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Comment by CodesInChaos | Hacker News Reader

I can recommend turning off biters, or at least biter expansion. That way you can at least focus on building your factory, without getting distracted by attacks.

Using a main bus where your factory is built in comb like rows on one side (so you can make the bus wider on the other side) is simple and will work pretty well for the starter base (i.e until you fire your first rocket and "win" the game).

I often split my starter factory in 4 quadrants with sufficient space for belts between them:

1. Smelters

2. Main bus based factory

3. Oil processing

4. Personal fabrication and mall (especially once logistic bots become available)

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Do not recommend main bus design to new players! The most fun I've in Factorio had was getting to a rocket blind and dealing with my spaghetti factory. Even mentioning any kind of pattern to new players should be avoided.

I avoided a main bus after noticing nearly all the copper went to producing circuits and low density structure, and similarly most iron for steel and green circuits - so just site those close together linked via short buses [1]. Then ship the remaining copper, iron and steel to the Science factory using single wagon trains. (That’s just for a simple one rocket per hour factory)

[1] Cu -> Circuits -> LDS <- Steel <- Fe

I don't this that applies here, since the person I gave the tip to was so overwhelmed that they gave up.

As a factory game vet, it's always fun to see how the big daddy factorio primes first time players in the other factory games, and you see main busses in Satisfatory (which is sub optimal because the limiting factor is belt transport capacity), and Dyson Sphere Program (viable in the early game before drone logistics, but only in the arctic poles, and irrelevant later on).

Obviously, this main bus pattern does _work_ in all the games, if sufficiently dedicated, as does having no pattern at all, if sufficiently bloody minded (johnson) about it.

The bigger problem with busses in Satisfactory is they're too fragile. One component backs up and it can wreck the bus for everybody else. Setting up the extra belts to deal with overflow at every spot ends up being more work than just running dedicated belts for each component.

A typical main bus in factorio uses a (half) belt for each product. Sushi belts are a different thing.

Would even recommend peaceful mode, biters to me always felt like the least fun part of the game, especially while still learning how things worked. It's like you have a coworker come over and interrupt whatever you were doing, except instead of doing small talk they close half your tabs, clear your browser data so you are logged out of every site, and steal your coffee mug

I disable expa sion but also biters evolution. Without expansion and evolution biters are just the right amount of pressure for me for casual play without completely losing having to climb half of the game tech tree

For some reason I never had a problem with the biters on the default difficulty. I got the sense they were there as another ball to juggle rather than a primary antagonist. Simply building turrets around structures was enough to fend them off in the early game until I could proactively destroy their nests in the pollution zone. After I started doing that, they never bothered me again.

It's not about the challenge tbh i play rail worlds because I like trains and while it evens out long term the start is slower and I dont feel like having time based evolution is a fair or interesting. I do leave pollution based evolution tho. That feed into base design choices

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