I'm getting the feeling my fans actually
hate me. Of course they chose Seablock. Let me give you the backstory. Many years ago,
some psychopath was playing the Angels Mods when they realized that it was theoretically
possible to beat the entire mod with only water as your resource. And instead
of locking that idea far, far away, they decided to listen to their intrusive
thoughts, and thus Seablock was born. Seablock's namesake is the classic Minecraft
mod skyblock, the first principle difference being we're in the ocean instead of the sky,
and the second being that this isn't Minecraft. Angel's and Bob's are already
very complex mods on their own, but asking us to do it all from nothing
but water and limited space is the exact kind of CBT you come to this channel to see. So
come with me on my journey to expand this tiny rock into a massive factory capable of producing
millions of science from nothing but silty water, and I do mean millions. Just launching
a rocket isn't enough for this mod, we need to research a spaceship complete with
FTL capabilities if we want to get off this rock. We're given a handful of materials to start
with, but this is about the only mercy this mod is prepared to give you. Our first question is
how in the heck do we turn water into iron plates. And we get slag by pumping water into an
electrolysis machine and zapping out the hydrogen and oxygen until we're left with nothing but
slag. That gets, crushed, mineralized, and finally crystallized into a *chance* at getting a useful
ore that can be turned into either iron or copper. Welcome to modded Factorio, and
we don't even have inserters yet. Though, to get inserters, I just need to grow some brown algae in these algae farms I
unlocked by crushing some stiratite. And with that, I've managed to make
a handful of copper plates. Hurray. I'm starting to get the feeling that the original
mod wasn't intended to be played like this. Well, with inserters, I can
actually start "automating" things. The first step is actually getting some slag
onto belts, which isn't terribly straight forward seeing we need to deal with all the useless oxygen
and hydrogen it creates first, but two flare stacks is enough to deal with it all. The main
problem is our rapidly dwindling starting supplies as a single underground pipe represents several
minutes of worth of resources at this point. We feed that into the crushers, then
into a liquefier, and finally we've got automated ore production.
If you can call two iron plates a minute automated. The main thing
this gives us is access to copper, which we didn't get from the starting resources
and allows us to start making some science. The first thing I want is basic logistics,
because it gives me access to splitters, which are very useful here because these ore
crushers spit out crushed stone as a byproduct, as if this production chain wasn't complicated
enough already. And the only way to get rid of it automatically at this point are filtered
splitters. The good news is we can feed that crushed stone back into the liquefier
and get even more mineralized water. You might have noticed the wind turbines
we got with our starting materials. Each one puts out an absolutely pathetic 15 kW each,
which means that running a single electrolizyer takes over twenty of them, but it's the
only source of power we've got. At least their output is constant. Guess there's
a good sea breeze around here, but we've only got 120 of these things, and no way of
making any more for the foreseeable future. Power is going to be a major limitation. With green algae we can make cellulose, which
can then can combine with algenic acid from brown algae to make paper, and eventually the boards
we need to make basic circuits. Cellulose is the only burnable thing we can make right now,
and if you were wondering where I was getting the fuel for the furnaces, there's an infinite
recipe to forage for a small amount of cellulose. At this point I've already used up
over half of my starting landfill, which is a bit concerning if I ever hope
to make more than two plates a minute, so I start researching something
that should help with that. These washing plants take in muddy water
sucked up from the sea floor and make it progressively cleaner before finally spitting
out saline water at the end after five steps. You can also get clay, sand, and lime from
it, which I regret building because it's not useful until way later and I wasted a ton of
my starting supplies building them. The saline water is useless right now, but we just get
rid of it in this clarifier. Funnily enough, what we're really after is the mud byproduct,
which can be used to make more landfill. The first step also spits out
trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which seems useless for now, so we
just vent it into the atmosphere. But all those washing plants take electricity,
and now we're officially out of wind turbines. Power is going to be our biggest
issue now. I can make steam boilers, but as I said, our only source of combustible
materials is cellulose from green algae, and that only has a measly fuel
value of 1 MJ. Doing some quick math, this one algae farm can create about 0.3 cellulose
per second, which roughly translates to 300 kW, and considering the building itself takes about
100 kW, I'm sure you can see the problem here. Not to mention all the useless brown algae it
spits out that we'd need to just shove in a chest. Oh yeah, and the assembling machine that
makes the cellulose is another 100 kW, but being positive 100 kW is still like, 6 turbines, so it's
something. Point being, we need something better. While i think about that, I'm slowly hand
crafting science to get through all this early research. There's way too many of these
to talk about so just roll with me here. This is also a good time to mention I got a speed
boost mod so I don't need to wait around as much. Usually I insist on everything being
real time, but when it takes a minute to make a single iron plate and with nothing to do in
the meantime, I'll make an exception. This will make the playtime counter a bit inaccurate,
however, since it runs off of game time. On our quest for a solution to the power problem.
We've researched some more cellulose processing, where we can combine fibers into chunks,
chunks into blocks, and then burn the blocks to make charcoal. Each step increases the fuel
value by 1.33, 1.125, and 1.11, respectively, meaning 12 MJ of cellulose turns into 20 MJ of
charcoal. We've also unlocked a better green algae recipe. Downside is, it takes mineral
water and carbon dioxide instead of water, but it doesn't output any brown algae and it takes
half as long to make twice as much green algae. The process in the same as making
mineral water for the crystallizer, plus turning charcoal into CO2 gas. This means
we're getting 1.2 MJ worth of cellulose per second from this algae farm, also known as 1.2
MWs, and when we factor in the whole processes, we're up to about 2 MJ per second. But considering
all the machines necessary, the operating cost is probably somewhere around 600 or 700 kW plus
the charcoal lost to make carbon dioxide, so we're looking at about 1.2 MW of excess
power. Which still isn't much considering all the effort it took to build, but that's
equivalent 80 turbines. After all that, we can support a whopping four extra electrolyzers.
Great...! Welcome to the seablock experience. Now, building all that has completely wiped out
the last of my starting resources and I'm really starting to feel just how horrible my supplies
are. Even with the speed boost I still need to stand around for several minutes just to get the
iron to make a single building. There's got to be a better way, and there is, but wouldn't
you know it, it's even *more* complicated. First off I'd like to explain these
valves real quick. They're pretty simple, this overflow valve will only allow flow
if the volume in the pipe is over 80%, and there's a top-up valve that only
allows flow if the *other* side is below 80%. They're handy for fluid control and I'll
be using these a good bit, so it's important. Anyway, it all starts with this unassuming
hydrogen sulfide byproduct we get from the mud washing. If we combine it with oxygen
gas in a chemical plant, we'll create sulfur, and if we combine it with oxygen again, we'll
create sulfur dioxide. I hope you're paying attention because this is the single most
important production chain in this mod. For the next step we'll need purified water,
which we can make by recombining the oxygen and hydrogen with another chemical plant now that
we've zapped all the slag out of it, and thanks to the overflow valves, only the excess gets vented
into the atmosphere so we'll always have enough. Finally, that combines with the sulfur dioxide
to create the almighty sulfuric acid. We love sulfuric acid. Why...? Well because it gets us
slag slurry. Instead of crushing the slag and liquefying it into crappy mineral water, we
can combine it with the acid to make slurry. We're almost there, but slag slurry on its
own isn't useful, we need to clean it up in a filtration plant first. It uses up a filter to
turn the slurry into mineral sludge, but it spits out the filter frame and we can recharge it by
adding some of the charcoal we've already made. This is a good time to mention that
this mod comes with bob's inserters, which are highly adjustable and allow
for some crazy compact builds. The mineral sludge goes into a crystalizer
and finally we can turn it into ores. None of the probabilistic nonsense where
we get a chance for two two different ore, here we get the exact ore we want, and with over
twice as much from the same amount of slag too. It's also time to mention this behemoth. The ore
sorting facility. Instead of smelting the Saphrite directly, we can sort out the iron ore and a
smaller amount of copper ore, as well as two pieces of slag which we can route back in to get
even more mineral sludge. It feels weird getting excited about a slag byproduct, but like I said,
welcome to Seablock. It's more efficient, yes, but it's still a tiny, *tiny* trickle of resources. If
this was a normal run I probably could've launched a rocket by now, but nope, here I am getting
excited over an extra ten plates a minute. But there's the loop to make mineral sludge, and
how we're going to be getting pretty much all our ores from now on. If you're already overwhelmed
by this mod, this is just the beginning. It's not even over yet, because if you were
paying attention, we've got this sulfuric waste water to deal with from the filtration
plant. But don't let the name mislead you, it's actually a sacred substance. This whole
thing costs sulfur to run, and our only source of sulfur is washing mud to get like two units of
hydrogen sulfide, which is totally unsustainable. However, we can recover that sulfur by putting it
through a water treatment plant. Not only that, we actually *gain* sulfur by doing this.
For every three sulfur that's put in, we get about 3.2 sulfur out by the time we wash
the waste. I guess you could say we're picking up some trace sulfides from the slag, but whatever
the case, we'll never run out of sulfuric acid. The plant also spits out some purified water and
mineralized water, which I'm more than happy to route back into the filtration plant and the
green algae respectively. This is where those top up valves come in handy, because I can make
it so there's always room for the output from the hydro plant and so that its water will get
consumed first so the system doesn't get clogged. And you'll never believe what
you're about to see next. That's right. Actual automated red science. It
might not look like much, and it isn't, but considering where we started, it's quite
an accomplishment for six hours of effort. To put an actual number on it, It takes
four seconds to make one slag. I've got three electrolyzers so that's .75 slag a
second. It takes 2.5 slag to make an ore, but for every four ores we get two slag back, so
our effective slag per second is actually .9. And after some more boring math, we learn that
that translates into a blistering .135 iron plates per second, and .0675 copper plates
per second. So yeah, you get the picture. Point being, we need to scale up. And
that starts with some more electrolyzers, don't forget that I still need to hand craft
all of these and getting the iron for a single electrolyzer takes about three minutes.
These copper underground pipes are almost as expensive as the electrolyzers themselves.
I'm going to make this set up to be a bit more expandable than the other one, but since
power is going to be a persistent problem, I'm not going to go overboard just yet. At this
stage of the game, it's best to focus on getting the early research out of the way and pray that
something we research will get us out of this I disconnected the landfill maker so I
could use it on electrolyzers instead, but it's time to bite the
bullet and make some more power. Now it's time to introduce the blast
furnace. Making iron plates in a regular furnace is lossy because it's four ores to only
three plates, but with this more advanced process, we can get the full four plates by turning them
into ingots, melting the ingots into molten iron, and then casting the molten iron into plates. An
unexpected bonus is that because the blast furnace is so fast, it actually takes much less fuel than
the regular furnace. I'm sure in a literal day I'll have the luxury of automating fuel insertion,
but for now we're hand feeding all the way. I've also researched steel, which is
made from iron ingots plus some oxygen, which we have in abundance. A steel
ingot takes four iron ingots to make, which is important because any steel production
is going to need to leech off our already sluggish iron production. The advantage is, along
with steel we've unlocked a few more recipes, and we can actually make more wind turbines
now. The fact that I don't need to make a five step process just to get power out of
them is initially appealing, but after making a handful it dawns on me just how expensive
they are to make relative to their usefulness. Running off five electrolyzers and the
improved furnaces, this thing puts out .25 plates per second. One single turbine takes
22.5 plates, so using 100% of my resources it's 90 seconds per turbine, And seeing as
it takes 20 to support one electrolyzer, you're looking at over 30 minutes just
to add one electrolyzer to the network. Yeah, that's a bit excessive,
even using the speed mod, so eventually I wizen up and return
to the algae farm idea. To be fair, each electrolyzer I add would speed up
the process, but it's just not worth it. So this is still a lot of effort to get out little
more than a MW of usable power, but I'll take it. I tried to make it compact and easy to duplicate.
I also added more steam engines than necessary, because when power demand is low, the chest
will actually stockpile charcoal almost like a battery and the extra engines will be
able to deal with any spikes in demand. More power means more electrolyzers, means more resources, means less waiting. Also
we can turn our landfill machines back on. With 14 zappers I've got a *reasonable* supply
of materials now, at least considering what we started with, and despite our single lab
setup, after several hours we're running out of useful research that we can get with just
red science. That means tackling green science. Up until now I've been happy to make nothing up
saphrite and extract iron and copper from it, but to get green science we're going
to need to broaden our horizons are start crystalizing different ores,
specifically bobmonium and rubyte. It's crushed in the same way as saphrite,
and the only difference is that when we put it through the sorter, we get out tin and
silicon ore instead. We have pretty much no use for silicon right now, but the
game's going to give it to us anyway, so all we can really do is stash the glass it
makes into a chest. The tin plates are made the same way as copper or iron and before too long
we've got the whole process up and running. Now, everything is made from the same mineral sludge,
which means making tin costs my iron production. And that hurts a bit because all the buildings
are like 90% iron, but I can spare a little bit. I decide to explore a bit and check
out this tree down here. There's some things called desert gardens which gives me
plants that I have no idea what they're for, but the tree is nice because it gives me
100 wood, which I can use to make chests, because this is a run where losing the eight iron
plates to make a chest is an excruciating loss. And now it's time to undo everything because I
didn't leave enough room to make the rubyte as well. Anyway, eventually I rebuild both
of them. Rubyte sorting gets us lead and nickel ore. The nickel ore is even more useless
silicon, so it gets its own special box too. Lead is also much less useful than tin, which
can make underground belts longer than two tiles, but it does let us make solder by combining
lead and ti n ingots in an induction furnace. So now theoretically I've got everything
I'll need to make green science. I just need to make it. It's crafted through this
complex chain which isn't worth explaining and so I'll be putting it all on the screen for
your viewing pleasure. It's a lot of steps, but it's not actually all that complicated. What
is complicated is the spaghetti abomination I created to make it. Seriously, the modpack giving
me the adjustable inserters mod was a mistake. Because now I'll be uncontrollably compelled
to make everything as compact as possible. Sorry if it feels like I'm speeding through this, but this mod is incredibly long and complex
and we'll be here forever if I try to cover every single crafting chain in detail.
But the end result of all this is slow, but fully automated green science. Hopefully
there's something in there that can save me from this endless hell of hand crafting, waiting
next to boxes, and never ending power problems. For any mod like this, something like FNEI or
Recipe Book that lets you browse recipes and items is completely necessary if you value your
sanity. At this point, I really want to scale up, but power is still holding me back, and so I'm
browsing through to find anything that might solve that. I stumble across oil processing,
which requires blue algae grown from sulfuric waste water, and then a fluid called fuel oil
catches my attention. It has a fuel value of 1 MJ per unit of fluid and seems *much* more efficient
than our algae to charcoal chain. One snag though. We need our waste water to recover the sulfur
necessary to make the acid that makes this whole factory to function. There's some excess, but only
about 6% of the waste water produced could be used before we're negative on sulfur, and that doesn't
sound like it's enough to run a whole base. But looking further, it seems other
things can produce fuel oil too, and that's when I discover *BEANS.* I'll keep you in suspense, but
now I'm on a beeline for those beans. Unfortunately there's a lot
of hurdles between me and my beans. First one are these clay bricks, but at
least now I finally get to use the clay, lime, and sand manufactures I set up fourteen
hours ago. I need them to make the buildings required for the next steps. Which involves
this tree seed generator and an aboretum. Using the tree we picked up a long time
ago, I can generate tree seeds and grow them. But growing them also requires soil,
which is made from compost and mud. I can get the mud from the washing plants and
the compost by putting anything organic in a composter. The blue algae I made earlier
will work. With all that, we can grow trees. Then we can cut the trees into wood with an
assembler and a saw. It usually preserves the saw and it's giving me flashbacks
to Space Exploration. Finally we can start assembling the parts of this new
science called an optimized biome planner. Again, not that complicated, and I'll just hand
feed the paper from the existing algae build. I don't need this fully automated anyway, because
I can't fully automate it. And that's because it requires these plant samples can only come from
gardens, if you remember those. I can only make a couple dozen at the moment, but fortunately that's
all I need to research the required tech. Farming. So with my 32 science packs, I shove them
into the labs and get on it. Also I researched circuit networks while you weren't looking.
I was been feeling pretty naked without them. Apart from giving us plant samples, the gardens
also have a chance to give us seeds. Unfortunately the last three didn't give me what I needed,
but there's another couple over here, which I snag real quick, and lucky for me, the very
last one gives me what I need. Binafran seeds. With these I can grow binafran in this farm
with the addition of saline water and sand, all very convenient products of our washing plants.
Excuse my while I spaghetti my way to victory. I don't think beans and spaghetti
usually go together, but they do now We get 30 to 40 binafran out, but we need to set
some of those aside to turn back into seeds with a seed extractor so we can repeat the cycle,
but the rest can go into the plant processor where our binafran is finally turned into
precious beans. Those beans can be processed further into nutrient pulp and finally fed
into a gas refiniary to create our fuel oil. There's lots of plants that also create
fuel oil, but beans are by far the best. Now we can feed that fuel oil directly into these
special fluid burning steam boilers. The process also gives off some water as a byproduct, but
since we're going to turn it all into steam, all we need to do is feed it into the boilers and
connect the main water supply with a top-up valve so there's always room to burn off the water
byproduct instead of saturating the pipes. And that's bean power. This whole thing is already
capable of producing around 5 MW continuous, which is basically more than my entire power
grid, and it's only a proof of concept. One thing worth mentioning is to make the
nutrient extractor I had to get bronze plates for bronze pipes, but they're just
copper and tin combined so nothing special. Excited by the prospect of being saved from
my pelagic peril by the power of beans, I don't waste much time setting up a more
proper build. It's got its own washing plants prioritizing sand and saline water and comes with
the added bonus of making more landfill for free. When I start designing the actual build,
I try to set up enough farms so that it can ideally keep one gas refinery
running constantly while maintaining a reasonably defined shape. The key word is
expandability. If I can get a good design down, all I'll need to do is copy and paste it
every time I start running low on power again. So behold, the tillable bean plant. This
thing puts out a staggering 20 MW. Quite the improvement over the 1 MW of the charcoal
plants, don'tcha think? And now I can finally stop worrying about power problems and
start preparing to scale this base up. yes, those are enemy worms to the
right, and yes, they are annoying. So, in a similar philosophy to that of
the bean power plant, I'd like to make a new mineral sludge setup that's easy to repeat
so I can always add more if I'm not producing enough sludge to meet demand. There's also a
better recipe for making slag that we unlocked, which makes it twice as fast. The only caveat
is, it requires these electrolyzer electrodes to function and spits out used electrodes,
which need to be cleaned with purified water. It might be tempting to spend twice the footprint
and power just so you don't need to deal with it, but washing the electrodes also
gives us mineralized water for free, which we can use to run our algae farms and
crystallize the excess into free saphrite and stiratite ores. Basically, it's definitely
worth it. At first I thought I'd run them off of the purified water that I can
make out of the oxygen and hydrogen, but it actually costs slightly more to wash
an electrode than the process can create, so I build a hydro plant to purify the water instead
and get rid of the saline water in a clarifier. The electrodes are never destroyed, so it just takes a couple hundred to start
the process and then it's good to go. You may have noticed that I'm trying very
hard to keep everything within the same width, and this is why. Not only is it compact,
but I can also use underground pipes to connect things like the saline
water output between each lane. I'm built a second one right now just so
it's easier to visualize how things will fit together moving forwards. All this
infrastructure just gets us the slag, however, and we haven't even started
to liquefy it, so that comes next. I'm trying to keep the ratios balanced with
ten electrolyzers of production as much as possible. There's also a recipe that can turn
crushed stone into slag slurry, and I'll set one up because I foresee needing to dispose of
large amounts of crushed stone in the future. It's a good amount of effort to get everything to
fit in this general footprint while leaving room to route out mineral water and mineral sludge, but
alos route in crushed stone and charcoal, but it's going to be worth it when it's done. The final
step is the filtration and waste water washing. It's worth pointing out the adjustable inserters
again, because they allow me to make this very convenient filter design between two filtration
plants that wouldn't be possible otherwise. All I need to do is drop ten or so frames in
each assembler and they're good to go. This thing is getting quite tall. It's
all set up to make our precious sludge, but first we'll need a charcoal factory to feed
the filters. As I mentioned earlier, the mineral water byproduct is very convenient and lets us
build one nearby without any major headaches. I'm not going to use all this mineral
water right now, so I'll collect it in this massive 200,000 unit tank, and add a
pressure release to get rid of any excess. Now all that's left to do is throw in
some sulfur and watch it whir to life. And there we have it, a repeatable stack ten
blocks wide capable of producing mineral sludge. But there's always adjustments, as I realize
that the amount of purified water off one plant isn't nearly enough with the electrodes,
acid, and filtration plants all requiring it, so I make a dedicated plant off to
the side and hook it into the system. Since we have a reliable source of sludge now,
we can start thinking about crystallizing it. It's pretty easy to set up because the sludge
is a fluid and pipes are much easier to deal with than belts. Also these stone pipes
are basically free since stone bricks aren't really used in anything else and stone is
just a byproduct of making the metals we want. Now, remember how to get pure ores, we had
to deal with getting some random ones like nickel along with it? Well with this advanced
process we got from red and green science, we can get pure iron, copper, tin, and lead
with just the cost of a bit of mineral sludge to create these catalysts. Also we need
to put two different ores into the sorter instead of one, but beyond this, there
isn't anything you haven't seen before. Then I set up copper in much the
same way, and then tack on some steel and brick production down here,
which I'm going to regret a bit later, but oh well. The crushed stone will be
turned into bricks until it's saturated, and all the excess will be routed back
into the sludge stacks to be disposed of. Despite being three times faster than my old
base, it's important to emphasize just how much infrastructure it takes to get even a trickle of
ores from water. And so before moving forwards, I start building another three sludge stacks.
This also goes to show the benefit of this easily expandable design, but perhaps easy isn't
the right word, because even thrity hours in, I'm still handcrafting literally everything.
All the belts, inserters, pipes, power poles, electrolyzers, liquefiers, everything. The pace
of this mod is so slow that the rate at which I can hand craft is pretty much the pace at which
I get resources, at least until very recently. The other thing is that these incredibly
complicated builds need to be made by hand, because I have no construction bots and
won't have construction bots until far, far in the future. Let me just level with
you. If you're going to play this mod, download something like companion drones
or nanobots. My suffering can bring joy to thousands of people, and that's why I'm
putting up with this , but your suffering achieves nothing. Do yourself a favor,
and get an early construction bot mod. Though I will say, there is a bit of zen to
this sort of thing. With a mod like this, the path ahead of you is often as confusing
as it is overwhelming, and it's kind of nice just having a repetitive, but simple task in
front of you. Or maybe I've just gone insane, who knows! Anyway, the end result is a grand
total of 50 electrolyzers bringing in 25 slag per second. It might not sound like much, but
that's 33x faster than our original build. That's a lot of power demand though, but all
we need to do is build another bean farm and that's another 20 MW into the system. Hard
crafting all the components is still annoying, but for the first time it seems like actually
automating supplies could be on the horizon. More confident in my sludge supply, I set up tin
processing, and lead processing in much the same way. After pasting and building, all I need to
do is change the recipes so we're making the two ores necessary for each resource, and we've
got the basics up. Except lead ingots take a small amount of oxygen, which I'm making
from an air purifier and a chemical plant. I've been leaving some space between them just
in case I need to route something through. And this decision immediately pays off as
I need to grab some of the ingots from other build to create the solder and bronze
I'll need to catch up to my spaghetti base And because nothings straightforward or
easy in this mod, I need to go through this massive rigmarole of making washing
plants for mud as well as clay bricks, all so I can use it to make soil to grow
trees, and turn the trees into wood so I can turn the wood into wooden boards
which can finally be used to make basic circuits. At least there's these electronics
assemblers that are smaller and faster than normal assemblers. Only difference is they can
only make electronics. The algae to boards recipe we used first is so incredibly bad that
there's no way it could possibly scale, so that's why we're using wood instead. With that
squared away, I've got the beginnings of a bus. So now that I've got all these resources, what I'd
really like to do is start automating supplies, but you may have noticed that there's
about a billion different buildings, and they all take like five different items each.
Not only that, but there's also tier two or three, and even tier four variants of each building
that take the previous tier as well as another four different things. Automating them
all with belts would be a nightmare, and if you've watched my other videos, you
might see me researching trains and are getting concerned. But don't worry,
what I'm going to do is way worse. I'm going to do it all with warehouses.
Conceptually it's simple, because if I can put all the items I need into the same box, any
assembler connected to that box will be able to grab whatever it needs to make that building.
And because of the adjustable inserters, each warehouse can supply eight assemblers each.
We'll use these smaller silos to bridge the gap and feed into each subsequent warehouse so I can
add on as many assemblers I need. The difficulty starts with actually getting items *into* the
warehouses, because unlike the cargo wagons, I can't add filtered slots to keep
it from overfilling on certain items. We need to limit the amount of each
item that can be in the warehouse, and we can do that by wiring up these inserters
to the warehouse and tell them to only activate when there's less than a certain amount inside.
All of these inserters put their items onto the same belts before they're all shoved
into the warehouse. The advantage of this solution is that not only does it fit neatly
through my main bus, but the verity of items I can add is no longer restricted by how many
inserters I can fit in front of the warehouse. As you can see, once there's enough of an
item, they stop pulling it off the main bus. Second problem. Because I want to be
able to make intermediate products like gears and throw them back into the
warehouse so other buildings can use them, I need to wire up the gear assembler's
inserters to the warehouse as well and set a condition that also limits
the number of gears it can add. Now the third problem is the toughest
one. I want each warehouse to contain its own set amount of items, but
if we just connected them all, the inserters would try to take everything out
indiscriminately and shove it all into the last warehouse in the chain. Obviously we need to
set a limit like we did before, but this time, we're not pulling from a belt that has only one
kind of resource on it, we're pulling from a warehouse that has dozens of different items, so
a simple condition on the inserter isn't enough. Instead, we can use filter inserters set to "Set
filters" mode. That way they'll only try to grab up items that they're receiving via circuit
signal, and if we load a constant combinator with the levels of each items we want to maintain
inside the warehouse, and then subtract the values of the contents in the warehouse from the constant
combinator, each signal will disappear from the filters when the value becomes negative.
It's all very complicated, and very tedious, and an absolute nightmare of manually setting
up signals in the combinators and inserters, but it's still better than trying to do this
with belts, and while the inner workings might be a nightmare, it ends up being very convenient
and orderly once it's set up. After all that, I've got a generic solution to make any building
I want and finally have automated supplies. I cannot express how strange it feels after nearly
40 hours of hand crafting to finally be free. The only thing I'm really missing
now before I'll be caught up with my old base are electronic circuits.
I kind of glossed over them last time, but they're a lot more complicated and
a lot more expensive than their vanilla counterparts. The smaller electronics assemblers
are a great help as we need to make copper wire, tinned copper wire, and carbon to first make
the electronics components. Carbon comes from combining charcoal with steam in a liquefier and
I made this slapdash thing here to deal with it. There's also these groundwater pumps which can
be placed anywhere to get 60 water a second, it's 1/20th that of an offshore pump, but
very convenient if you don't need much. Those get combined with solder and basic circuits
to make the circuit board, and finally that's combined with iron plates to make the circuit.
They're only going to get more complicated from here. I can also route those green circuits into
the warehouse mall and start automating fast inserters and filter inserters too. The adjustable
inserters definitely make things a lot more compact, but it is a bit harder to tell exactly
what they're doing just by looking at them, which isn't the best for the video but you're
all smart people I'm sure you can handle it. You know what, I'm tired of talking about stuff
I've already done, so there. That's red and green science fully automated at scale. It's a little
bit better than our single assembler set up, that's for sure. There's still a
ton of red and green research left, and this should take care of the rest of it.
Also making these labs was really annoying. Right now I'm basically on cloud nine. I've
finally got reliable ore production, a fully automated and expandable supply hub, and labs
measured in Science Per Minute instead of Minutes Per Science. However, this is just the beginning
of what this mod has up its sleeve. It really does feel like I'm only now starting the game for
real as blue science looms far on the horizon. I'm already using 100% of the mineral sludge
I make with just red and green science, so before I can start thinking about getting
the resources I need to make blue science, I decide to set up another two sludge stacks
by hand. It's slightly less painful now that everything I need is automated,
but bots are still a long way off. Also I'll need more power,
so here's another bean farm. Also, finally checking it off my to-do list
is making crystallizers that uses my excess mineral water, instead of flushing it all
down the toilet like I was doing before. Getting some Saphrite and Stiratite out of it
will help ease off some of the sludge demand. Now then, that's enough beating around the bush,
time to start plugging away at blue science, and hopefully make some actual progress. The main
challenge is that it takes several materials we haven't even seen yet, namely silver and
aluminum. I'll get to that, but first I'm setting up another bunch of crystallizers
to make the six base ores just like before, and then crushing it, again, just like before,
but this is where it's different. now we need to process it even further by putting it
in these buildings called flotation cells. The flotation cells require purified water to run
and will turn all of our crushed ores into ore chunks. These chunks are what will eventually
allow us to extract the different resources, but besides that the process also gives out
not only sulfuric waste water, but nitric, flouric, and chloric too. On top of that,
each ore also has a 50% chance to create a differently colored geode. Unfortunately I
built this whole thing at once and decided to turn it on all at once, so I can't
really show you an example right now. Sometimes I get lost in just playing the game
and forget I'm supposed to be making a video. Anyway, those chunks will then go into the ore
sorter as usual. And remember how we used to have those terrible recipes that would give
us one thing we wanted and something else we didn't? Well, they're back, and now we get even
*more* things we don't want. As you can see, mixed in with all the trace amounts of
aluminum and silver are ores like iron, copper, and nickel, and if we want
to get the aluminum, we'll need to deal with those too. it's very annoying and
also gives us some more slag to deal with. Regardless, the method I've cooked up is a pretty
straight forward one. I'm going to put them all on circular belts and let filter inserters sort them
out into their own ore silo. Then I'll just drop them onto isolated belts. Okay now I actually want
to turn this thing on, and that means getting some more purified water. For that I'll just copy
the same design that feeds my sludge stacks. On top of that, I'll need to deal with disposing
the various waste waters. They'll be useful later, but not right now, so down the toilet
they go. I do want to keep some around, so I'll put another pressure
release on these big tanks. But without further ado, here it is in
action. For now I'll be storing all the geodes in a warehouse and all the slag from the
sorters will be crushed on site and then joined with the rest of the stone byproduct so they can
be routed into the sludge stacks for disposal. I will say, watching all the different colors of
this mod's ores roll by is activating my neurons. So we're slowly getting the ores we need, and
I'm more than happy to let them stockpile, but we get many more lower tier ores than ones like
silver, and so I'm going to route all the iron, copper, tin, and lead into the already existing
ore refineries to keep it from clogging up, once again patting myself on the back for
leaving all this space between the sorters and the furnaces. As usual, priority input splitter so
it pulls exclusively from that lane when possible. Now about actually using these ores. The first one I'm going to sort out is aluminum,
and these things are no longer as straight forward as just throwing it into a furnace. First
off I'm going to need some saline water, and I can get more than enough from the hydro
plants that make the purified water for the flotation cells. With this saline water we're
actually going to use electrolyzers to make something that isn't slag for once. By zapping
saline water we can create sodium hydroxide as well as hydrogen and chlorine gas. I don't have
a use for it right now, so I'm just going to vent all of this environmentally friendly
chlorine gas directly into the atmosphere. The sodium hydroxide is combined with our
aluminum ore in these special powder mixers to make aluminum hydroxide, which
goes into a furnace make alumia, and finally into *another* furnace along with
some carbon to produce liquid aluminum. These electric boilers I researched are very convenient,
and I can get the carbon from the nearby charcoal belt I already run to fuel the furnaces. After
that all that's left is to cast it into plates. That's one down. Only a few more to go and maybe we can start thinking about
doing something useful with it. Next on the agenda is silicon. We could always
get silicon ores, but up until now we could only make glass out of it, and we need mono silicon
now. Making the ingots is easier than aluminum, but it also takes carbon, and so I just leech
off of the aluminum build. The liquid silicon can't make the mono silicon we need without a
silicon seed, which comes from adding nitrogen to molten silicon. The nitrogen comes from an
air filter and a chemical plant. With the seed, we can finally get out the finished mono silicon
which will eventually become silicon wafers for advanced electronics. But we've also got a
better glass recipe which is dead simple and multiple steps of turning ingot into silicon
powder, then putting that in a powder mixer to get glass mixture, and finally putting that
into an induction furnace to make molten glass. That's another one down. Tackling mods like this
requires a certain mindset. If you go after it trying to finish, you'll just get burned out, but
if you relax and take each production chain step by step, you'll get there eventually. Unlike
the other two, silver is as simple as throwing the ore into the furnace. Or at least what the
mod's conditioned you to think of as simple. Guess what, it's time for more beans, and
this time I'm making three bean plants at once. The washing plants seem
to be able to support just about three of these with how much sand
and saline water they can produce, so I'm not going to stand higher than three
without setting up some new washing plants. Alright, so that's maybe like, half of what we
need done, but there's still a ton of things left on the checklist. Remember how our sodium
hydroxide machines give off chlorine and hydrogen gas? Well now we actually want to combine it into
hydrogen chloride, and then use that so we can combine it with iron ore to make a ferric chloride
solution. That's another tick off the checklist. There's also cupric chloride, which I don't
really need but it's so similar I made it anyway. Now we're going to need to venture into a
place I've been pretty happy to ignore until now. Petrochemicals, and that's where
this silver and aluminum ore comes in, another thing routed straight through that space I
left. Similar to the charcoal filters, I've got to make some catalyst frames in order to facilitate
the creation of methanol from carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas, but the empty frames are returned
and can be reloaded. That methanol combines with steam to create propene as well as some residual
gas we're just going to shove into a tank. And what's the end result of this whole
chain? Plastic. Technically liquid plastic, and then plastic, but plastic nonetheless. Do you want to know what all these things are
for? Advanced circuits. This is what is takes just to make advanced circuits, and there's still
more: we need the resin for the phenolic boards Fortunately they just take wood and wooden boards,
which are conveniently right next to each other. With everything assembled, I can
*finally* start making advanced circuits, but that's not exactly straight forwards
either. We have all the raw materials, but we still need to make all the electronics
and transistors, and wires. And because I've got a bit of an obsession with making
things compact and inserting directly from assembler to assembler, what we get is a
bit mess of inserters and underground belts. At this point I've pretty much given up on making
this base intelligent or expandable. It's become abundantly clear to me that what I thought might
be my real base has actually turned out to be just another starter base, and I've pretty much
resolved that I'll need to rebuild this whole thing later considering the insane science
requirements we'll need to win. Right now, I just need to get the basics up and running, and
with advanced circuits, we're one step closer. The advanced circuits were definitely the
biggest hurdle, but there's a still bit more we need before we can actually make blue
science, and one of them is making brass, which is a combination of copper and zinc.
The best thing is it's an actual use for zinc ore so I won't need to worry as much about
it clogging up the ore sorters. Zinc ingots are a bit weird because they take in molten lead
and spit out lead ingots along with the zinc. If you remelt the lead ingots, you get all of
your molten lead back, so you only need a small amount to start and it just keeps cycling
forever and ever. But after that weirdness, they're turned into molten brass along with some
copper and cast into plates like everything else. The absolute best thing is brass
isn't even used in blue science, it's just used in one component that we'll need to
make the upgraded labs that can fit blue science. Here's something I call the wiggle maneuver.
The worms calculate where to shoot based on your velocity vector, and since you're capable of
going from zero to max speed in a single frame, if you keep jittering side to side the
worms will continuously try to predict where you'll be and continuously fail. It's
not foolproof, but it's definitely effective. After that we're back in petrochem land making
blue algae for the first time in forty hours. I mentioned it way back as a potential fuel source
before the blessed beans appeared, but we need it now to make multi-phase oil, and then crude
oil, to finally get naphtha and mineral oil. The naphtha's what we need, but the mineral oil will
be very important shortly. Again, I wish I could go into more detail about thing like the raw gas
byproduct, and routing the sulfuric waste water it creates back into the blue algae farms, but if
I point out every little facet of this factory we'll be here forever. What matters is we've
assembled everything we need to make blue science. Here's all the recipes to do it. The item icons
still look a little rough, but I'd like to shout out the artisanal reskins mod for adding
some polish to these two six year old mods, even if it's not completely comprehensive yet.
While I'm at it, I might as well shout out Bob and Arch Angel for making the original mods.
Anyway, this stuff takes a ton of copper, both in plates and in the form of circuits. It's helped
a bit by the coppery waste byproduct it spits out that we can turn into copper ore, but it's a
significant spike in copper demand. Blue science is also pretty much the only thing that consumes
glass, and I didn't make much glass production because of that, but as it turns out, while it
might be the only thing, it also *eats* a ton of glass. I'll be sure to remember that when I need
to rebuild this whole thing in a hundred hours. But there's blue science, and as much as I'd love to start researching
things immediately, I need those upgraded labs I mentioned, and they are *very* annoying to
make, I need to poach some items from the green science build and shove it into a chemical
plant because one part takes sulfur dioxide. Then I need to wait to make like ten billion large
solar panels which I haven't automated until now because they're an absolute waste of space and
resources compared to beans. I've got to combine them all with the previous tier of labs too. All
I can say is, thank god for the time warp mod, but there it is. Let's just appreciate it and
not think about all the work there's left to do. Within minutes of making blue science, I realize
that using wood to make resin is actually really *really* bad. Turns out we need all that wood to
make basic circuits instead. It's so convenient that if it weren't for the fact that scavenging
trees is required to make the seed generators, I'd probably just make a billion arboretums
and call it a day, but unfortunately it's back to petrochem land. That's the interesting
thing about this mod. There's tons of recipes, but you're not required to use all of them.
Most of them are just alternate ways to get the same end product, and it's up to you to
decide which one seems the least painful. You can see why I wanted to avoid it though,
it takes my blue algae to make ammonia, then that combined with even more carbon dioxide
to make urea, and then our methanol and green catalysts to make formaldehyde to *finally* make
liquid resin. It's several times more efficient than the wood recipe, but with blue science in
full swing, it's still struggling to keep up. Just making a handful of blue science has
completely wiped out my stockpiled metals as well, so it's about time I upgraded some of the
electrolyzers to their tier two models, which should give each lane 50% more slag per second.
You kind of forget while you're making each ingredient step by step, but when it's time to put
them all together, you quickly realize just how bad your production really is. Still, it's enough
to get us limping through the blue research. So, after all that you'll never guess what we can
finally make. That's right, after fifty hours of building everything by hand, I can finally start
building construction robots. And keeping with the rest of the mod, it's not straightforwards at
all, because each one needs a robot brain, a robot frame, and a robot tool. I'm planning to make the
tier two bots right away. Technically I could've gotten them before blue science, but it takes
advanced circuits and all the things you'd need to make blue science, so you might as well make that
first and build the upgraded bots all at once. Luckily I can pull most of the complicated stuff
off my advanced circuit build, but the lube, electric engines, and batteries
all need to be built from scratch. Also I need to run a giant pipe to my sludge
stacks to get some sulfuric acid for the batteries. Then there's fitting room for the tool
and actually assembling the brains and frames, it's just, uhh... What I'm getting at is, it's a
mess. But a functional mess! This thing is really hungry for advanced circuits, so it's going to be
a while before we've got any appreciable number of bots, but if I made it this far without
bots, I'm sure I can go a little longer. Now, remember those geodes I mentioned way back
at the start of t his blue science endeavor? Well the warehouse is almost full, so it's
probably about time I started disposing of them. Just like slag we can melt them all
in sulfuric acid. We just need a liquefier for each color of geode, and to prevent
it from deadlocking, I'm going to make it a circular belt that prioritizes what's
already on the belt before accepting more. By dissolving the geodes, we get crystal slurry,
which we can filter just like slag slurry to get out mineral sludge and sulfuric waste. We
just need to combine it with mineralized water instead of purified water. Ignore that it suddenly
rotated 90 degrees I forgot to unpause OBS again. We've got more than enough mineralized water
and the crystal slurry will be useful for more than just sludge later, but for now we're
only disposing of geodes. You can also get geodes from water, and it would be a good
way to turn excess mineral water into sludge, but at this point that kind of
sophistication is beyond this base. Time to start emptying out the warehouse.
I don't like how it's totally saturating the belt with one color of geode, seeing
as we've only got one liquefier for each, so I make a really quick and dirty
circuit that cycles between every color on some filter inserters.
It's not *perfect* but it's better. While I'm just walking, I'd like to mention the
existence of a ceramic filter recipe we could switch to for our sludge, which sounds great on
paper because they can be washed and reused and wouldn't require consuming charcoal anymore, but
it actually gives out way less sulfuric waste than charcoal filtering, and if you switched over to
it you suddenly wouldn't be getting enough sulfur back to dissolve your slag anymore and the entire
base would stop working. I wouldn't recommend it! Back on the topic of robots, why am
I routing steel ingots through this increasingly cramped space? Well, I'd
really like to have a personal roboport and exoskeletons as well as a robot network,
but all I have access to is modular armor, which has an absolutely pathetic equipment grid
size of 5x5. The 7x7 grid of power armor is pretty much the bare minimum required to maintain
both, but one problem. It's locked behind military science. And that's finally where
this hitherto useless nickel ore comes in. Making the ingots takes carbon monoxide, which
we can make from carbon and purified water. We can combine that with steel to create invar, the
main ingredient in military science. It's used in a couple buildings, but similar to glass
it's almost exclusive to military science. Here's the recipes for the so-called Ablative
Weapons Testing Kits. Not even military science is safe from the insane circuit demands
everything has, but it mostly takes tons of carbon and invar, which is absolutely unsustainable, but
we don't need too much of this stuff. Our only enemies are worms, and while those are starting
to get out of hand the further out we go, spamming gun turrets is enough for now. It also gives out
an insane amount of scrap, so unlike the blue science, I'm actually bothering to route it
back into the main copper and iron ore lanes. Remember when this place looked
halfway orderly? Yeah, me neither. But there's military science... Slowly... My
circuit production is still struggling. However, slow and steady wins the race, or so
I've been told, and pretty soon we've got power armor loaded with two exoskeletons
and two roboports. Being able to walk faster than a glacier almost feels wrong at this
point, but let's test out those robots. Oh my god... It's beautiful... I don't need
to do everything by hand anymore...! I'm free! My main priority right now is setting up the
robot network, and that means increasing the number of buildings I've got automated, as well as
converting everything to passive provider chests so the bots have access to them. Since my base is
going through some serious spaghettification and there's no longer any room below the warehouses,
I'm adding in all the new supplies like brass in from the top as I turn this whole warehouse
abomination around. While it's much more convenient than the alternative, dealing with
all the circuit conditions is still a pain. Speaking of spaghettification, for one very
important building, I've gotta make concrete bricks, and that requires a bunch of random
stuff like lime and silicon powder to make cement in a powder mixer. Then I need to do some
unholy routing to get slag from the sludge stacks so we can combine it with water and cement to
make liquid concrete, and finally throw in stone bricks to make concrete bricks. It goes into the
input belt and then I need to add its signal to each and every warehouse's constant combinators
so it gets propagated all the way to the end. But all this effort is well worth
it, because look what I can do. We've been pretty strained on mineral sludge for
a while now, and now that I've got a fully stocked network, suddenly adding more sludge stacks is
as easy as pressing ctrl + v. Certainly beats spending 30 minutes doing it by hand.
But more than just shoring up our base, we'll need it to move beyond blue science,
because we're ready to enter the next phase. However, ready does not imply willing, and I'm
suffering from a condition I'd like to call Factorio Progression Paralysis. It's when it's
more appealing to run around and make minor tweaks to your base instead of actually diving into
the next major project. It's mostly stuff like increasing wood production slightly, adding things
to the mall, or upgrading existing builds, things I usually cut out, but are great when you're
trying to avoid the next step. Though I can't run forever, and the beans give me the courage I need
to carry on, so behold automatic bean expansion. Alright, just like with blue science, the
resources we need for the next science requires some materials we don't have yet, and so now that
I have the power of bots and provider chests on my side, I'm just going to copy this whole
crystallizer, crusher, flotation cell thing. And I decide to finish adding
the extra sludge stacks while I'm at it. Remember the old base? Well
its only purpose is making electrodes. I've already got all the infrastructure needed to
dispose of the geodes and various waste fluids, and so this whole thing goes up pretty painlessly. Now, remember how when we got green science,
we unlocked recipes that allowed us to get pure ores with the use of a catalyst? Well if you
remember when I promised there was another use for that crystal slurry, here it is. Instead
of making mineral sludge, we can turn it into crystal seedlings, which can then be used to make
*crystal* catalysts. That also leads to this funny moment when I'm placing things one by one until
I'm like, wait a minute, I have bots for this. Same as before, except using chunks
instead of crush, we can combine two ores and a catalyst to make pure ores. I'm
only bothering to set up aluminum, silver, and silicon, because those are the only ones I
really need in any quantity and the mixed ore sorting is still giving me more than enough
zinc and nickel.Just like the other ores, we'll set it up to where it prioritizes the output
from the mixed ore sorting, but can always rely on the pure process. And not a moment too soon,
because our aluminum stocks were completely dry. I'm also setting it up to make fluorite.
Fluorite takes a mixture of three ores called cupric mixture, which then needs
to be crushed further with a milling drum, which we need to re-lube every time and it means
running a massive pipe just to get lube here. It's a lot of work for a rock, but here it is. Now, you might be wondering why I'm bothering
to keep the mixed ore sorting up when it's much more convenient to make the pure ores, and
aren't you perspicacious imaginary audience member. The reason is, I can reuse it. Remember
all those waste waters like fluoric, chloric, and nitric? Well we actually have a use for them
now, making Hydroflouric, Hydrochloric, and Nitric acid. We'll need more than we can recover
from waste, but it gets us halfway there. The recovery process is mostly just putting it
into a hydro plant and shoving whatever solid comes out into a liquefier. We can make
all the hydrofluoric we need, however. The reason we need all this acid is for
the next step in ore processing: leaching. With these leaching plants we can turn our ore
chunks into ore crystals and extract even more resources from them. Each recipe takes its own
kind of acid. Three of them take sulfuric acid, which is convenient because it's
the one we've got the most of, but it's important to have at least some
of the other acids because without them we'd be missing out on some of
the new ores we're about to get. It takes a bit of a redesign of the silos to
fit the four new ores, but the general setup is exactly the same, except we're using ore
crystals instead of chunks, and soon enough we've got cobalt, titanium, gold, and uranium. Who
knew there was more than just plastic in seawater. It's going to be a while before I've got any
appreciable amount of ores, so I go around making some more tweaks. It's hard to show in
the video, but this base is barely limping along. I solved a steel shortage earlier by shoving this
thing here and using a new recipe for molten steel that uses half steel and half silicon ingots, now
that I've got a reliable source of silicon ore. That took a load off of iron, but copper's still
struggling. I'm making more molten copper than I can cast into plates, so I decide to
test out these strand casting machines to turn it directly into copper coils. It's
basically copper whose only purpose is being turned into copper wire, but it's twice as
dense and takes much less crafting time. Though I quickly drain my excess of liquid
copper too. The main issue, and why I'm planning on scrapping this base eventually, is
that we've unlocked some much more efficient ways of smelting, but there's just no space to fit
it in. Or is there...? So I just barely manage to fit in these ore processors thanks to some more
belt weaving and the versitility of the adjustable inserters. Processing the ore first lets us
get an impressive 50% more ingots per ore. There's another process that would give us another
50%, but we *definitely* couldn't fit that. I'll just need to fill the void with dreams of what
could be until I scale up for the fourth time. All this space I intentionally left has a
funny way of getting filled with spaghetti. Anyway, now it's time to see about
getting all those new metals. I feel like you've seen this enough times for
me to speed through it. Cobalt is similar to nickel and invar, in that we need to melt it
together with steel to get a cobalt steel alloy. Gold is the most straight forward, with
the usual ore, to ingot, to liquid, to plate chain. Except that it takes chlorine gas. Titanium is the most unique of
the three because we also need chlorine gas and carbon to make titanium
tetrachloride in a chemical furnace, which turns into a titanium sponge, then
ingots. But that's all three of them. There's also advanced smelting recipes for
these too, but we'll worry about that later. When we were aiming for blue science, our main
hurdle was advanced circuits, and accordingly, now we've got to make processing units. All
the circuits follow the same general logic, and we'll start with the boards. We'll need glass
fiber, which comes from a strand caster and molten glass, and this is literally the only use for
glass fiber, so we don't need to worry about it. Just like how electronic circuits took tin
wire and advanced circuits took silver, processing units need gold wire to make the
new integrated electronics, but it also takes basic components and the transistors as well.
Put all that onto the board with some solder and we've got our processing units. Plus four
advanced circuits, and when it relies on our already slow advanced circuit production,
you know it's going to be *really* slow. That's alright though. As I said, we're
in this for the long haul, and even one science per minute is enough to finish a lot of
research over another seventy hours. This base's job is mostly going to be creating supplies to
build the *real* base and trickling research. With that in mind, I waste little time setting
up the next sciences, and yes, we can make *two* sciences with what we've got. The first one is
purple science, and when you've got a main bus, even things like this are fairly straightforward
as you just split things you need off the main line. It is a little bit weird though. Because
while it takes sulfur dioxide, it spits out twice as much sulfur as it takes in, so we need to get
rid of it, and so I turn it into sulfuric acid and put it into the network and assume the
processing units will consume enough of it. The other half of the science requires methane
gas, which is probably the most convoluted petrochem product to date. Because I need to
turn fuel oil and steam into synthesis gas, turn the raw gas byproduct of oil refining into
natural gas liquids, and finally combine that to get methane, ethane, and butane, as well as
some carbon monoxide. It's a bunch of stuff I don't need and I'm just going to collect in
tanks and burn off any extras. This is just rough automation and it's already a headache.
I can only imagine trying to do this at scale. *Finally* we create this bio silicate extract, throw that in a furnace, and combine it
with a processing unit to get the other half of purple science. *phew*. This
thing also gives off a bunch of scrap, but I've already got scrap handling set up in
military science so I just route it in there. We're getting there. Before we can make the real
base, there's two major researches I couldn't imagine progressing forwards without. The first
one is... *Artillery.* To build the real base, We'll need to expand... a lot. but so much of the
ocean is covered in these worm islands and they're getting to strong for gun turrets to handle them.
But with artillery, we can kill any worm far, far outside their range. I could've gotten
this with just blue and military, but it costs 2,000 to research, which is going to kill
all production in my base for literal hours. But after some copious use of the time warp,
I've finally got it. I just need to make the artillery shells, which thankfully don't
take radars anymore. The sulfur is hand fed, and the rest I just pull off the bus as usual,
but let's test this baby out and give em hell. And just like that, worms are no longer a threat
and I can expand wherever I want. Although, I will want to be careful where I
aim, because the shells can destroy the gardens and trees I'll be wanting
to collect for agricultural science. Speaking of science, the second research we
need is, well... We need to make the next science first, but I'll bet some of you
can guess which research I'm aiming for. The pink science is a lot easier than the
purple science, mostly because I don't need to dip into petrochem land and most of the
odd stuff it needs I've already got nearby, like lube and electronics, which I can just
sponge off of the processing unit build. Plus it doesn't have any scrap byproduct.
This science also takes processing units, which will be the main bottleneck for actually
making any of these advanced science packs, but pretty soon we've got the seventh science. And as for our mystery research, if you
guessed requester chests, you were right! We've successfully spaghetti'd our way to bot
malls. Our warehouse mall was nice, but you can't beat the convenience and expandability of a
bot mall. I just need to go around shoving every little thing into provider chests and making a
few of the intermediates like pipes and bearings. It'll take a while for everything to
fill up, but I'm feeling very powerful. I'll also want to make tons of
landfill as we prepare to expand. However, you may have noticed the length
of this video, and unfortunately this run's going to need to be multiple parts.
This mod is a gargantuan undertaking, and I still feel like I've only scratched the
surface, but we've come a long way from our little island. We went from struggling to get
a single iron plate to making sludge in the thousands. Buoyed by beans, we expanded and
expanded, and we even survived without bots until finally we've got the power to automate
any building and place it anywhere. This is a good stopping point. Progressing further is going
to be daunting, but I'm feeling more confident, and something tells me it's going to
involve trains, so look forward to it. I'd like to thank my Patrons for making
videos like this possible. It takes an incredible amount of time to play and edit down
these runs, especially ones as complex as this, and it's really reassuring to feel like
I don't need to go chasing algorithms and can just do what I want. Thanks for the
support, even if you did vote for Seablock. And to close this video out, please enjoy the
several soothing, unbroken seconds of beans.
