it’s just better this way
I think there are a couple flaws in this design that seem to be glossed over. Granted the video was very long for this kind of topic so perhaps I missed the counterpoints. But, to me they are:
- the hoverpack negates the need to jump over everything, so the initial point is very early game focused, and in the early game you’re building simple things
- you should never really need a top down view of your factory to understand it. Manifolds are very simple, there isn’t a lot to figure out once it’s already built, and frankly if you build large, spaghetti factories then you need to do yourself a favor and simplify into smaller factories or rooms. Encapsulation is a friend
- coveyors on the ceiling are nice, but they have one fundamental flaw - you can’t see what’s on the belt. That removes your ability to assess flow rate or even to refresh your memory on what’s going where. I’ve done many ceiling conveyors and inevitably I end up hitting my head on the ceiling trying to peek at what’s going on up there
A better strategy, to my mind, is to use floors dedicated to conveyors, or have floors that are so simple that there are only two or three things being moved on the floor (except for floors with manufacturers and the like with 5+ things). It really improves the “readability” of a factory. Plus you can use windows and glass to still allow for glance value assessments if desired
I appreciate the thoughtful comments. I’d encourage you to watch to the end, there are definitely counterpoints.:
- The hoverpack is a late-game thing, and as I clarify in the follow up to this video, this is really to help people overcome the complexity hurdle of the early game, which is a big problem. The devs said only 0.2% of people beat the last phase of the game prior to 1.0. A lot of people are attacking this technique from the point of view of being very experienced players that have all the tools, but if you’re that far in the game, this may not be for you.
- I like my spaghetti factory, it emphasizes the complex industrial look of this game, which I don’t like to hide. This technique allowed me to make it far more complex than I ever would’ve managed without this technique. You can always encapsulate after you adopt this technique, and I absolutely have in certain places. Again, in the follow up to this video I cover encapsulation right at the start, although I don’t use that word for it.
- You can wave a deconstructor at the belt and see what’s on it.
This is not intended to be an all-encompassing method, just a rule of thumb that makes the task of hand-building the early factory much easier, which you can then scale and extend into the late game if you wish. Plenty of people are talking about logistics floors, but I don’t use them because they obfuscate even more than a ceiling belt. If your problem is that you can’t see what’s on the belt well… you can’t see through floors either. You can through glass floors, but then you’re bringing back the visual noise anyway, and I’ve always found tracking belts through even glass floors to be much more work than following a belt to the ceiling.
Again, I’d encourage you to finish the video and also check the follow-up, where I roll this method into stackable blueprints, and I explain that these blueprints can easily be incorporated into logistics floors if that’s your thing.
I also have a note in that video apologising for calling people babies :)
Eh, there’s no tutorial here, people can make things the way they like
I like this enough that I’m glad I saw it before I got too far.
Real players just slide under all their belts.
Real players elevate their belts so they can run their pipelines directly on the ground because, and I can’t express this strong enough, fuck headlift with a rusty spork.
Whenever I need headlift on a lot of pipes of the same fluid I build a “water tower”. Built properly it should cover all your headlift needs.
By “water tower” are you just directing the input into a couple water tanks placed higher than wherever the water needs to go?
Kinda but not quite. The fluid buffer isn’t necessary and it’s just one pipe going up and down. The idea of a water tower is to pressurize all your pipes with just one headlift pipe. Let’s say you need 1800 cubic meters of water to go up 40m. How many mk 2 pumps do you need? Three? Actually you need just one. You take one pipe, add the pump to it and bring it up to 40m, then bring it back down. That pipe is your “water tower”. You then connect it to the three pipes you want going up to your factory and all those pipes will move water up to the water tower height. The best part is that you can connect however many additional pipes to that water tower and they all will flow up to the same height without any additional pumps.
