How Hard is it to Beat Factorio When EVERYTHING is a Burner?

oh yes i hate this it is revolting more please if you've played factorio you've probably encountered burner inserters they're pretty easy to forget about and for good reason despite being available at the start it's trivial to beat the entire game without ever even building one most people's experience with them is to make a few realize they're more of a nuisance than just inserting and removing the materials yourself then relegate them to feeding steam boilers until nuclear makes even that obsolete it's no surprise that they rarely see any use if you want to use one without it running out of fuel you need to dedicate an entire half of your belt to carrying it not only that but if you want to use them to take anything out of a machine you'll need an entirely separate inserter whose sole job it is to insert fuel into the other inserter and if using fuel instead of electricity was enough of a drawback they're somehow even slower than yellow inserters maximum capacity research it takes 15 burner inserters to match the throughput of one stack inserter and that's just the inserters should be pretty obvious why designing your entire base around burners is not only inefficient but extremely inconvenient as well there's a reason all the burner tech gets replaced by something better by the time you finish chemical science but inefficient and inconvenient might as well be the motto of this run before we get into it i'm just going to point out a few things about this challenge as you can probably guess i've modded the game so that everything takes fuel instead of electricity but unfortunately there are some things that can't be turned into burners mainly robo ports and the rocket silo so unfortunately there will be some electricity in this run and i hope it's not too unforgivable but i've made lamps and circuit combinators require no energy to function because they can't be turned into burners and running power poles just for lighting sounded annoying i've also borrowed the models for the burner assemblers and labs from the ai industry mod so if for some reason you want this horrible mod you can't have it because redistribution isn't allowed under that mod software license as for the challenge itself i'm not going to be using any solar power outside of personal equipment or laser turrets and that includes personal equipment also i won't be using logistics bots because requester chests would completely remove the logistical challenge altogether for similar reasons i've decided to eschew sushi belt designs for the most part i just don't think the bills would be very interesting since every single one of them would be the same sushi carousel the moment i researched circuit networks also i know i titled this video how hard is it to beat factorio but we're not just trying to beat it because burners are not it's pretty trivial to launch one rocket if that's your only goal what we're trying to do is make a fully automated base that uses nothing but burners that includes automating space science packs i'd like at least 60 signs per minute and that might sound like barely anything but with level 1 assemblers and no modules i'd be perfectly content with 60. also just to make sure there's absolutely no temptation i've actually completely removed all non-burner entities like stack inserters fast inserters electric furnaces and so on but anyway that's about everything so let's get to the run so unsurprisingly the start of the game is pretty much the same whether or not you're restricting yourself to burners just want to build a bunch of drills and feed them into furnaces until you get enough iron to make even more drills miners which i'm going to use to make this circle of coal miners here if you've never used this technique it's the best way to get coal in the early game and we are definitely going to need a lot of coal here's some quick copper you need way less copper than some people think at the start of the game especially if you're limiting yourself to burners because our drills don't take any electronic circuits you just need a lot of iron for your inserters and miners to get your production kicked off so mostly you just want to make a bunch of iron forges because this is default settings you can see i've already seen a little nest right there fortunately i got really lucky with this seed even though it was just completely random but there are trees everywhere i was initially afraid of burners and tons of pollution but i don't think i'll have a problem with that with this many trees around and at this point i think i have enough miners to start worrying about science so i'm gonna make a collab and start handcrafting some science if you're not crafting anything you might as well be making science and this is probably the only convenience i will ever experience in this run compared to normal factorio but at least i don't need to make any steam power before i can start researching things and with that science done we can start working on automation i'm just appreciating the animation and with automation done we can start automating things i'm also going to research gun turrets because i don't think i'm in too much danger but it doesn't hurt to be prepared there's the first burner assembler the first of many burner assemblers probably because with 0.5 crafting speed for the rest of the game i'm gonna need a lot of these it's also worth pointing out that with nothing but 10 red science we have indeed completed our end game assembler it will never get any better than this i'm just going to start researching logistics and i believe i'll use these first two assemblers to start making belts and that's some dirty built automation you can already see the direction this run is going with that inserter in the middle there but this sort of you know chest into machine is really the best way to start automating things early in the game where it's not even worth it to start putting things on belts yet you just manually move it around setting this stuff up is really easy and you'll be thinking yourself not even that much later you'll be thanking yourself in like 10 minutes or something and here's some real quick red science automation and i'm only going to set up one of these normally i'd do more but it's going to take so long to set up actual mining and a furnace stack that i really don't think time is going to be a limitation here and we'll quickly double the iron output so we can start worrying about green science some quick steel while we wait for green science to be researched and there it is uh oops so in my crusade against all things non-burner i neglected to remember that yellow inserters are actually pretty important for beating the game so i've added them back in the form of a non-functioning token the recipe is the exact same it's just an intermediate product instead of a placeable entity i also did the same thing to electric furnaces while i was at it for their use in purple science and quick automation of burner inserters because i am going to be using about a million of these things i'll also be using about a million mining drills too and after 40 minutes it's time to start thinking about a furnace deck except this time it's not only going to be going into the furnaces but it's going to be powering the entire base as well now most people don't need to worry about making their burner mining jewels fully automated but unfortunately we don't have that luxury here this design works i guess if you're mining coal won't work for anything else we're gonna need something a lot better for the iron and you can already see how much wasted space there is now you'd think a two by two burner mining drill wouldn't be as space and efficient as an electric mining drill but when you factor in the belt carrying fuel and the inserters need to put it in it's actually more like a 2x4 so not only is it half as fast as an electric mining drill it also ends up taking more space when you factor in everything they're going to be a significant part of the challenge just by how slow they are and before i start working on anything fancy like a furnace stack i definitely want to get some quick green science going and there's that uh non-functioning token again it works but it sucks it sucks but it works and just clearing a path of the main vein of the base and i can guarantee you that we will be using all of this coal so might as well fill out the entire field right now and congratulations if you noticed the problem before i did because you were apparently smarter than me and right after i deal with that embarrassment i realize another fundamental flaw with his design and that is that the burner inserter is so weak that it can't even pick up the coal off of the belt before it gets away on that turn these things are absolutely pathetic so having demonstrated how terrible that design was i immediately decided to start working on a better one it's pretty important i get this design right because it'll be the one i end up using for the rest of the game so after some tinkering i came up with this design it's a 5x5 square and of the 25 spaces 16 of them are occupied by mining drills so i'm going to give this an efficiency score of 64 it's also worth noting that using the same calculation an electric mining drill can reach an efficiency score of 75 without even trying this is absolutely the most efficient it could possibly be there is no wasted space anywhere so 64 is our upper limit here now it might be the most efficient design but some of you might have noticed the flaw already unless your resource patch is exactly 10 tiles wide it becomes much less efficient because the output isn't big enough to support any other underground belts now this would be perfect if you're using passive provider chests and logistic spots to take out your ore but as i've already said i'm not using those and requester chests are way off anyway so we need a better design so i adjusted the design to allow for tileable output belts but that suddenly turns our 5x5 into a 5x6 which makes our efficiency score go way down at 53 it's also complicated to build and without construction bots it's just needlessly annoying just to get an idea of a baseline i made the simplest design possible it's just a straight output build and a straight fuel belt it's 6x8 and of the 48 spaces only 24 of them are occupied by mining drills giving it the absolutely abysmal score of 50 but the fact that it's only three percent off from the complicated pinwheel shows how bad that design really was so we need something better uh the joys of the burner radar i just wanted to get some scouting going while i'm working on these mining designs i tested this design where the cold is a little sinusoid between the miners but at 5x7 and 16 spaces with miners it's even worse than the most basic design at forty five percent efficiency so i quickly scrapped it [Applause] and after much tinkering i made this design it's completely tileable and at 4x7 with 16 spaces of miners its efficiency score is 57 which isn't quite 64 but it works anywhere and it's much easier to build so i think this is the design i'll be using the rest of the game i genuinely don't think it's possible to get any more efficient than this so with the design finalized it's just a matter of implementing it and this is why you automate mining drills and inserters i am so glad that factorio just automatically makes belts underground for you and i hope you like splitters because there's no way to avoid using a million of them and that is the first fully covered ore patch i've had a vision of what the end game will look like and i hate it as you can see thanks to all these trees even though it's been over an hour i am in no danger of a biter attack so in a normal run after an hour and 30 minutes i probably would have finished chemical science by now but instead i'm building my first furnace stack so it's basically going to be the same way you build it in vanilla except that the inserters that take out the finished iron are going to need to be fueled as well and that means that there needs to be an extra two spaces to fit underground belts and that is a tileable furnace stick only a little bit more complicated because of the two extra belts of fuel so i decided to upgrade these to steel furnaces because surprisingly they're actually twice as fuel efficient as the stone furnaces unfortunately there's a cliff in the way but that is the first furnace stack and the first step towards full automation and now i just need to start making one for steel and copper and i'll be able to start making an actual base while i was waiting for more materials to make steel furnaces i decided i might as well take out these wider nests while i'm at it i know i'm finally getting some use out of those gun turrets i made at the start [Music] and with that taken care of it's back to furnace stacks and with steel done all we gotta do is move on to copper takes so many underground belts so after two hours and in the middle of building the copper stack i got interrupted by the first biter attack of the game it's not surprising after making so many mining drills but a single gun turret should take care of it [Music] and with the biters taken care of we've got copper online and it makes the video a lot better when you can actually see in the dark so i'm just going to use some of my amazing free energy lamps let's just say that they're solar powered you can see the supply of coal is slowing down because this design is actually so bad i'm eventually going to need to replace this thing and with the iron steel and copper lines completed all we need is stone to finish it off as far as science goes i'm mainly going to use this for military science i'm not planning on building purple science in this starter base but it's used in the automation of all sorts of things like oil refineries and railroads so definitely need it definitely don't need a full line of this even this is probably overkill whenever i'm making these starter bases i just like to merge the stone and the bricks onto the same belt it's just convenient because you never really need it in that volume anyway but there's all the supplies we need for the start of a base and you can't forget that coal is one of the most important resources too i'm just gonna take it right off of the furnace supply lines another real challenge of automation begins straight to assemblers and onto belts i'm going to start with green circuits because they go into science and i really want to stop crafting splitters in my inventory now as you can see i'm struggling with possible designs the issue is that again the inserters which take things out of machines need their own dedicated inserters to fuel them unsurprisingly this makes things a little complicated because ordinarily for green circuits you have one and a half copper wire assemblers feeding directly into a circuit assembler for an optimal three to two ratio but that's just impossible in any tileable expandable way with burner inserters so i decided to feed one wire assembler into a one circuit assembler for just for simplicity even if it is sub-optimal this is the main logistical challenge of the run and i absolutely hate this design already so i'll probably be updating it multiple times before i'm finished with the run and you may have noticed that i've already screwed this up because i neglected to remember that the assemblers themselves require fuel and fueling the inserter that takes off of the copper belt isn't enough so i'm gonna need to split the copper belt with coal as well if the burner mining setup wasn't enough to convince you of how annoying these things are to build around hopefully this will but ugly or not we've got green circuits now we actually got to do something with them now the most important thing i could think of to use these circuits for and the first application we'll be giving to them is to make these lamps and along with the lamps i just start automating everything i'll need for the rest of the run and here's the belt automation so i can finally stop handcrafting splitters and underground belts i was actually astonished though i was able to get this looking half as good as it did in anticipation of medium biters and with my pollution cloud getting a lot bigger i've decided to set up red ammo real fast it's better to do it sooner than later i'll also end up using it in military science so it's definitely a good investment and before the pollution cloud gets too big and while i'm waiting for some red ammo to be produced i decided it's the best time to start scouting for any nearby nests and after about eight minutes of driving this is what the map looks like you can see that coal patch i'm eyeing which i'll need to move into pretty soon because the starter field is already starting to run dry also there is a nice oil field right above it which i'm gonna be using for chemical science pretty soon and as the run approaches the three hour mark i'm only just now automating red science i think i'm starting to get the hang of using these burner buildings because this design is not actually all that bad and now for green science i think i need to take it back i am not getting the hang of these things they are still horrible uh those three inserters feeding coal and a conga line are probably my greatest creation ever and with the belts and fake inserters done i can just basically copy the exact same design i used for the red science it's just two inputs and one output now a crafting time of six seconds and a crafting speed of 0.5 these eight logistic science assemblers will make about 40 packs a minute which is more than enough for what we need right now and sure beats a single assembler plus some hand crafting but that's red and green science fully automated so now we just need to build a few labs we can finally finish the early game science this lab design really won't work when i need to add more flavors of science but it'll work for now and now we have the beginnings of what you might actually call a base it makes raw materials and converts that into science that's amazing let's just take some time to appreciate it and this is really the final nail in the coffin for burner inserters unlike electrical inserters when they run out of energy as long as you restore power to them they just start working again right away but burner inserters you need to refuel them manually there is no way around it as you can see our coal supply line is running pretty dry it's probably on account of our base actually producing something for once although we can get a little bit more life out of this cold patch with one simple trick so not only am i replacing with the new design that doesn't randomly run out of fuel because of a turn in the belt i'm also moving the miners over by two tiles because unlike miners that are actually good burner mining drills only mine the resources directly underneath them so when a resource patch runs out it's actually only half used another thing you don't need to do with electric mining drills is kickstart them with coal probably should have set up some turrets and now i will exact my revenge on the biters by clearing this coal and oil patch the old turret march never fails at least in the early game i'll also take these out because they're in my pollution cloud i guess i'm walking back home so while i was running i finished oil processing so i'm gonna start automating all those buildings as well and then work my way over to flamethrower turrets for proper defense also i didn't mention it before but it's worth talking about now because some people might have noticed it already but when i turned everything into a burner it was less that i turned them straight into burners and more that i made what i thought a burner variant of that building would look like basically it involved making them a lot worse i have the crafting speed of the chemical plants and i also took away all of the module slots for the plants refineries and pump checks i also adjusted the crafting recipes to reflect a burner variant as well which more or less just means that i swapped out electric circuits for stone bricks or something i hope this doesn't upset anyone but i'm just trying to channel the true spirit of the burner and i don't think the burners wanted me to have module slots or crafting speeds above one you know you're cooking some serious spaghetti when you gotta use that trick to separate the belts since our red and green science builds gave us some actual research now i've got more stuff to automate and that would certainly explain why we're out of steel i think it's about time i dealt with this coal problem and how are we gonna get the coal back to our base well with a train it's the first train of the run just a simple double-headed train on a single line track when we scale up to a proper base we're gonna end up using a lot more trains but i'll talk more about that later this train is pretty simple because it transports fuel already so we don't need to worry about the inserters ever running out of fuel and keep in mind that six of those inserters on either side of that cargo wagon is still slower than one stack inserter and there's the new coal mine now let us witness the blistering speed with which they will unload this train also we need more iron fortunately there is a big iron patch directly to the left of our old coal patch and with coal and iron dealt with we can actually move on to automating some more science you might be able to guess which early game science requires a steady supply of steel and coal and the one we're already automating one-third of if you guessed military science you'd be correct now without this we won't be able to capture any of the ore patches we'll need to reach the ultimate goal of 60 spm because our miners are so slow that we're going to need several patches just for the throughput we also want the flamethrower turrets that this will unlock as they're indispensable for defending mining outposts plus without personal laser equipment the tank will be the only way for us to take down the larger nests i've also devised this tileable way to feed three ingredients into the assemblers with only one half belt carrying coal it's pretty nifty and now with military science completed and chemical science on the horizon i need to build a lab design that can accept more than two types of science using splitters like this to mix belts is always pretty cool and this is why you always carry some fish on you and why i probably should have made some body armor by now [Music] so i thought this design was pretty okay where three belts sharing fuel and science come from the side and then three more would come from the top but then i remembered that there's more than six sciences in this game and i'll need to redesign this eventually still it's a long time before we need to worry about space science so this will be fine and with that we can start automating flamethrowers so we finished researching plastic so it's about time you started thinking about chemical science and that starts with setting up this oil field setting up oil fields is already enough of a pain in vanilla but throwing burner pump jacks and it becomes a massive headache the next time you need to set up some pump jacks i appreciate the fact that you don't need to do this at least the coal mines nearby so i don't need to worry about fuel but it's still annoying and now with the pump jacks fueled and pumping we just need to bring the oil to the base i'm just gonna use another double-headed single rail train system to bring the oil to the base because this is still our starter base and there's no sense in over building right now also this is our first usage of the burner pump now it's just a matter of routing it to the base we also intersect the coal line here so we need to put some signals on it but that's easy and this is a good spot for our early oil refining because it's right next to water fortunately refining oil here is pretty much the same as it is a normal factorio except for a little space to run fuel at the top i'm adding the lines for light oil and heavy oil already because i'm going to research advanced oil refining pretty quickly seeing as it's a prerequisite for construction bots which are really going to come in handy especially with all these complicated designs loaded with splitters undergrounds and inserters that i'm forced to use but anyway now we have petroleum and the first thing i'm going to use it for is cliff explosives this is also the first time you get to see my beautiful burner chem plant models i'm just gonna half automated and hand feed steel and grenades now with chemical science researched we just need to make it now before we can make chemical science we're gonna need more green circuits to feed the red circuits but i know that there must be a better circuit design than that original build i made to the left there and after some trial and error plus the combined burner knowledge i've accumulated from the past six hours i came up with this design now it's still technically inefficient because the circuit assemblers are only working 66 of the time but that's only when you compare to normal designs as far as i'm concerned this is peak burner efficiency we just need plastic now and it's pretty easy to build because it already takes coal as an ingredient i'll just make a few more because their crafting speed is half of what a chemical plant usually is now we've got everything we need to build advanced circuits basically i'm going to use the same design i used for the military science assemblers where it allows three inputs and one output hopefully by now you can see why i'm so desperate to get construction robots fortunately these red circuits put us one step closer to them and the next ingredient on our quest for chemical science is sulfur it's pretty easy to make because it's only inputs are fluids so that means the only time i need to worry about burner inserters is when i need to take it out which is very convenient for me as you can see i have completely given up hope on making this base look any good but that doesn't matter right now what matters is results and our result is two-thirds of chemical science now well that's left our engine units and with that we can finally get our end-game science seriously though once we get chemical science there's almost nothing useful left to unlock except for better construction bots and personal equipment but it's not like we're gonna be getting a better assembler or anything anyway as you can see i've managed to improve my design even more for three inputs and one output there's very little wasted space and i genuinely think i won't find a better way to do this and now that we've got engines sulfur and advanced circuits we have everything we need to make chemical science and because chemical science is another three input one output recipe we get to use the exact same design we used for these engine units hopefully this is the last time i'll need to build something like this without construction robots it took us long enough but that's chemical science up and running now all that's left to do is split it a few hundred times to route it into all of our labs just in case you were wondering this is far from optimal and as promised the first thing we're going to use it for is advanced oil processing which will give us access to the lubricant we need for the electric engines and flying robot frames since everything's set up for it we can immediately switch over to advanced oil processing i'm only gonna switch three of them because i'm not gonna set up cracking right now and i don't want to get deadlocked by an overflow of light oil since i still need the petroleum production for the chemical science i set up some sulfuric acid so i can start making the batteries for the flying robot frames i just finished researching since i'm not planning on making anything beyond chemical science here i'm only going to make one then we need more engines for the electric motors and some blue circuits for personal equipment now those will buffer while we're setting up everything else now we just route the lube down to the engines and we can finally get started on electric motors if you're wondering why the fluid input is kind of blue it's because level 1 assemblers aren't supposed to be able to craft with fluid so i had to mod it in and i was too lazy to change the model now robot frames are actually the only recipe you need to mass produce that requires four ingredients so my design won't really work here but i only need something like 50 of these so that's fine i'm not going to automate them because as much as i'd like to i won't be making a large robot network and pretty much all of the construction will be done off my personal equipment and with that done it's gonna be mostly about waiting for research to be finished and that's construction bots it only took us about eight hours unfortunately i need to research solar power to get access to the personal robo port after all that effort we finally have robots as far as i'm concerned we have officially entered the mid game from now on our main focus will be capturing resource patches and preparing to build our final base because of that i'm going to focus our research on military and set up some more weapons automation red ammo has served us well but we're going to be up against big biters soon and that means we need something stronger and that something would be rockets and cannon shells which both take explosives but this is all just preparation for the true challenge of this run and that is trains i've been dreading them since the start of this challenge and some of you may have already figured out why but now i've more or less solved the challenge of the assemblers but that's nothing compared to the difficulty of trains ever since i finished chemical science i've been racking my brains over it and i still have no idea how i'm going to get mass amounts of raw materials to our forages but for now i'm going to focus on gathering the materials first whatever i'm going to do with trains is probably going to involve circuit conditions so i'm just getting this out of the way with a tank and some shells it's time to clear out all the biters in our pollution cloud and capture some resource patches while we're at it i've also got some rocket fuel i made earlier and i wouldn't recommend doing anything in a tank without it because it's so much easier to get stuck and surrounded without the acceleration bonus that rocket fuel gives so after blowing up like 20 nests i park on this cliff and decide it's time i actually did something with the free sources i just cleared which unfortunately means trains i started testing some ideas but quickly decided it was too complicated for the save file so i downloaded the editor extensions mod and started playing around with them in there now this is going to get pretty technical so if you don't care just skip ahead in the video or something so the reason the trains here are so difficult to automate is because once again the burner insert is loading the train is easy enough because you can just set filters on the slots in the cargo wagon but it's the unloading that's the complicated part it all boils down to the fact that there's no easy way to refuel the inserters that unload the cargo trains there's really only two possibilities and that's inserting fuel into them from the side or putting fuel on a cargo wagon the easiest solution is to fuel them from the side but if we wanted to do that we could only fit two inserters on either side of each cargo wagon for a total of four and taking into consideration how slow they are that means we would need at least four and a half cargo wagons to saturate one red belt if i wanted four lanes of red belts i would need a train with at least 18 cargo wagons which might even be preferable to the alternative that alternative being 12 inserters 6 on each side and carrying fuel on the cargo wagon now there's two ways to go about that the first is to dedicate the first slot on the cargo wagon to some sort of fuel and that would work but it means sacrificing a slot that could be carrying ore and whenever a train comes in the insert inserters would need to unload all of the fuel first whether or not they actually need it since it takes about 1.7 seconds for a burner inserter to fully rotate and it would take one and a half cycles for fully upgraded inserters to clear a stack of coal or solid fuel it means roughly 2.2 seconds of wasted throughput every cycle or 66 items per belt that also compounds on the time it takes for an empty train to leave and a full train to arrive at the station because we won't be able to use buffer chests to avoid any downtime it had its downsides but in retrospect it's the design i should have gone with instead of option two option two being a dedicated train carrying fuel that only arrives at the station when the inserters need it but how do we know when the inserters are running out of fuel there's no circuit condition that tells you in an inserter is about to run out of fuel so the only thing we can do is time it now a burner inserter burns 92.2 kilowatts when in operation and a single unit of rocket fuel contains 100 megajoules meaning that it can fuel one burner inserter for about 18 minutes but i know from testing that even when they're moving non-stop a burner inserter only burns fuel about half the time meaning that a single unit of rocket fuel will last a burner inserter for about 35 minutes at max level capacity is possible for it to grab three units of rocket fuel at once which would last for over an hour and 30 minutes but this is the best case remember if they run out of fuel we would need to manually insert fuel again and that is the opposite of automated so more realistically we want to refill it about every hour or so so all we need to do is make a train that pulls into the station every hour lets the inserters grab a stack of fuel and then leaves it sounds simple right well it's really not but i'll explain how it works once i actually build it but this is enough to let you know what kind of design i'm going for and before this gets too boring let's get back to the challenge before we can set up a forage and an unloading station we need a mining outpost to actually supply it and before we can set up any mining outposts we'll need something to fuel them with i'm using our oil to make solid fuel and i'm going to put that on train so that we can deliver it to our outposts you always want to make solid fuel out of light oil but i'm also making some out of petroleum just make sure it won't get any dead locks but i'm using some circuit conditions to make sure that it only uses petroleum if it's almost full and there's no light oil available unfortunately i'm going to need to automate these two not for electricity but to carry circuit conditions solid fuel has a fuel value of 12 mega joules which is three times denser than coal and a burner mining drill consumes 150 kilowatts or 150 000 joules per second which means that the single block of solid fuel will last a burner mining drill for 80 seconds ergo one train with four cargo wagons can supply 640 000 seconds worth of mining in fuel and just for fun we can determine that that represents a total of 160 000 units of ore as a result of every full load of fuel approximately obviously we lose some of it to the inserters and the point of all that mostly useless information is just to say that supplying our mining outposts via trains is pretty effective i'm also going to be attaching a fluid wagon to our supply train to provide some fuel for flamethrower turrets despite being half as fast burner mining drills actually produce 20 more pollution than electric mining drills which means our mining outposts are going to be pretty stinky so defense is a must now we had some wading bays before the fuel station hook it all up to a standard t-junction and we've got our first foray into a proper rail network all it's missing is somewhere to go and the first thing ryan is that copper patch over there so we just build some rails to it and then we can start thinking about our outpost design and finally we get to use the blueprint for the mining design if you've never used snap to grid before i highly recommend learning how it's especially useful here because now all we need to do is drag across the ore field and the bots will do all the rest even with 12 inserters we still won't have enough throughput to fully saturate a red belt so i'm going to build our ore trans to have eight wagons and two locomotives which also has the advantage of letting me put the station at the end of the curve and help keep her outpost relatively compact part of the reason i didn't go for the 20 wagon long design is because the amount of infrastructure that it would require splitting all the builds with coal and balancing them across 20 wagons plus the extra defenses that a 24 unit long train station would need was enough to put me off of them because without logistics robots or filter inserters it's pretty much impossible to automate base repair and the less to defend the better i say mostly impossible because i can think of a way to do it it would just require some belt carousel that takes things off of a train and uses filter splitters and circuit controlled belts to only allow in the things that are needed and the rest gets put back on the wagon but god i don't want to do that maybe that's the kind of thing i would do if my goal was 600 spm instead of 60. anyway a flamethrower turret every underground pipeline will be enough to keep this place safe from pretty much everything now we just need to pump some oil off the train add in some walls and we've got a fully defended mining outpost the only thing left to do is throw in some robo ports for repairs i decided to put steam on the supply train and power the robo ports that way i know i've got electric poles all along the rails but as far as i'm concerned those things aren't real and only exist for carrying circuit conditions this is how i would have done it if not for my train design decision as i said unfortunately i'll need to manually stock these with repair packs and things like replacement underground pipes because if you've never defended an outpost this way while it is extremely effective you're forced to listen to the alert sound of an underground pipe exploding about every five minutes because of it but now we've got a finalized outpost design that we're free to copy and paste anyway we see fit now we just need to copy and paste this a few times hook it up to our train network and we can finally start our base it sounds easy but you can see the sheer number of buildings that each one of these outposts take takes 330 burner inserters alone which are tremendously expensive to produce but with nothing but solar powered armor and the best bots you can get from chemical science it costs more time than anything fortunately for you though i've condensed about three hours of building outposts done into about a minute this nest wasn't on the map so i just walked right into it so and after all that we've got copper iron coal stone and oil which is all you need to make everything in this game with that we're finally ready to move on to making our smelting hub we're definitely going to need more copper and iron mines with how slow these miners are but we've got enough to get started this is a burner run so before we can build any part of our new base we need to make the most important part first and that's the fuel processing we want to set up oil refining so we can get started on making even more solid fuel to fuel all the assemblers and buildings and stuff like that you've already got the old base making fuel for the mining outposts but we're definitely going to need more we're also going to want the rocket fuel for our trains even though rocket fuel has a much higher fuel value than solid fuel at 100 megajoules takes 130 megajoules worth of fuel to create so we're only going to use it for the trains and the rocket silo this base is going to be pretty hungry for oil i considered using coal liquefaction but without productivity modules it's extremely inefficient and probably not worth the effort of all the extra cracking that it would require especially with half speed chem plants it takes a single assembler a whole minute to make one unit of rocket fuel so we're gonna need at least a hundred assemblers to make enough to launch a rocket every 15 minutes fortunately it's probably the easiest thing to make in this challenge saying as the input and the output are both fuel finally we can start working on the train stations as you can see i'm just pasting a blueprint that i made in sandbox mode earlier the first thing you might notice is that it's extremely ugly and that's because all four of the trains need to be able to leave the stations at the same time in order to make way for the fuel trains as quickly as possible and then the fuel trains need to do the same to let the ore trains back in if they're not doing this quickly then there is no point in this design at all i can't help but feel like there's an easier more elegant solution to this but i want to make some kind of progress without getting too bogged down in the theoreticals right now halfway through building this i realized it wasn't going to be worth the effort but i'm committed now basically it's all controlled by this cluster of combinators up here the fuel trains wait at the stations until they've received the green signal and the green signal gets sent whenever the clock signal t reaches our constant c factorial updates 60 times a second so if for example we want to send the green signal every 10 seconds we want to make our constant 600 then after reaching the constant the clock signal resets to 0 and starts counting over again at the same time as the green signal it also sends a red signal into an sr latch which constantly outputs the red signal and starts another clock for 2 seconds then after 2 seconds it resets the memory cell basically it just means that the red signal gets sent for 2 seconds instead of 1 60th of a second like the green signal does the reason we need the red signal the last two seconds is because there's no way to send a train to a specific station on a signal just goes down the list and chooses whatever is next but if you disable a train stop it will skip over that and go on to the next so because i want my trains to leave the station then immediately come back i need to have an extra station that's only enabled when the red signal is active so when the red signal boots them out of the station they'll go to that before the mines then if we disable the mines temporarily the trains will skip over them entirely and immediately head back to the unloading station the two seconds give the trains enough time to reach the temporary station and start a course to the unloading stations before the mines re-enable does it work yes was it worth the effort no is it more efficient than any of the alternatives probably not but i did it now it's time to work on the forges since it's not like we researched anything better between now and then we're going to be using the exact same furnace stack setup that we used in our starter base in vanilla factorio with beacons and modules you can output an entire blue belt of plates with as few as 13 electric furnaces but here we're using 48 furnaces for each red belt so this is going to be pretty big i ran out of furnaces and belts in the middle of building the forages so i decided to go ahead and set up some concrete production while i waited for more supplies to appear since we'll be needing it to build the rocket silo later i also set up some refined concrete while i was at it it's not like i'm going to be paving my entire base but it's nice to have for roads and such though i have a feeling that the time i save from the movement speed bonus won't ever exceed the amount of time it took to set this thing up so after all the supplies were done i finished the forges and started loading them with fuel it took almost an hour for everything to be fueled and it didn't help that the inserters were doing this the whole time and because they're so weak i had to manually fuel half of them after they died failing to pick up any fuel but after all that we'd finally got our smelting up and running with this we can make a little under 120 iron plates per second but if you happen to calculate the resource requirements for 60spm without any modules you would realize that we need a constant rate of around 170 iron plates per second instead so we're going to need a little more than just this later the only thing left to do as far as the raw resources are concerned is to set the coal trend so we can make plastic but because they already carry fuel they don't require any special treatment like the other trains so from here on it's all assembling since i just finished with the coal and was already in the neighborhood the first thing i decided to set up was the plastic i used 60 chemical plants which is probably 20 more than i need but it doesn't hurt to overbuild also keep in mind that these burner chemical plants are half speed compared to their usual counterparts i also set up sulfur while i was here the 30 chemical plants i used here complete overkill i needed like four tops but i like the symmetry of the plastic plants and since i made sulfur i might as well make sulfuric acid as most of you probably know the most important part of the base is the circuit production they're used in pretty much everything and if you calculate the resources required to continuously research mining productivity about 50 of all your iron plates and 60 of your copper goes into making green circuits i made 88 of these the throughput is a little hard to calculate because even in ideal circumstances they're only going to be working about 66 percent of the time and in practice they'll perform even worse than that because of the slowness of the burner inserters we're gonna need around two and a half red belts filled with green circuits if you want to reach 60 spm which would pretty much take all four of our copper lines to produce and even with 88 assemblers this whole thing will probably only fill one belt so i'm planning on adding another set of trains and forges dedicated entirely to green circuits later which would solve all of our throughput issues this is just a kickstart the base the second most important part of any base is probably the advanced circuits so we're making them next though they're probably a little less important here than usual since we're not so concerned with mass producing modules or anything in general it's a one to six ratio of copper wire assemblers to red circuit assemblers but i'm going with a one to five here which leaves me with 20 assemblers per lane and 160 total in general red circus will use about 15 of your copper which means roughly three-fourths of all your copper ends up in circuits somehow while i was working on the red circuits i thought of a way to improve and further complicate this gordian knot that i've created out of train stations here it would allow me to expand them and add on more stations for things like more iron and copper for the green circuits but like the actual gordian knot the best solution would probably be to simply cut it off and go with one of the easier solutions but again i'm committed basically it involves making all the trains double-headed so they can go in and out of a dead-end track that they will only enter when it's time for refueling and then reverse back into the forges it involves some temporary stops another memory cell on clock to make sure that the trains leave the holding cell on time and a ton of complicated stuff that i'm not even gonna bother explaining and yes making all the trains double headed will slow them down i've pretty much given up on this being the optimal solution if you want an idea of how convoluted this thing is the only thing that this combinator does is output the exact same thing as its input it's apparently pointless but the whole thing will break if it isn't there and if you can figure out why your talents are probably being squandered watching this video but all that really matters is that it works anyway engine units are next they're pretty similar to the red circuits with these couple assemblers that in front except the ratio is two one to twenty with the two and the one being pipes and gears respectively i didn't need to make nearly this many assemblers but whatever it never hurts to overbuild the routing i need to do to fill all these lines with fuel is pretty funny to look at now it's time for blue circuits otherwise known as processing units they're pretty easy here since the design we've been using for pretty much everything allows us to put the pipes right in the middle blue circuits always seem to trip people up mostly because it pretty much doubles the circuit demand but the ratio is actually pretty simple including the greens that you need to make the red circuits you need six green circuit assemblers and six red circuit assemblers to feed five blue circuit assemblers so as long as you remember that you shouldn't have too many problems with them assuming you've got enough materials and for the final ingredient we hook up the iron to our sulfuric acid plants throughout the pipes and we're ready to turn it on and watch batteries are up next and i don't really have much to say about them so here they are so the last major intermediate product is low density structures and what i mean by major is that they're the last thing that goes into more than one kind of science since it's used in both yellow and space science whereas things like rails and red ammo are only used in one type of science remember when i said 75 percent of all your copper goes into circuits well of the last 25 23.5 goes into low density structures where the last 1.5 percent goes is an exercise left to the viewer again this is for continuous mining productivity research without modules then this is what happens when you accidentally route the materials in before any fuel the shot came out a little scuffed because of it finally we can start working on the science we're just gonna copy our lds build here since it's pretty much a universal design for three input one output things i'm making blue science first also known as chemical science since we've already got all the ingredients we need on belts i'm using enough assemblers to support 100 spm just because i don't want to limit myself and for my rough estimates i'll actually end up producing a fair bit more than 60 spm when this is all done and i remembered to put the fuel in first this time and while i was recording this happened i've mostly been editing it out because it's not very interesting but this whole time i've been slowly building up a perimeter because of attacks like this it's a little awkward without a true logistics network to automate repairs but it's enough anyway back to science i'm making military science next because it needs coal for the grenades and the coals right there the design for this was a little awkward because it was the first time in probably 12 hours i couldn't just copy and paste an old design after a lot of thinking i came up with this design i was pretty proud of it until i realized that it didn't work and i'm an idiot so then i came up with this design where one of the ingredients is carried in between the two assemblers and the inserters hand off to one another to clear the gap leaving space for the output unfortunately it leaves a two wide gap instead of one wide like all the other builds with the ammo done now i just need to make the rest of it and the next ingredient is walls you only need one wall assembler for every 10 science assemblers but keep in mind that these ratios don't take into consideration the travel time on belts the last ingredient is grenades and since they have a similar crafting time to the science itself 8 seconds versus 10 i pretty much always insert them directly into the science assembler fortunately i can just copy my ammo design and repurpose it for military science instead and as soon as i'm done changing the recipes that's military science done and two of the seven sciences down now it's on to production science it's significantly harder than blue or black science just because the variety and volume of materials that it requires but it's not that difficult the perfect ratio is 42 science assemblers to 30 module assemblers but it's much easier to just say that for every four you need three for the electric furnaces you just need one for every four science assemblers basically one third as many module assemblers the furnaces take five advanced circuits just like the modules so if your red circuit production is insufficient this is usually the first place that you'd find out but i used math so i should be good and just in case you didn't believe me when i told you that this was the exact same recipe with both of those done the last ingredient is rails 30 of them because of the volume similar to the grenades i like to insert the rails directly into the science assembler but this is quite the challenge with nothing but burner inserters i came up with this design that feeds the iron sticks onto the belt like so but feeding the rails from there into the science assemblers is going to be a little more complicated i thought i could use the same design as the military science but i didn't leave enough of a gap and i didn't really want to tear up the whole thing so after a ton of trial and error i found a way to improve the design by using undergrounds to split the fuel off of the left belt and pulling it through the gap in the middle from inserter to inserter now that i'm looking at this in hindsight i have no idea why i thought i needed to weave the belts down the middle especially considering it's going to need blue undergrounds to work properly but apart from that it's great anyway purple science has done at least two of them since i'm still convinced i need blue belts for the design to work on the yellow science we've already got everything we need on belts except for flying robot frames so we start with the electric motors first for yellow science you only need one motor assembler for every two science assemblers finally we turn on the lube i have no idea why i routed steel instead of engines into the electric motors but it's an easy enough fix flying robot frames are a little more difficult since i take four inputs but for that i can basically just combine my design for green circuits and red circuits using one side input three and the other to input one output one by now i think it's safe to say i've mastered the art of burner inserters when it comes to flying robot frames you want as many assemblers as you have science assemblers since the crafting time is almost the same 20 seconds versus the 21 it takes for science and now that the frames are done it's just a matter of plugging them all into the science red science is super easy basically it's the exact same design that i use for the green circuits except with gears instead of copper cable i didn't need to give each one its own dedicated assembler but it saves me the effort of putting it on a belt i don't know why i forgot to put the extra inserters in the middle before copying it but whatever it's an easy enough fix and that's red science done now the only things left are green in space science but there's no sense building space on it before we've even researched the rocket silo so green's up next it's a little bit more complicated than red but you don't need many belt and inserter assemblers to support a lot of science assemblers one for every 12 to be precise so i've got enough to support 48 assemblers just so i don't need to worry about it and with that all six sciences are done after something like 30 hours we can finally get past chemical science just look at how beautiful they are remember when i said i was mostly going to avoid sushi belts well this is what i meant by mostly i'm going to use it to carry the science to the labs if you've never heard the term before it basically just means when you shove a bunch of random stuff out of the same belt there's multiple ways to do it but the best in my opinion is to use a memory cell to keep track of everything that enters the belt disables the belt when there's enough of that item then lets the items be subtracted from the memory cell whenever they're consumed if you don't know what a memory cell is in factorio it's just a decider combinator whose output feeds into its input and outputs everything it receives to toe when an item is consumed we just wire our inserters set them to read hand contents and pass that signal into an arithmetic combinator that multiplies everything by negative one then feeds that signal into the memory cell to effectively subtract it from the total basically the end result of all that is this i think it looks pretty neat but you can see why i limited this design to the science and after using nothing but modular armor for 20 hours finally i can start working on power armor since power armor takes modules i gotta make some so i made this temporary setup and just filled the inserters with rocket fuel after like 30 minutes i've finally got enough modules for power armor and i'm pretty sure everyone's done this at least once with this my life just got so much easier it's not obvious since i've been editing it all out but i cannot overstate how annoying building everything up until now with just solar powered bots was with these bots building outposts is about 80 percent less painful and since i'll need way more than just a few ore patches if i want any chance of sustaining 60 spm i might as well start outposting while i'm waiting for satellite research to finish plus some errands like routing more fuel to the outpost fuel trains expanding the wall and clearing biters to make more room for more outposts this is why it's important to make a good blueprint i'm probably going to need something like four or five patches of both iron and copper to keep the forges working all the time since each one of these outposts has around 150 to 200 mining drills by my rough calculations i'll need like 800 joules just for copper to meet demand this is also why mining productivity is so useful since each level effectively speeds up all my drills by 10 as you can see back at the base even without space science our belts are still pretty sparse because we have so few minds up anyway the last intermediate product left is rocket control units which unsurprisingly we need to build a rocket they take speed modules and processing units which basically means that their only ingredients are all three kinds of circuits you need one module assembler for every two rcu assemblers so i made roughly 60 assemblies for the modules which is enough to support 120 rcus with these rcus and the lds and rocket fuel that we already made we've got everything we need to build the rocket it takes 1 000 of each to finish the rocket but if you're using prod 3s like you should be it only takes 720 of everything i never said that this was a no module run unfortunately the rocket silo takes power but fortunately we've got fuel pretty much everywhere so making it isn't a problem i just decided to show the leftover speed modules into some beacons around the rocket i don't think i even need them to reach 60 spm because the rocket only needs to launch like every 10 minutes but having beacons around the silo makes it feel more legit the satellite is a little tricky since it has six inputs but since i only need one assembler it shouldn't be a problem four solar panel assemblers and four accumulator assemblers is enough to make 12 of each a minute and since it takes a hundred to build a satellite and we're aiming to launch a rocket every 10 to 15 minutes this is perfect we also need radars but one assembler is more than enough and with everything in place all that's left is just plug it all in this whole thing is really ugly and really convoluted but it works now we just build an output for the space science and hook it up to our sushi belt for the purposes of this video i probably shouldn't have been fiddling with circuit conditions while our first rocket was readying but it's important always remember to only insert your satellite when you actually need the science or else it'll all get wasted and finally after so long it's time to launch our first rocket and that's the victory plus the three achievements to prove that i did it without solar logistics or laser turrets but that's not the end it may have taken 45 hours to get this far but there's a little bit left to do here comes our first batch of space science all that's really left to do is to expand our train network and make the dedicated circuit stop so we can actually reach 60 spm consistently i built some more outposts for iron copper and oil since we're preparing to nearly double our demand thanks for the modifications i made to the trends earlier it's pretty easy to retrofit another two stations and almost everything from here on is going to be just placing blueprints i'm just going to take this whole thing and slam down two i've got four lanes of iron and four lanes of copper ideally i'd want six lanes of copper but it's gonna make enough circuits either way i said it was copy and paste but with burners it's never that easy routing fuel under these belts remains extremely fiddly we can expect this to produce about 75 circuits per second on average but peak around 80 per second which is about two and a half red belts and with everything done now we just need to route it into the base to ensure that the base uses the dedicated circuits first we hook them into splitters with priority input into the red circuits then route all the excess back onto the main bus but with that done there should be no reason that we can't sustain 60 spm we're basically done with our goal there's a lot of things i could have done better in hindsight especially the trains but i bet you those other designs i mentioned wouldn't look nearly as cool as this anyway that's the video when i started out determined to make a base using nothing but burners i thought it was going to be a lot more painful than this don't get me wrong it was extremely painful but it provided a surprisingly deep logistical challenge after a couple iterations i was able to find a design that was pretty much universal and pretty aesthetically pleasing too this run wouldn't have looked half as good without the models from aai industry i was a little surprised that one belt of solid fuel was enough to power everything but i guess it's not that surprising since 30 units of solid fuel is enough to produce 360 megawatts of electricity when put through boilers without modules the energy cost should remain fairly low all in all i'd say this run was more time consuming than it was difficult this run ended up being over 50 hours and while there was a fair bit of thinkage required the majority of my time was spent blowing up biter nests and waiting for my robots to recharge the fact that i was able to compress 50 hours of footage into a little over an hour of video should tell you all you need to know about that it would have been much easier if it weren't for the biters towards the end when the behemoth showed up without the ability to create uranium ammunition i had to pretty much give up exterminating biter nests then i had to listen to the alert sound pinging off every time some pipe exploded once a minute but if you're doing a challenge run it's got to be default settings anyway it was actually a lot more fun than i was expecting and while this base isn't really expandable i could see making a fully expandable megabase using nothing but burners though i'd probably want to do it with biters turned off as you can see at the end of it all we're actually producing and consuming around 100 spm i have a feeling that it'd probably settle around 90 or 95 if i left it running for a couple hours but it's already much higher than the 60 i was aiming for and that's how hard it is to beat factorio using nothing but burners i'm glad i could answer a question that nobody asked and thanks for watching

Channel: DoshDoshington

Views: 797,384

Keywords: Factorio, Challenge

Id: jFC7ez1bgnQ

Length: 72min 20sec (4340 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 12 2022