My friend and I routinely have conversations about factory design.
His ideal factory ships every ore in its raw state to a single building, which can then move the ore to different floors/sections for processing. He goes further than most and separates each product into its own “room”, so all steel bars are made in one room then shipped to the steel beam and steel pipe rooms. Importantly the factory should be designed so that you can “infinitely” expand a room if you need more of that resource.
I prefer what I call “microfactories”, where each component is created in a small, independent factory and the result is shipped to a main repository for builder use and for the space elevator construction. If you need modular frames, for example, you would find a group of ores and build a small factory on it and build every sub-component you can in it. Ideally, it would not rely on any other microfactory’s outputs, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. Often I will have a small cluster of microfactories all dedicated to shipping their output to a final microfactory for processing.
So what do you all use?
Note: He claims his design is more analogous to microservices (from software architecture) than mine, and that mine is something apparently called “pirate architecture”. I think he’s out of his mind on that one.
I created stackable blueprints that include a specific type of building, for example constructors. They have an input and output on the ground and i can build them higher and higher as long as the belt is fast enough to push in and out the materials.
By doing that i normally have one or more towers for each component, similar to your mentioned microservice architecture.
On the ground i connect these towers to build the downstream components, essentially creating your mentioned microfactories out of the towers/microservices. Perhaps Manyfactories is a better name, as it’s somewhere in-between micro and mono.
It’s fast, scalable throughout the research tiers and pretty enough for my own standards.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between a love of blueprints and a preference towards closer together infrastructure. Because my friend also loves blueprints, but I generally don’t like them.
I always tell him he’s like King Neptune and I’m Spongebob. He’s shuffling out gigafactories in minutes and I’m here tucking in my conveyor belts and reading them stories. Each one is a special snowflake to me
During my first playthrough I eventually came to the conclusion that I’ll never progress much further if i keep building every small item one by one. I do not have much time to play the game, so blueprints came in handy. Since then I have never looked back.
You’re totally right though, there are many ways to play the game and they are all enjoyable. I bet there’s even players roleplaying a nomadic, explorative playstyle.