Bots in 40, sub 60 rocket launch next.
3 years ago

Made it to bots in 40 with 67 red engines and 33 frames. Didn't totally hand feed my way as I originally intended. I do a lot of direct insert gears/gc/coil factories from burner -> furnace -> assembler factories (very few belts except to help optimize walking distance.). The first factory I create is a burner/furnace one, which produces up to 35 burners per minute.

https://imgur.com/a/4XSeJ19

This lets me spam a coal patch as well as burners everywhere. It will also solve the long term smelting problem I hope. Feel free to use these ideas.

My biggest challenge by far really was getting the oil setup, but I found a map where it's super close to where I build everything. I broke down and memorized / practiced the pipe placement separately. I even use shortcuts for this. :p I try avoid such things as I'm not really a speedrunner per se, just wanted to get to bots in 40 and was close except for that.

I have zero doubt a GOTLAP top #1 runner could do it five minutes faster. Those guys are cray cray I don't even think a keyboad macro replayer could do it faster than what the current top guy does

I'd upload a video, but only for entertainment value. you have no idea how slow before bots I am, at least relative to you guys.

Speaking of bots -> Next goal is rocket launch in 20 minutes.

Fortunately, I am actually pretty good with blueprints, componentizing them for reuse, and doing optimal things with robots - frankly far more skilled than I am as a keyboard speedrunner. I think I ended up spending 99% of my time in map mode in my longest factorio game. Much more confident about this part than I was about getting to bots in 40 minutes.

Looking at the current speedrun videos, I see so many huge areas for improvement, but it was always after you guys get to bots :) Before bots, I was only amazed at the talent.

Anwyways, yes, I get it, you're doubtful. You ask - but what about all that smelting to be done? How does bot wizardry fix that? 200k iron 200k copper?

Well I can have a large iron/copper smelting op to start out with at least near the beginning.

Remember that burner/furnace factory and coal spam? After a few minutes in I can very easily spam about as many burners/furnaces as I want. I have a near infinite supply as far as that goes and enough coal to feed them.

I'll have to spend a couple of minutes or so setting them up and a little bit extra refueling during the run. But I think I can shave 2 or 3 minutes off my 40 minute run to compensate. I'm sure someone could do even better. Just need to practice my inserter / power technique a bit more. I tried burner inserters, but they use too much min coal.

The burner->furnace->inserter->chest combo I am using is 12 sq meters and produces ~20 iron per minute. On a 32 by 32 patch, that's about 86 sets, and 70K plates per chunk after 40 minutes. I believe the burner refuel is every 300 or so or every 25k total.. Furnaces need to refuel at around 60k?

Shift craft Inventory hack for infinite carry supply, with a few science in between so I can offload :) Grenade tech is very handy and must have for this. If they nerf that, I'm screwed of course. To make sure they don't, I asked them on the forums to nerf it. heh :) WEll, if they do, I'll have to robot deconstruct stuff and belt it out I guess. Not a terrible idea to do anyways. Coal carrying will be a set back tho, but not life ending.

Steel, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader. It's rather important though as I'll obviously need to build a crap load of assembler2 when I go for rocket launch after bots. Perhaps more important than plates themselves.

Anyways, progress.

Germany

sounds great. The video would be cool to see and if you don't mind sharing the replay for the above mentioned sequence?

I'll upload a video to youtube once I rocket launch in sub 60, that way I won't be mocked as much for terrible keyboarding skills. :)

I am doing it for NewGame+ category, though I don't find blueprint import helps that much prebots, however with post bots, shouldn't be long.

BTW with the production you have going in your gotlap run, you could easily beat out my bots record I'm sure. I was actually able to get GOTLAP in 28 minutes. How it's done in 24 minutes is frankly amaazing.

GOTLAP is 520 / 375. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in your run you have 48 labs going. oil processing is 455-290. The run from oil to advanced oil processing is 18.75K worth of lab sec time. You can do that in 6.7 minutes with 48 labs - assuming you don't add production / labs!

After advanced oil processing there is 350 science left r/g/b, which is another 10K, which will take 3.5 minutes with 48 labs.

Given your growth curve, I can see you adding another 24 labs + production + oil in 10. Say add average of 12 throughout run to advanced oil and 18 for blue science. That'd be about 5 minutes to advanced, and then 2 or 3 minutes to bots depending on how fast you can get oil and plastic prod up.

I'd recommend putting down a furnace / burner factory to start with tho. I have mine complete by 7:30. The trick is laying down your inserters/poles/boxes while lab is researching automation (do that as early as possible) and having your gc/gears ready to craft the 4 assemblers in 2 seconds.

The beauty of having an early furnace/burner factory is you can get your ore prod up far faster than you can crafting them by yourself.

Building some gc/coil prod going is good too. gc/coil never goes out of style. Being able to repurpose prod from belts/inserters to engines and red/green to green/blue is important as well, which is where the handfeeding comes in.

The problem with the factories in the runs currently is they become obsolete quickly as you progress throughout the tech tree. It's a lot of botique custom work for little long term payoff. Once you hit bots you get access to blueprint copy paste, and all that work you did was mostly useless so why invest.

For example, to get to rocket silo tech I think you need what, 5800 gears for red science?

If you have 120 assembler down and enough iron plates, you can do that in 48 seconds. Red Science done, and now you can use all those assemblers for something else. Yes, you can probably set up a red line in less time, but you can't repurpose those assemblers.

Post bots, of course, it's all different because bots can't hand feed. If logistics system were cheaper, maybe?

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Germany

GOTLAP is 530 / 375 consumed. To make sure all labs work until the end I overproduce a lot. Production is usually around 600 / 500 by the time the locomotive is placed.

blazespinnaker likes this

Well, the 10 for automation is optional. ;p

Yeah, the prod at the end is pretty wild. I admit I tried but I gave up trying to beat your times.

I did play around a little with getting some good ore prod out of the gate at 10 minutes, just curious what I could do with the furnace/burner factory. My best so far is 70 furnace/burner pairs on ore, 10 on stone and 35 on coal, and 20 furnaces ready to be deployed / changed into burners.

I imagine I can probably do better though with fewer mistakes and balancing crafting of burners better between factory and hand queue. Thinking 80 furnaces / 120 burners down is probably best I can do. Spamming stone burners early helps a lot.

For comparison at 10 minutes, looking at soleglo, he has 48 furnace/burner pairs down and 24 on coal. He's removed all but the last from stone at that point.

Edited by the author 3 years ago

I might be able to get my bots runtime down - if I can get 80 furnace running at minute 10.

Say 54 on iron, 26 on copper. That'd be 1K iron .5K copper. per minute. Bots only needs about 15K iron / 6.3K copper . Say another 4K/1K for 60 labs and 70 assemblers and another 600-700 for oil/plants/pipes. All in, that's only about ~20 minutes smelting, which is 30 minutes total. I should be able to hand feed and craft in 70 assemblers faster than these furnaces can smelt.

edit to add: Maybe need to add a few more assemblers for engines. If I can have all the red/green done by time blue starts, I should be able to repurpose everything to blue.

Edited by the author 3 years ago

Hmm might be able to improve on gotlap as well, though it's a bit of distraction from my goal.

Yeah, I can get to ad oil by m30 with just using 54 iron furnaces and 28 copper. Had to slow it down to .75 though, but it's a first run through. There was quite a bit of slack in the run, too. Tried again and got in 28m. The useful thing bout handfeeding is that it's easy to simulate and write down the order of movements.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
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