex.
1) the oil extraction is spread across the area with individual pipes running to
2) a fuel farm that consolidates the crude oil into a pipes the bus to
3) the oil terminus.
- the oil terminus has a train station, NS Oil Terminus, to ship out the oil.
- the intent is to have a large water farm and train station to ship out the water.
- this complex needs work.
1) it hasn't been updated for the larger pipes which allows more overclocking on some of the oil extractors.
2) the train bits were set up prior to understanding trains and probably need redone.
3) the water farm needs developed. There are a lot of construction materials staged there already.
- there is a lot of decoration in this complex.
- a note about the video, TotalXclipse said that the oil was being sent to the Main Base. It is not.

D) Waterfall
- situated in the Northern Forest closely to the south of the Main Base. The visual reference is the waterfall and white building next to it - the "Waterfall" building.
- this building smelts the two caterium nodes and exports them. Some bit goes by conveyor the the Main Base. The rest will go out by train.
- there is a sulpher exporting location nearby. The sulpher goes out through the "Waterfall Sulpher Out" train station for compact coal production in the Houses of Black and White.
- note, there is a power switch using the Release 4 changes. It is the only switch I've done using the new stuff.
- the base and walls of the building were built quite early on, but not completed until later. Consequently, the production area is not particularly well designed. And, the train station needed reoriented, later yet, since there is only enough room to have a train come and go from one direction. I reversed the station orientation once I realized what direction I wanted to send it in, so the belts are now a bit awkward.
- there is an easter egg of sorts in the building.

E) Crater Lake Complex
- situated in the Crater Lakes with the visual reference being the building.
- this building makes Alcad for export to the Main Base for use in construction.
- the Alcad production lines are not optimized at all. They just make enough to get enough Alcad. Release 4 broke them, and I fixed them to just get it to work. Release 4 changes resulted in the by-product water clogging the system. I took one of the water gens that had been underclocked and turned it off.
- the final stages of alcad production are jammed into the top of the centre building.
- there are interlinked coal gen power plants in the area.
- there are two train stations, "CL Alcad Out" that exports the Alcad, and "CL Ore Out" that will export coal and bauxite in the future. Note that one of the freight compartments in the ore station will likely end up unused or underused since it's source of coal is mostly being consumed for the two coal gen setups.

F) Houses of Black and White
- located next to the Coal Gen area, and the visual reference are the two inter-connected buildings.
- these two buildings create compact coal for the Gold Coast turbo fuel complex, and will export the local raw resources elsewhere.
- these two buildings did go through a lot of evolution prior to the final state. Originally intended to make reforced iron plate, they morphed to doing compact coal once that was needed for turbo fuel.
- the compact coal production is jammed into the larger of the two buildings, which also houses the two train stations, "RD Compact Coal In/Out" and "RD Ore Out".

G) Gold Coast
- located in the Gold Coast that is on the western ocean, south of the Rocky Desert and west of the Grasslands. Visual reference is obvious...
- this complex makes turbo fuel and has a fuel gen farm to produce power with the turbo fuel. There are some ancillary exports as well.
- this is a very large complex with many components, so in rough order of least to most important
1) the staging area / construction base, with the cunningly named train station, "GC Staging". Basically, overflow from the Main Base is shipped here to have most of the building materials available at the construction site. This area has a lot of decoration and an interesting sortation system that might be covered later. It is obsolete since there is not much construction likely, but could still come in handy.
2) the "GC Ore Out" train station that exports out local resources to the RD Distribution Center.
3) a very small factory to take the polymer resin byproduct use in the turbofuel production process to make plastic which is then turned into empty cannisters needed in the turbofuel production process.
4) four train stations, of which two are more theoretical, one exports polymer resin to the RD Distribution Centre, and one imports the compact coal. Station names will be obvious.
5) the turbo fuel creation plants. The original concept was to design for six plants each taking in 300 crude oil, but to build three plants, and then quite possibly only run one plant. The approach is to use the "diluted packaged fuel" alternate recipe which is the "Stage Five" approach in the Satisfactory Wiki that you can find by searching for "Satisfactory setting up fuel power". It's actually pretty simple to set up even though there are five interlinked production lines. This will produce 667 turbo fuel per plant that can be burned to create 22.5GW of power. At the moment only one of the plants is running and there are problems since Release 4. One known problem is that the compact coal deliverys by train need more trains to deliver the compact coal in a more steady stream. Anyway, the facility is generating roughly 17-20GW at the moment. I will elaborate on power later.
6) the fuel gen farm. Three plants are designed with one built full out - 149 fuel gens.
- note, there is a significant "death zone" in these parts that constrained building and such.
- I might not complete this facility, and may not have built it based on Release 4 changes. I understand that the sulpher used for the compact coal is better used in the nuclear production line now. And, the new recipe using the Blender might be a better alternative to the pre-Release 4 approach as well.

H) Sand Castle
- located in the north west of the Rocky Desert, with visual reference a big blot of a building.
- this complex makes concrete.
- there are 16 limestone inputs (1 inside the building, 10 from surrounding areas, and 5 via train). 16 production lines produce (if maximum input was sustained) 3307 concrete per minute.
- there are three train stations. "Sandcastle Concrete O", inside the building, will export concrete. "Sandcastle Ore In" imports limestone from the Rocky Desert Distribution Centre. Sandcastle Ore Out" exports iron to the Rocky Desert Distribution Centre.

I) Rocky Desert Distribution Centre
- located in the west of the Rocky Desert, with the visual reference of a bunch of train stations.
- this is a "cross dock" facility. Inputs from an inbound train are routed to an outbound train station. In addition, the local resources are belted into the facility.
- there are 18 belts of input (17 being used). There are three inbound train stations with 13 of the freight bays carrying cargo. There are six outbound train stations with 22 freight bays loaded with cargo.
- the cargo routing is done in the north building in the facility. There are six freight platforms per outbound train station with one buffer for each freight bay. The inputs route into the buffers and route out to the destination freight platforms. The buffers are two stacks of 18 ISC's (three stations worth). The train stations and corresponding ISC's are colour coded.
- a major design error was made in regards to sinking stuff. It's arguable whether anything should be sunk, but I put an overflow check at the load of each freight compartment (that is, after the buffer) instead of checking before loading the buffer. I disabled the first overflow check and added an overflow check before the buffer. Either way, the overflows are merged so that there is one sink per train station.
- another possible error is only using one conveyor belt to load or unload a single platform. I reasoned that the load/unload of a platform is much less important than a given train's travel time. However, I didn't take into account there might be multiple trains running the same route. Then, that load/unload might be much more important. I think multiple belts for the outbound train stations can be retrofitted, though. The belt runs to the train station can use space currently occupied with the overflow belts. The sinks may need to be removed.


*Infrastructure Details

A) Main Base
- there are some good bits and bad bits in here.
- all production in the building is based on raw resource inputs of 270 items / min.
- there is a single input bus plus plastic, rubber, and alcad coming in from below the main floor. These are kludged in to the buildings distribution system since I forgot to design for it...
- the administrative hub has a hypertube area for getting out of the building and for going to to the Coal Gen area.
- there is a point to point hypertube system to specific floors in the building. The hypertube entrances and the floors are colour-coded.
- at the entrance (south west corner of the building) and the north east corner of the building are a floor to floor elevator (colour coded) and a stairwell.
- there is one power circuit in ("power main"). In the switch by the entrance is a switchable circuit that splits of to power hypertubes and sinks. This circuit ("power aux") is cabled through the floor to floor elevator shaft. There are switchable circuits to power each production floor, or groups of floors, or whatever. These circuits are cabled through the point to point elevator shafts. Each floor has a switch controlling four circuits that create ceiling mounted power connections for production buildings. All switchs are the pre Release 4 style.
- each production floor has an area where all the inputs come from and another area where the outputs go to. There is an additional area where some (high quantity) inputs come from. A lot more on this below. From the perspective of the production lines on a given floor, this kind of standardizes production line layout.
- each floor is 20x20 foundations. The infrastructure overhead makes useable floor space roughly 12x13 foundations. While cozy, that's good enough to all the pre-Release 4 hub and elevator levels.
- the sinks for the distribution system handle all the overflow. However, I "patched" the system to, more or less, route overflow from the building to a train station to export my personal storage. Sadly, I don't understand the patch anymore...
- the distribution system is big. It was a proof of concept of how to handle a mega base and, as expected, some valuable lessons were learned. Note, the concept was that production lines would be isolated from each other. If a production line produces plates it would get it's iron ingots from the "wall" and send it's plates to the "wall". Everything in the factory complex would be cycling through the storage system. Details:
1) Storage system. It's set up to store a lot of stuff. Lesson learned is that is the wrong way of looking at it. I think the best way of looking at Satisfactory is that you set storage size based on your needs. You set up your personal storage size to whatever you figure gives you enough to keep building. All other sizing is based on what keeps production moving at 100%. Train deliveries are asynchrous so a target factory may need X sized buffer for something to guarantee the production lines stay at 100%. But storage for storage sake may make you think you have X when you still don't, and of course less than X is no good, unless you don't need 100%.
2) The standarized routing of inputs works fine. All of the spaghetti stuff gets hidden. Conveyor lines move at max speed, though once you start splitting lines for multiple targets then you can lose scale. You will lose it in a large facility. For example if you need ten 780 lines of iron ingots for production, then there has to be ten unsplit lines. Any split loses scale.
3) The standarized routing of outputs does not work. The idea of using Smart Splitters to sort the outputs into the storage system loses scale since you are splitting stuff. I think any system where you use Smart Splitters to sort can only be done if scale is not needed, like for your personal storage.
4) In general the overall concept can only be used in a very large building since it needs a lot of space, and probably needs to have a bunch of distributed storage buffers that are strategically placed, otherwise the distribution system probably ends up being much larger than the actual production area and would be insane to build.

B) Power
- 64 coal gens making 4800MW
- 14 fuel gens making 2100MW
- 11 geothermal gens making 1150-3450MW
- 149 (+30 idle) turbo fuel gens making @17-20GW out of a theoretical max of 22.5GW
- the turbofuel power plant does not get enough turbofuel. The cause of that is not enough flow of compact coal to the turbofuel factory. More trains should fix that.
- I suspect a fluid dynamic issue introduced in Release 4, as well.
- the three fuel plants and corresponding power plants are colour coded. Blue, Green, and Copper'ish.
- A note on the tubofuel power plant organization. Each plant has 134 fuel gens on two decks. That uses exactly 600 m3 turbofuel per minute. Each plant has 15 fuel gens by the fuel farm that uses 67ish m3 turbofuel. The output from the turbofuel plant is 667ish m3 turbofuel carried equally in two pipes. At the entry to the fuel farm 67 m3 are siphoned off from each plant's output to fuel the 15 fuel gens. Valves are used to turn on/off individual sets of 15 fuel gens.
- the turbofuel plant complex currently has a manual switch (ie build/dismantle) for switching which of the three fuel plants gets compact coal. The switch is at the bus entry to the Blue plant.
- the recipes used to make turbofuel don't work the way you would like. The recycled containers don't recycle quick enough so the packaged water production line ends up perpetually not getting to full efficiency. I've seen some people probably slamming constant empty containers in to handle this problem. I did it by experimentation and ended up introducing 3600 containers into the closed loop system instead of the 800 indicated by the recipe. But, the fluid manifolds for the actual turbofuel production line also never come to 100%. My final approach ended up being:
1) prefill all buffers before turning power on to the four production lines that create the fuel input to the refinerys that create the turbofuel. 
2) break the pipe connections to the turbofuel production line, and the turbofuel output lines. 
3) turn on the power to these four production lines.
4) when the output buffers of fuel are full. Connect the pipe connections to the fuel farm that actually feeds the turbofuel production line. 
5) when the fuel farm is full, power on the turbofuel production line.
6) when the output buffers of the turbofuel refinerys are full, connect the output pipes.
This created a steady state that worked pre-Release 4. I'm going to fix the compact coal problem and see how much that helps. If the turbofuel production returns to steady state then there is a fluid dynamic issue involved. Note, there are more complications that make Release 4 hard to work with since the power never turns off...

C) Train System
- the general idea is that there will small, local train networks that transport to a Distribution Centre (DC). There will be a few DC's that have their own train network that links to a future mega base.
- this might have some performance gain for the ai pathing.
- I think it will make it a bit easier to understand the network in the in-game dialogs since a lot of trains won't be displayed in the timetable depending on what network you are looking at.
- There is probably a better chance at scaling up the number of tracks for increased throughput on the DC / mega base network.
- With the exception of the railway to the North Sea Oil Terminal which will likely be redone, all tracks are one way so that any future signaling system should be easier to implement.
- the train station naming convention is roughly, geographical-designator/cargo-type/(in or out). The train naming convention is roughly source-station/cargo-type.



*disclaimer: Though I upload the saves sent to me, after I've already checked the save, downloading and using these save files are done at your own risk.


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