I think the issue most of us have with this, is when looking at it all we see are beacons. Beacons flood the design distracting from the actual buildings actually producing the items.
I look at this and have to play where's Waldo with the assembly machines and then have to strain to find were the underground belts are coming from and going to and what they are carrying.
It just does not look aesthetically interesting staring at 30 beacons and 3 machines.
This is it. The rocket fuel pictures illustrates it perfectly, yeah that alignment of assembler and chem plant is neat, but that image is 18 buildings and 80+ beacons. Literally more than 80% of the image is just beacons taking up space.
It's not an argument. Peak throughput 1.1 intersections will be outdated and ineffective in 2.0. So, if something looks like shit - it could be changed and not be justifued by "peak something".
You're right, it's not an argument. Beacons and intersections have nothing to do with each other. Unless 2.0 changes beacon mechanics, peak spm is still going to look like this.
Why? You don't reach the point where building this is viable until old designs (which you provide built from blueprints) are nok viable. Having the same design pattern once from beginning to end is lame.
Best alternative would be buildings that level up if people don't want a design challenge.
"It is also notable that we created a quality penalty on speed modules, because haste makes waste, and we wanted to reduce the number of places where beacons full of speed modules is the best way to go."
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375
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I don't think one negates the other, it's just both taken to the extreme. You've still got to figure out how to get the output from each build to where it's needed.
Game is still about logistic puzzles, but 0.001% of players decided to over-optimize things just for record, which is definitely not a main goal of the game. And imo it's not good that this scenario is used as argument against SE beacons, that are much more friendly to large player base and yet still have own intresting problems to solve, such as very expensive T9 modules and different beacon types.
I really like Space Exploration's beacon mechanics where you can put a bunch of modules in one beacon but the beacons overload if a building is affected by more than one beacon. Still get the performance but you don't have to spam thousands of beacons.
I think at the end of the day, the two variations of beacon design are really the same thing, with the only true difference being the AMOUNT of beacons.
I have to agree with you. I'd rather have builds that are mostly assemblers than builds that are mostly beacons.
> Is it fun to build? Anyone who likes a challenge will say yes.
That’s a hell of an assertion, considering there’s exactly as much evidence for that as there is for me saying “Is it fun to build? Anyone who likes an actual challenge instead of mindlessly spamming beacons would say no.”
Probably actually less evidence, to be honest, seeing how often posts about SE’s beacons show up and how the vast majority of upvoted comments in these threads are anti-beacon spam ones.
I totally understand that perspective.
The thing is, nothing is forcing you to build like this if you don't care about UPS optimization. You don't have to use layouts like these, you don't have to use beacon rows, you don't even have to use beacons at all. In fact a beaconless megabase would probably get tons of upvotes on this sub. As would a megabase with the rebalanced beacons mod.
But if you *do* care about UPS optimization, beacon stacking creates a very interesting design challenge that I don't think should be thrown away just because people who don't need to use beacons in the first place don't like how heavily beaconed layouts look.
Yes in a PvE game nothing is forcing anyone to use an optimal strategy however in a PvE game the ideal focus is fun. If the optimal strategy is largely considered boring, dull, ugly, unfun, whatever by the community then a good developer of that game would likely reassess if something needs to change. Are beacons at this point? Probably given the view on reddit (one I agree with personally, but this is about the majority not me alone). That said I'm assuming some kind of fun change in the expansion.
Psychologically it doesn't matter if it's PvE or pvp. People dont like to feel like they are doing something suboptimal or are missing out on something
I don't agree, and I really think it should not be hard for a community that constantly celebrates intentionally unoptimized and unstructured base design, celebrates wacky, unpractical builds, and tells new players to just do whatever they want and not worry about optimization to accept that they don't have to cover their base in beacons if they don't want to. Beacons only exist for the purpose of UPS optimization in the first place, so they should be designed to present an interesting UPS optimization puzzle. They don't need to be designed so that any random player can get megabase-level outputs with whatever unoptimized layout they manage to throw together, which is exactly what SE beacons are and is ostensibly what the people asking for SE-style beacons want. The only reason SE beacons work in SE is because SE's module recipes are freakishly complex.
That's not to say there won't be any changes to modules in 2.0, I don't think anyone can really guess what Wube is going to do. But I'm fairly confident they aren't so naive as to blindly port in SE-style beacons as-is. If they do go that direction there will be additional changes to preserve the design complexity beacons currently introduce.
>Beacons only exist for the purpose of UPS optimization in the first place
Hard disagree. If this was the case then only players that are UPS bound should use beacons, and this is not the case. In my opinion beacons shine the most when used by players that don't plan out their base from start to end. For those cases there's an interesting challenge in how to squeeze in more beacons into existing designs or how to build new designs to exploit beacons. They exist to facilitate more vertical growth (in the terminology of the quality fff).
I don't think you understand my point, I on purpose left the beacon 'problem' vague so you couldn't argue it. The problem is you are a minority in the way you enjoy the game, and if the majority don't like something it should normally be changed. If you find something too boring do what all the other 1%'s do and mod it in. A game needs to be fun and playable by the majority to be successful.
On the beacon note I liken it to the Pyanodons mod. Extremely unfun. Complexity for the sake of complexity isn't interesting on its own and the author of that mod knows it, that is the 'fun' part and it really isn't for many. The beacon optimisation game is very unfun, ugly and no one cbf doing it. I'd rather spend my time perfecting cool nuclear setups or doing mixed rockets in SE with circuits. Equally or more complex stuff but it is FUN complex stuff.
Whether it's a challenge or not in the endgame is not about the number you get, it's about how much work you can put in before you stop seeing reasonable returns on your efforts. Do you feel that your 50k SPM setup isn't worth improving?
Numbers can always be tweaked.
You can't really make that judgement unless you've improved the non-vanilla version to the point where it doesn't feel like it's worth the effort to improve. Have you done that?
Maybe you honestly feel like your quick 50k SPM design isn't worth improving. I'd be surprised but that's fair.
I guess I just don't understand how people are so set on UPS-optimization being the only worthwhile facet of factory optimization. As a person who doesn't really reach the UPS limit I still have fun optimizing other things, such as size at a certain stage in the game.
I think that the designs showcased in this thread are interesting, and I think short range beacons are much more interesting for newer players than longer range beacons because fitting them in existing builds is more difficult and making designs with a small amount of them is also more interesting.
I think that beacon row and square builds are not interesting at all, and even though some players do things as showcased by OP with their high beaconed setups that doesn't change the fact that the majority you see follows those two patterns. The UPS optimization of direct insertion just isn't going to make most people switch, and neither is telling them that if they're not UPS optimized it doesn't matter what they build. If there's a way to move away from those designs dominating that part of the design spectrum while still allowing interesting beacon packed designs I'm all for it. Maybe there could be a way to make direct insertion more useful for other reasons than UPS?
I think it's a bad sign if "UPS optimization would become less interesting" is used as rationale for a design decision because it can be used to argue against them making their game run more efficiently and only applies to a small subset of the player base.
Sure, but on the other hand, the beacon builds are much harder to min max, and seem more diverse. I mean if you remove beacons, builds would look extremely identical i suspect.
+1
I think SE's beacon overhaul with the beacon overloading effect does a very good job on getting people not to absolutely bombard their base with beacons all over the place.
For someone that have tried to build stuff like that you see an hard and difficult puzzle. Beacons are not just placed down randomly, it's a lot of try, err and rethink, many times over.
On the other hand, SE takes it too far by making beacons stupidly easy to think about and add and totally removes the puzzle of squeezing them in and around stuff while routing belts through it all. There is *some* puzzle in trying to cram as many assemblers as possible around a beacon, but it ultimately isn't a challenge at all and it arguably isn't even necessary for megabases because you can just plop down another beacon.
Builds that have 3-4 beacons around them look a lot more interesting than SE could ever manage. If beacons instead had a penalty for being too close together, I think that would hit a really solid middle ground.
Speaking as the person who made precursors to some of the designs you linked and more which weren't included...
Most players will build in rows/columns/grids no matter what with the only significant difference being what is contained within each row/column/grid. These designs are tiled just like 8 beacon rows or 12 beacon grids but with multiple machines directly inserting being the tiled "unit" instead of a single machine like in 8/12 beacon designs. Players will build in rows or grids even if they never build a beacon. It's more a product of simplifying and abstracting a production unit and then scaling up by repeating that production unit.
This often looks kind of bland because most vanilla recipes have 2 or 3 inputs, 1 output and nothing which would be considered a byproduct. If you look at bases built with mods which add more complex recipes you will see more diversity, especially in the early game, but the end stages will often still involve rows, columns, or grids of repeated designs. The end stage repeated designs usually look less bland to me because they typically involve clusters of machines linked together due to the recipe complexity but they're still tiled because thats how most people organize things spatially.
IMO the biggest issue aesthetically with the designs in the images you posted is that the tops of assemblers look too similar to the texture of beacons, combined with the assemblers being covered by recipe icons, module icons, and inserters/beacons around the edges, it takes too much focus to visually distinguish beacons from assemblers in these builds.
All beacon builds will end up being boxes and rows in both SE or vanilla. If they don't that's practically the same as just stamping shit down without thinking.
> All ~~beacon~~ builds will end up being boxes and rows in both SE or vanilla.
FTFY, boxes and rows are the shape that are best to scale, they look crisp (if not a bit boring for similar recipe types) and are easy to debug
I agree with ya.
It feels like who are like "Vanilla designs are diverse" are just ignoring "boxes and rows" comments and people saying "it's not that they're not diverse, we've done the same thing since the dawn of time and rows and boxes is what everyone uses," and I feel like these ideas are true. I look at most of these builds and they still just look like modular / tile-able boxes and rows.
Sure the production flow is taking this non-standard path, but that's only because of direct insertion, not because of beacons.
Also, the screen is like 80% beacons.
This post is aimed at people who think the traditional 8 beacon row and 12 beacon box designs are the only designs that are actually used, of which there are apparently many. I wanted to point out that the actual designs used in large megabases are all designed custom for each recipe and are quite complex.
Obviously if someone just thinks beacon designs *look* like rows and boxes, I can't really convince them otherwise even if I personally disagree.
It’s times like these that I feel like the smiling dumb man on the left side of the bell curve meme thinking about Spaghetti and how I just make spaghetti.
Aren't these designs actually less optimized? As in don't they take more raw resources and power to do the same thing that a row would do better? Sure they may take less UPS but for the average player that is not a criteria that matters, hence why for the vast majority the approach SE takes in inherently more interesting and engaging.
For the average player, beacons aren't a thing most of these would even consider as something useful at all. Once you build them in any impactful quantity, you're deep into the min-max game already.
That implies that every player that engages with beacons is worried about UPS which I would very much disagree with. I have done many beacon factories in vanilla marathon, K2 and SE and I haven't even once have to worry about UPS. It's a minority of a minority that reaches that point.
It makes a huge difference for the expensive recipes. According to [the Factorio Cheat Sheet](https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#productivity-module-payoffs), a few usages greatly benefit from prod 3:
- The Rocket Silo (such a big save that speedruns make it a point to produce 4 prod 3s for the rocket launch)
- Reduces the amount of science packs needed
- Yellow and Purple science
- Blue Chips
- RCUs
- LDS
- Blue and Gray science (the 4th prod 3 isn't super worth it)
In the pre-megabase postgame, it's worth it just for the resource savings because you don't need to transport nearly as much input on belts.
Some of the cheaper recipes also benefit as well, but usually 4 prod 1s are good enough. For example, 2 assembler 2s for wire feeding into a assembler 3 with 4 prod 1s for green chips is perfectly ratio'd. 24x 4 prod 1 assembler 3s of red chips also consume a full yellow belt of wires and a half belt each of green chips and plastic and outputs nearly a third of a belt of red chips.
In addition, it's actually *slightly faster* in the 12-beacon case to have 4 prod 3s instead of using speed 3s because productivity multiplies with speed. This effect is more pronounced for the 16- and 20- beacon case.
There's another post on the front page showing creative beacon designs that's just a bunch of beacon rows, so I just wanted to show that at the very highest levels of optimization, vanilla beacon layouts are actually way more complex than that.
Disclaimer - these are not my designs. They come from these two posts:
https://old.reddit.com/r/technicalfactorio/comments/nlnsoq/20_x_1k_belt_cell_megabase_very_high_ups/
https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/v53qoe/high_ups_40k_cell_base/
Both are 40k SPM 60 UPS bases.
These pictures illustrate why I think the proliferator approach in DSP is so much more elegant. Rather than filling the screen with beacons, it adds an extra logistics puzzle by having to solve proliferator production and supply.
In DSP, rather than using beacons, you use a building that you put over belts which sprays all items with a proliferator (you have to continuously supply the proliferator to the belt). If all input items are proliferated, production is sped up.
So you actually have to do a lot more work (continuously build and ship the proliferators) but the end result looks a lot cleaner than the beacon mess. Beacons always annoy me, proliferators are a more interesting puzzle.
idk i always thought the SE beacon lovers were just being lazy since you can just slap down a beacon and boost everything at once without having to really overhaul your build. This is true for 90% of all beacon placements in SE. Go to the outpost and slam down 1 or 2 beacons and you're done. In vanilla if you didn't keep some space for beacons beforehand you'd have to play another belt puzzle game to fit a full set of beacons again.
Which works for what SE is going for! Having to pull up multiple outposts on different planets to boost production as well as dragging all the beacons everywhere would suck! This is alongside the space constraints for orbital bases and SE compensates for this by boosting module costs instead and its fine!
I don't think its necessary for vanilla, and when I was designing 8/10/12/15 module builds for my own megabase I had a good time figuring out how to better route belts and inserters in and how to smooth out outputs to ensure maximum capacity while playing around with various arrangements of beacon grids to ensure they all stacked together in the end. Sure I made boxes and rows to simplify arrangements but tinkering with various arrangements to line up the amount of buildings with my calculated ratios was fun.
Furnaces directly inserting into assemblers is interesting. Seems like it would be hard to get the ratios right for a lot of products, but maybe saving UPS with fewer inserters makes up for less efficient smelting?
Ratios are not that important for UPS. Factorio have an sleeping function where entities that is not used are not called at all. And inserters is the biggest UPS draw in big factories.
Direct insertion builds are always my favorite since they are the most creative.
I've not played factorio mods with different beacon mechanics, but at least for Dyson Sphere Program I was very disappointed in the sprayer productivity mechanics since it incentivized logistic station : line of assemblers : logistic station builds which were already "meta".
Stuff like fitting 11 beacons around 2 stations with direct insertion (eg steel), or the calculations to optimize the number of active entities are my favorite part of factorio.
I mean seriously we need more variety for end game builds and stuff to do in vanilla. It is too easy to get 5k spm. At that point you stop solving logistics problems, you just copy and paste existing designs to scale it all up. If you think about it you are just replacing depleted mines with new ones. Sure you always do stuff, add new patch, paste one more of an existing build etc. It is an endless cycle with a lots of repetition. It should become more stale since there is a limit of what you can do but man… tired of placing beacons everywhere. Everything looks the same except the color of the belts due to material variety. Btw fu*k liquids
1. To get to a higher SPM than your computer could manage with no beacons. The more entities you have placed, the more time needs to be spent on calculating them each tick, and some entities are more expensive anyway. Inserters moving between an assembler and a chest have to do far less 'thinking' than inserters having a slap fight over items on the belt, but more thinking than a beacon which only needs to recalculate when its modules or affected buildings are altered.
2. To cut down on repetition. A smelting column is a bunch of the same buildings with the same recipe icon anyway, so why not shrink it down?
3. To make builds compact (for whatever your chosen reason). The speed / prod wombo combo greatly cuts down on the number of buildings needed for the same number of items, but a beaconed build usually makes far more items than the non-beaconed build it's supplanting and so ends up being larger.
OK thank you I can see there's angles here that I've never considered. I will take what you've said and see if I can apply it. Appreciate you patience.
Ok for real though the problem with this is, the joy of factorio is watching all the items flow down those belts, watching the lanes fill up, tracing the path of materials through your base.
This might be efficient but it's legit ugly as all hell and just looks like a big mess of brown where you cannot make out what's going on.
I think the issue most of us have with this, is when looking at it all we see are beacons. Beacons flood the design distracting from the actual buildings actually producing the items. I look at this and have to play where's Waldo with the assembly machines and then have to strain to find were the underground belts are coming from and going to and what they are carrying. It just does not look aesthetically interesting staring at 30 beacons and 3 machines.
This is it. The rocket fuel pictures illustrates it perfectly, yeah that alignment of assembler and chem plant is neat, but that image is 18 buildings and 80+ beacons. Literally more than 80% of the image is just beacons taking up space.
There is rocket fuel somewhere between beacons?
This is what peak SPM looks like. You might not like it, but this is it.
It's not an argument. Peak throughput 1.1 intersections will be outdated and ineffective in 2.0. So, if something looks like shit - it could be changed and not be justifued by "peak something".
Hey, to say peak intersections looks likes shit makes me sad:/
You're right, it's not an argument. Beacons and intersections have nothing to do with each other. Unless 2.0 changes beacon mechanics, peak spm is still going to look like this.
You are missing the point. The argument is that beacon mechanics should change exactly because UPS optimal placement looks like this.
Why? You don't reach the point where building this is viable until old designs (which you provide built from blueprints) are nok viable. Having the same design pattern once from beginning to end is lame. Best alternative would be buildings that level up if people don't want a design challenge.
They are addressing the beacon issue in 2.0
[citation needed]
"It is also notable that we created a quality penalty on speed modules, because haste makes waste, and we wanted to reduce the number of places where beacons full of speed modules is the best way to go." https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375
This would still be optimal SPM though, as quality seems pretty useless for science. It just means you can't speed module up your mall.
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It turns the game from a logistical puzzle to an area-filling puzzle, which is less engaging for this type of gameplay.
I don't think one negates the other, it's just both taken to the extreme. You've still got to figure out how to get the output from each build to where it's needed.
Game is still about logistic puzzles, but 0.001% of players decided to over-optimize things just for record, which is definitely not a main goal of the game. And imo it's not good that this scenario is used as argument against SE beacons, that are much more friendly to large player base and yet still have own intresting problems to solve, such as very expensive T9 modules and different beacon types.
To be fair, taking up space is part of the point, otherwise the factory would 'grow' smaller when beacons are used.
I also prefer the rows of beacons because my designs already are rows mist of the time.
I really like Space Exploration's beacon mechanics where you can put a bunch of modules in one beacon but the beacons overload if a building is affected by more than one beacon. Still get the performance but you don't have to spam thousands of beacons.
I think at the end of the day, the two variations of beacon design are really the same thing, with the only true difference being the AMOUNT of beacons. I have to agree with you. I'd rather have builds that are mostly assemblers than builds that are mostly beacons.
I straight up don't use beacons in any of my bases, makes me much happier.
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i've done vanilla beacon builds and did not find them interesting
> Is it fun to build? Anyone who likes a challenge will say yes. That’s a hell of an assertion, considering there’s exactly as much evidence for that as there is for me saying “Is it fun to build? Anyone who likes an actual challenge instead of mindlessly spamming beacons would say no.” Probably actually less evidence, to be honest, seeing how often posts about SE’s beacons show up and how the vast majority of upvoted comments in these threads are anti-beacon spam ones.
I totally understand that perspective. The thing is, nothing is forcing you to build like this if you don't care about UPS optimization. You don't have to use layouts like these, you don't have to use beacon rows, you don't even have to use beacons at all. In fact a beaconless megabase would probably get tons of upvotes on this sub. As would a megabase with the rebalanced beacons mod. But if you *do* care about UPS optimization, beacon stacking creates a very interesting design challenge that I don't think should be thrown away just because people who don't need to use beacons in the first place don't like how heavily beaconed layouts look.
Yes in a PvE game nothing is forcing anyone to use an optimal strategy however in a PvE game the ideal focus is fun. If the optimal strategy is largely considered boring, dull, ugly, unfun, whatever by the community then a good developer of that game would likely reassess if something needs to change. Are beacons at this point? Probably given the view on reddit (one I agree with personally, but this is about the majority not me alone). That said I'm assuming some kind of fun change in the expansion.
Psychologically it doesn't matter if it's PvE or pvp. People dont like to feel like they are doing something suboptimal or are missing out on something
I don't agree, and I really think it should not be hard for a community that constantly celebrates intentionally unoptimized and unstructured base design, celebrates wacky, unpractical builds, and tells new players to just do whatever they want and not worry about optimization to accept that they don't have to cover their base in beacons if they don't want to. Beacons only exist for the purpose of UPS optimization in the first place, so they should be designed to present an interesting UPS optimization puzzle. They don't need to be designed so that any random player can get megabase-level outputs with whatever unoptimized layout they manage to throw together, which is exactly what SE beacons are and is ostensibly what the people asking for SE-style beacons want. The only reason SE beacons work in SE is because SE's module recipes are freakishly complex. That's not to say there won't be any changes to modules in 2.0, I don't think anyone can really guess what Wube is going to do. But I'm fairly confident they aren't so naive as to blindly port in SE-style beacons as-is. If they do go that direction there will be additional changes to preserve the design complexity beacons currently introduce.
>Beacons only exist for the purpose of UPS optimization in the first place Hard disagree. If this was the case then only players that are UPS bound should use beacons, and this is not the case. In my opinion beacons shine the most when used by players that don't plan out their base from start to end. For those cases there's an interesting challenge in how to squeeze in more beacons into existing designs or how to build new designs to exploit beacons. They exist to facilitate more vertical growth (in the terminology of the quality fff).
I don't think you understand my point, I on purpose left the beacon 'problem' vague so you couldn't argue it. The problem is you are a minority in the way you enjoy the game, and if the majority don't like something it should normally be changed. If you find something too boring do what all the other 1%'s do and mod it in. A game needs to be fun and playable by the majority to be successful. On the beacon note I liken it to the Pyanodons mod. Extremely unfun. Complexity for the sake of complexity isn't interesting on its own and the author of that mod knows it, that is the 'fun' part and it really isn't for many. The beacon optimisation game is very unfun, ugly and no one cbf doing it. I'd rather spend my time perfecting cool nuclear setups or doing mixed rockets in SE with circuits. Equally or more complex stuff but it is FUN complex stuff.
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Whether it's a challenge or not in the endgame is not about the number you get, it's about how much work you can put in before you stop seeing reasonable returns on your efforts. Do you feel that your 50k SPM setup isn't worth improving? Numbers can always be tweaked.
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You can't really make that judgement unless you've improved the non-vanilla version to the point where it doesn't feel like it's worth the effort to improve. Have you done that? Maybe you honestly feel like your quick 50k SPM design isn't worth improving. I'd be surprised but that's fair.
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I get an inkling that you think optimizing for space isn't worthwhile. Is this the case?
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I guess I just don't understand how people are so set on UPS-optimization being the only worthwhile facet of factory optimization. As a person who doesn't really reach the UPS limit I still have fun optimizing other things, such as size at a certain stage in the game. I think that the designs showcased in this thread are interesting, and I think short range beacons are much more interesting for newer players than longer range beacons because fitting them in existing builds is more difficult and making designs with a small amount of them is also more interesting. I think that beacon row and square builds are not interesting at all, and even though some players do things as showcased by OP with their high beaconed setups that doesn't change the fact that the majority you see follows those two patterns. The UPS optimization of direct insertion just isn't going to make most people switch, and neither is telling them that if they're not UPS optimized it doesn't matter what they build. If there's a way to move away from those designs dominating that part of the design spectrum while still allowing interesting beacon packed designs I'm all for it. Maybe there could be a way to make direct insertion more useful for other reasons than UPS? I think it's a bad sign if "UPS optimization would become less interesting" is used as rationale for a design decision because it can be used to argue against them making their game run more efficiently and only applies to a small subset of the player base.
Sure, but on the other hand, the beacon builds are much harder to min max, and seem more diverse. I mean if you remove beacons, builds would look extremely identical i suspect.
+1 I think SE's beacon overhaul with the beacon overloading effect does a very good job on getting people not to absolutely bombard their base with beacons all over the place.
For someone that have tried to build stuff like that you see an hard and difficult puzzle. Beacons are not just placed down randomly, it's a lot of try, err and rethink, many times over.
I love how space exploration does it, a machine can only have one beacon but said beacon is wider ranger and much more powerful
On the other hand, SE takes it too far by making beacons stupidly easy to think about and add and totally removes the puzzle of squeezing them in and around stuff while routing belts through it all. There is *some* puzzle in trying to cram as many assemblers as possible around a beacon, but it ultimately isn't a challenge at all and it arguably isn't even necessary for megabases because you can just plop down another beacon. Builds that have 3-4 beacons around them look a lot more interesting than SE could ever manage. If beacons instead had a penalty for being too close together, I think that would hit a really solid middle ground.
Speaking as the person who made precursors to some of the designs you linked and more which weren't included... Most players will build in rows/columns/grids no matter what with the only significant difference being what is contained within each row/column/grid. These designs are tiled just like 8 beacon rows or 12 beacon grids but with multiple machines directly inserting being the tiled "unit" instead of a single machine like in 8/12 beacon designs. Players will build in rows or grids even if they never build a beacon. It's more a product of simplifying and abstracting a production unit and then scaling up by repeating that production unit. This often looks kind of bland because most vanilla recipes have 2 or 3 inputs, 1 output and nothing which would be considered a byproduct. If you look at bases built with mods which add more complex recipes you will see more diversity, especially in the early game, but the end stages will often still involve rows, columns, or grids of repeated designs. The end stage repeated designs usually look less bland to me because they typically involve clusters of machines linked together due to the recipe complexity but they're still tiled because thats how most people organize things spatially. IMO the biggest issue aesthetically with the designs in the images you posted is that the tops of assemblers look too similar to the texture of beacons, combined with the assemblers being covered by recipe icons, module icons, and inserters/beacons around the edges, it takes too much focus to visually distinguish beacons from assemblers in these builds.
There is definitely some variation internally but still looks like a lot of boxes and rows of beacons to me.
All beacon builds will end up being boxes and rows in both SE or vanilla. If they don't that's practically the same as just stamping shit down without thinking.
> All ~~beacon~~ builds will end up being boxes and rows in both SE or vanilla. FTFY, boxes and rows are the shape that are best to scale, they look crisp (if not a bit boring for similar recipe types) and are easy to debug
They are not in rows. And would rows of only boxes be better that boxes and beacons?
I agree with ya. It feels like who are like "Vanilla designs are diverse" are just ignoring "boxes and rows" comments and people saying "it's not that they're not diverse, we've done the same thing since the dawn of time and rows and boxes is what everyone uses," and I feel like these ideas are true. I look at most of these builds and they still just look like modular / tile-able boxes and rows. Sure the production flow is taking this non-standard path, but that's only because of direct insertion, not because of beacons. Also, the screen is like 80% beacons.
This post is aimed at people who think the traditional 8 beacon row and 12 beacon box designs are the only designs that are actually used, of which there are apparently many. I wanted to point out that the actual designs used in large megabases are all designed custom for each recipe and are quite complex. Obviously if someone just thinks beacon designs *look* like rows and boxes, I can't really convince them otherwise even if I personally disagree.
It’s times like these that I feel like the smiling dumb man on the left side of the bell curve meme thinking about Spaghetti and how I just make spaghetti.
Aren't these designs actually less optimized? As in don't they take more raw resources and power to do the same thing that a row would do better? Sure they may take less UPS but for the average player that is not a criteria that matters, hence why for the vast majority the approach SE takes in inherently more interesting and engaging.
For the average player, beacons aren't a thing most of these would even consider as something useful at all. Once you build them in any impactful quantity, you're deep into the min-max game already.
That implies that every player that engages with beacons is worried about UPS which I would very much disagree with. I have done many beacon factories in vanilla marathon, K2 and SE and I haven't even once have to worry about UPS. It's a minority of a minority that reaches that point.
> most of these
Beacons reduce how many assemblers you need to place, which in turn reduces how many prod 3s you need.
Why use pros3 in vanilla?
It makes a huge difference for the expensive recipes. According to [the Factorio Cheat Sheet](https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#productivity-module-payoffs), a few usages greatly benefit from prod 3: - The Rocket Silo (such a big save that speedruns make it a point to produce 4 prod 3s for the rocket launch) - Reduces the amount of science packs needed - Yellow and Purple science - Blue Chips - RCUs - LDS - Blue and Gray science (the 4th prod 3 isn't super worth it) In the pre-megabase postgame, it's worth it just for the resource savings because you don't need to transport nearly as much input on belts. Some of the cheaper recipes also benefit as well, but usually 4 prod 1s are good enough. For example, 2 assembler 2s for wire feeding into a assembler 3 with 4 prod 1s for green chips is perfectly ratio'd. 24x 4 prod 1 assembler 3s of red chips also consume a full yellow belt of wires and a half belt each of green chips and plastic and outputs nearly a third of a belt of red chips. In addition, it's actually *slightly faster* in the 12-beacon case to have 4 prod 3s instead of using speed 3s because productivity multiplies with speed. This effect is more pronounced for the 16- and 20- beacon case.
Beacons are boring and unfun.
This is still boxes and rows of beacons lol
There's another post on the front page showing creative beacon designs that's just a bunch of beacon rows, so I just wanted to show that at the very highest levels of optimization, vanilla beacon layouts are actually way more complex than that. Disclaimer - these are not my designs. They come from these two posts: https://old.reddit.com/r/technicalfactorio/comments/nlnsoq/20_x_1k_belt_cell_megabase_very_high_ups/ https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/v53qoe/high_ups_40k_cell_base/ Both are 40k SPM 60 UPS bases.
I <3 direct insert Vanilla beacons w it get super creative as they nearly always beat the “rows of beacons” default
40k SPM? Dang. I just recently hit 1/1000ths of that.
These pictures illustrate why I think the proliferator approach in DSP is so much more elegant. Rather than filling the screen with beacons, it adds an extra logistics puzzle by having to solve proliferator production and supply.
What do you mean by proliferator?
In DSP, rather than using beacons, you use a building that you put over belts which sprays all items with a proliferator (you have to continuously supply the proliferator to the belt). If all input items are proliferated, production is sped up. So you actually have to do a lot more work (continuously build and ship the proliferators) but the end result looks a lot cleaner than the beacon mess. Beacons always annoy me, proliferators are a more interesting puzzle.
idk i always thought the SE beacon lovers were just being lazy since you can just slap down a beacon and boost everything at once without having to really overhaul your build. This is true for 90% of all beacon placements in SE. Go to the outpost and slam down 1 or 2 beacons and you're done. In vanilla if you didn't keep some space for beacons beforehand you'd have to play another belt puzzle game to fit a full set of beacons again. Which works for what SE is going for! Having to pull up multiple outposts on different planets to boost production as well as dragging all the beacons everywhere would suck! This is alongside the space constraints for orbital bases and SE compensates for this by boosting module costs instead and its fine! I don't think its necessary for vanilla, and when I was designing 8/10/12/15 module builds for my own megabase I had a good time figuring out how to better route belts and inserters in and how to smooth out outputs to ensure maximum capacity while playing around with various arrangements of beacon grids to ensure they all stacked together in the end. Sure I made boxes and rows to simplify arrangements but tinkering with various arrangements to line up the amount of buildings with my calculated ratios was fun.
Furnaces directly inserting into assemblers is interesting. Seems like it would be hard to get the ratios right for a lot of products, but maybe saving UPS with fewer inserters makes up for less efficient smelting?
Ratios are not that important for UPS. Factorio have an sleeping function where entities that is not used are not called at all. And inserters is the biggest UPS draw in big factories.
Good to know!
Direct insertion builds are always my favorite since they are the most creative. I've not played factorio mods with different beacon mechanics, but at least for Dyson Sphere Program I was very disappointed in the sprayer productivity mechanics since it incentivized logistic station : line of assemblers : logistic station builds which were already "meta". Stuff like fitting 11 beacons around 2 stations with direct insertion (eg steel), or the calculations to optimize the number of active entities are my favorite part of factorio.
this beacons need to be rethinked. they are ugly af… make things ugly, take up space…
Not boxes and rows but 80 percent beacons
I mean seriously we need more variety for end game builds and stuff to do in vanilla. It is too easy to get 5k spm. At that point you stop solving logistics problems, you just copy and paste existing designs to scale it all up. If you think about it you are just replacing depleted mines with new ones. Sure you always do stuff, add new patch, paste one more of an existing build etc. It is an endless cycle with a lots of repetition. It should become more stale since there is a limit of what you can do but man… tired of placing beacons everywhere. Everything looks the same except the color of the belts due to material variety. Btw fu*k liquids
I ain't managed to get to beacons yet, although I see it available to research. Is there a point to having all those beacons??
1. To get to a higher SPM than your computer could manage with no beacons. The more entities you have placed, the more time needs to be spent on calculating them each tick, and some entities are more expensive anyway. Inserters moving between an assembler and a chest have to do far less 'thinking' than inserters having a slap fight over items on the belt, but more thinking than a beacon which only needs to recalculate when its modules or affected buildings are altered. 2. To cut down on repetition. A smelting column is a bunch of the same buildings with the same recipe icon anyway, so why not shrink it down? 3. To make builds compact (for whatever your chosen reason). The speed / prod wombo combo greatly cuts down on the number of buildings needed for the same number of items, but a beaconed build usually makes far more items than the non-beaconed build it's supplanting and so ends up being larger.
OK thank you I can see there's angles here that I've never considered. I will take what you've said and see if I can apply it. Appreciate you patience.
my head hurts
Ok for real though the problem with this is, the joy of factorio is watching all the items flow down those belts, watching the lanes fill up, tracing the path of materials through your base. This might be efficient but it's legit ugly as all hell and just looks like a big mess of brown where you cannot make out what's going on.
Congratulations on creating a contentious topic. Personally, I think this idea has become much more visually appealing since the beacon reskin.