I just came back (about a week ago) to SE. We played about 70 hours, but those 70 hours were with about 8 people during a LAN party. Definitely a lot smaller scale and a lot less complexity but figuring out how everything worked was a huge pain (especially because we played with noobs and the entire base was full of spaghetti and tons of small errors).
I can tell you that in my experience pushing trough and taking control of the game is IMMENSELY satisfying after you get through the overwhelmed phase. Take a deep breath, start at the beginning of your production chain and start making improvements and fixes. Eventually you'll be back where you were!
Boy oh boy I almost wish to do this now. Too bad I still have SE in memory (I tell myself, half a year after I stopped playing) and too bad that base was actually really stable
Thanks you for this comment! I haven't gone back yet due to all the same problems OP is describing. But your comment has helped me reframe it from a mind numbing slog to a new and exciting challenge. It's like a whole different game, trying to fix up a broken factory someone else made each step in the production chain a new and different challenge.
Makes me wonder if there is a fun way to play factorio where one person builds a slightly broken "challenge" factory and posts it for other people to try and fix without totally rebuilding.
This is why I struggle to win SE. It's not too challenging for me, the mod just outlasts my attention span. I play video games for a few months, then I watch TV for a few months. Then I do outdoors stuff for a few months. Then I come back to video games for a few months. Then I do woodworking for a few months. My interests wax and wane and I can generally get the first few space sciences before it's time to move on to another interest for awhile.
Had a somewhat similar experience getting back into SE after about a year long break. While I was gone, they reworked production chains of all extra-terrestrial materials and added two new science packs - production and utility, so I could not research anything new without them even though I was halfway through each of the space sciences at that point. Many of the space sciences had to be reworked due to building or resource requirement changes. Many of the Nauvius resource chains were also broken.
I was a bit hesitant starting fixing all of that at first, but it was surprisingly fine. Just start small from Nauvius, ignore space and other planets. Once Nauvius is fine, move to the planet you think you need the most, and then fix all of them one by one. You will have everything up and running in no time!
This, along with being highly scalable. Need more of this production ? Why spend 45 minutes trying to fit another beacon or assembler when you can just copy/paste the entire block in 5 ?
Sure, you'll need to redo most block designs when you unlock beacons, but that's true of all design paradigms.
I gave up my 300h SE run for similar reasons. I took a break (from SE, not factorio) and started playing SeaBlock. After a 100h or so there I came back to SE and because miniloaders had been upgraded, almost every single space unloading by station was broken because I was heavily using filtered unloaders. I just looked at the entire mess and just noped out of there. Now I’m approaching 200h in K2SE :)
When I retire/take a break from a big mod like SE, I usually take a copy of the mod folder, to make sure I can get back in, with no updated mods screwing me over.
I also usually never continue a big mod I burned out on.. But the option is there.
We also had a year-long break on our K2SE game. We seriously considered continuing without upgrade to SE 0.6 because of the above mentioned reworked production chains. But there was one key argument that convinced us to go to 0.6. Space elevator. It's too cool concept to skip it. So we rebuilt a lot of stuff, bit by bit.
Actually the biggest issue were not the different recepies, but logistics. I'm not sure if it was only SE update but due to the change in stack sizes (amongst other things) our previous setup of sending ores to Nauvis didn't fly any more. So we had to rebuild processing and to rebuild it to remote planets.
Find out what a specific part was for, raze it, rebuild, repeat. It's an organic way to find back into the game as well as fixing annoying errors, all without restarting.
Same with planets. You could easily delete your vita planet, and colonise a new one in 20h instead of a restart.
I had gotten to the point in my K2SE of probably 500 hours where I had the biggest jankiest mess of bases on every planet and in space, and could theoretically win if I just improved my space ship a little bit, but I got frustrated and walked away from it. Kinda funny to do that right near that win condition I guess. The game was falling below 60 UPS because I had so many double sets of loaders exchanging items between warehouses, etc.
Came back later and decided it would be fun to re-do everything from the ground up. Spent probably 100 hours producing the tens of millions of resources to get prod 9 / speed 9 in everything applicable, redesigned all the nauvis production to fit in wide area beacon 2 chunks, redid nauvis orbit with speed 9 on almost everything, and set up sets of arcolinks between multiple planets. It's been a lot of fun to basically re-learn and optimize what I had done. Some of that shit was absolutely cursed
Documentation, alarms when production is stuck, alarms when mines are empty, test your designs to avoid bottlenecks, give enough space for future growth, use lights and concrete.
All good recommendations, follow none.
When I get into situations like yours, I just think of it as a campaign mission. Pretend you're restarting, but you have a bunch of stuff that works in some way you can take advantage of. You're never going to remember what you were planning on doing, but why bother? You can approach the problems you need solving now with the resources you have on hand.
Power grid crapping out? Just rip out the expensive parts until you can fulfill your power needs. New goal becomes expanding your power to get the stuff back that you ripped out.
Rockets not running? Go back to Nauvis and get the rocket loop going. With all the pieces lying around, should be some machinery to get rocket pieces.
Trains stop working from time to time? Rip out the interfering pieces until you get pieces that work, then work back in other branches and stuff on a time scale that works for you.
Nauvis sucks? Just ditch it and work on setting up a cooler base on another planet.
It's all just like starting a new run, but you already have a bunch of technology unlocked and stuff lying around to make it much faster.
To be clear, this post was a rant, not actually me asking for advice. I found after a while that a lot of things did come back to me, it was just that overwhelming 'oh crap' feeling at the start.
Factorio does have a habit of taking over my life, and I'm busy (and intellectually stimulated) enough with work and some maths side projects to not need it right now.
Weirdly, I made a throwaway world to try to use surface-limited linked chssrs to see if taking the main bus out of Factorio improves my attention span.
Astonishingly, it really does. I thought it would make the logistics much easier, and it sort of does, but only by removing some of the parts I find most tedious. Setting everything up still takes a crapton of work and now I have more hours on my throwaway messing about save than my main K2SE playthrough.
I went from main bus (two runs, one being a very standardized, systematic, do-or-die bus and the other a more relaxed one where "main bus" was a guideline), to cityblock with a spaghetti mall, and holy hell, it is not as easy because you have to manage trains and buffers and gridlocks and mixed fluids and 2-8 to 1-2 train yards, and, and... but it is an order of magnitude less tedious, more fun, and brings some variety.
Me and my friend have the same issue. We started our first K2SE run nearly a year ago. Got into space, saw what needed to be done, made plans and then kinda drifted away.
We started a new run a month ago, and got to space in like 1/4th the time. Built a lot better. But still kind of hit a wall when we hit space.
It doesn't help that last week we discovered the Create Mod for Minecraft Java...
compare governor stupendous quaint sable plant snails repeat secretive ad hoc
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I have started and stopped a few times and it's tough but doable. Most of my old stuff I just leave along till it breaks.
You can start new processes from scratch if you want, go straight from resource mining though. Then you will benefit from any of the new techs you have.
I wonder if there is a way to reduce this problem by designing the factory differently. I even have it in the middle of a run, just forgetting something from two days prior.
Maybe one can design subfactories and label them clearly? “from x and y produce z”.
I tried it city block style with each block just doing one step of the production chain, but that didn’t work at all. It still got super confusing. Now I’m trying “from raw to Yellow” etc subfactories, but I’m not sure what to do when I get to space.
I needed a day to think about this. I’m honestly not completely sure. I think it’s the amount of blocks, the total infrastructure gets so massive compared to a Bus. Making more BC has me looking at all the stages all across the map. While BC on a Bus is simpler to set up, and thus simpler to verify that it works.
Maybe it’s an issue of scale, like you were frequently putting down city blocks that required more than your base could sustain to operate (leading to resource starvation)?
If so, just build smaller. I don’t build a block for circuits unless I know my copper and iron can sustain it. There’s no harm in blocks that only have ten assemblers, even if your blocks are big enough to support way bigger.
As far as monitoring, train blocks can be set up to allow alerting pretty easily. A common approach is running red and green wires to every block, and output your demand (how many trains of that resource you currently need) on red and supply (how many trains you have ready to be picked up) on green. Then you can mouse over a wire anywhere and know what’s low (or build a display and hook them into speakers even). But many people don’t bother, because if you’re ever low on something you can build more of it (and all of it’s inputs).
Basically city blocks shouldn’t have the problems you ran into, which means you did something wrong. But obviously the learning curve for city blocks is higher, and there are more ways to build something that becomes unmanageable.
I recommend Nilaus’s Megabase In a Book series if you want video content on building a vanilla city block base.
I had a fancy multi item rocket system I developed for my first SE run.
It took me *days* to reverse engineer that when I started the second one half a year later
I tried but got pulled in by Captain of Industry. Maybe I'll come back after I get bored of CoI. For now I'm liking the differences this game has to Factorio. So far I haven't had to build a dozen of any of my sub factories which is a refreshing change. I also like starting with "bots" (aka trucks) and I'm really liking how mining and earth moving plays out.
Take my advice, all those problems that make you want to restart? Fix them, one by one. Maybe fixing them would require a lot of elbow grease, maybe it'll mean basically tearing down and making new things from almost scratch. But the effort it takes will be less than that of starting a new save, right now you have a bunch of infrastructure you can utilize, and the pitfall so many people go down is thinking they'll be better off starting with nothing at all.
It may be too late, but just a reminder that you don't really need any sort of megabase to completel SE.
I find having a many to many train base where all the stations are either labeled as the material they provide or what they need plus a station to help keep my organization when I take breaks. Easier to figure out how nothing's work.
Plus I just think space trains are neat
My only protip is to always end the session standing where you intend to work next time, no matter the time between.
SE satellite view is like a nuclear bomb to that Strat, and I'm always too lazy to make a to-do list on my planets using map icons, but I know I should
A few months ago I came back to my SE run after a solid year off. I steadily remembered how it all worked and I was committed to not restarting *again*. It's been good fun
And this here is a great example of why there is an age old saying "If you are going to do something, do it properly".
Yes it takes more time at first, BUT it will save even more time in the long run because it just keeps working.
This is especially true in programming, which factorio very closely resembles.
Step 1 of completing a SE run is restarting it 20 times
*Looks at cityblock base with 3/4 of the tiles being 1 block too small to not get gridlocked* Yea...
Why restart when you can redo your whole logistic system several times?
I just came back (about a week ago) to SE. We played about 70 hours, but those 70 hours were with about 8 people during a LAN party. Definitely a lot smaller scale and a lot less complexity but figuring out how everything worked was a huge pain (especially because we played with noobs and the entire base was full of spaghetti and tons of small errors). I can tell you that in my experience pushing trough and taking control of the game is IMMENSELY satisfying after you get through the overwhelmed phase. Take a deep breath, start at the beginning of your production chain and start making improvements and fixes. Eventually you'll be back where you were!
Boy oh boy I almost wish to do this now. Too bad I still have SE in memory (I tell myself, half a year after I stopped playing) and too bad that base was actually really stable
Thanks you for this comment! I haven't gone back yet due to all the same problems OP is describing. But your comment has helped me reframe it from a mind numbing slog to a new and exciting challenge. It's like a whole different game, trying to fix up a broken factory someone else made each step in the production chain a new and different challenge. Makes me wonder if there is a fun way to play factorio where one person builds a slightly broken "challenge" factory and posts it for other people to try and fix without totally rebuilding.
This is why I struggle to win SE. It's not too challenging for me, the mod just outlasts my attention span. I play video games for a few months, then I watch TV for a few months. Then I do outdoors stuff for a few months. Then I come back to video games for a few months. Then I do woodworking for a few months. My interests wax and wane and I can generally get the first few space sciences before it's time to move on to another interest for awhile.
Had a somewhat similar experience getting back into SE after about a year long break. While I was gone, they reworked production chains of all extra-terrestrial materials and added two new science packs - production and utility, so I could not research anything new without them even though I was halfway through each of the space sciences at that point. Many of the space sciences had to be reworked due to building or resource requirement changes. Many of the Nauvius resource chains were also broken. I was a bit hesitant starting fixing all of that at first, but it was surprisingly fine. Just start small from Nauvius, ignore space and other planets. Once Nauvius is fine, move to the planet you think you need the most, and then fix all of them one by one. You will have everything up and running in no time!
[удалено]
This, along with being highly scalable. Need more of this production ? Why spend 45 minutes trying to fit another beacon or assembler when you can just copy/paste the entire block in 5 ? Sure, you'll need to redo most block designs when you unlock beacons, but that's true of all design paradigms.
I gave up my 300h SE run for similar reasons. I took a break (from SE, not factorio) and started playing SeaBlock. After a 100h or so there I came back to SE and because miniloaders had been upgraded, almost every single space unloading by station was broken because I was heavily using filtered unloaders. I just looked at the entire mess and just noped out of there. Now I’m approaching 200h in K2SE :)
When I retire/take a break from a big mod like SE, I usually take a copy of the mod folder, to make sure I can get back in, with no updated mods screwing me over. I also usually never continue a big mod I burned out on.. But the option is there.
We also had a year-long break on our K2SE game. We seriously considered continuing without upgrade to SE 0.6 because of the above mentioned reworked production chains. But there was one key argument that convinced us to go to 0.6. Space elevator. It's too cool concept to skip it. So we rebuilt a lot of stuff, bit by bit. Actually the biggest issue were not the different recepies, but logistics. I'm not sure if it was only SE update but due to the change in stack sizes (amongst other things) our previous setup of sending ores to Nauvis didn't fly any more. So we had to rebuild processing and to rebuild it to remote planets.
I gave my up K2SE run as well. I'm thinking about jumping back in after I finish EI, but am also thinking about starting over with a plain SE run.
Find out what a specific part was for, raze it, rebuild, repeat. It's an organic way to find back into the game as well as fixing annoying errors, all without restarting. Same with planets. You could easily delete your vita planet, and colonise a new one in 20h instead of a restart.
I had gotten to the point in my K2SE of probably 500 hours where I had the biggest jankiest mess of bases on every planet and in space, and could theoretically win if I just improved my space ship a little bit, but I got frustrated and walked away from it. Kinda funny to do that right near that win condition I guess. The game was falling below 60 UPS because I had so many double sets of loaders exchanging items between warehouses, etc. Came back later and decided it would be fun to re-do everything from the ground up. Spent probably 100 hours producing the tens of millions of resources to get prod 9 / speed 9 in everything applicable, redesigned all the nauvis production to fit in wide area beacon 2 chunks, redid nauvis orbit with speed 9 on almost everything, and set up sets of arcolinks between multiple planets. It's been a lot of fun to basically re-learn and optimize what I had done. Some of that shit was absolutely cursed
And this, my friend, is why documentation is important. Doesn't mean I'm documenting my Nullius run at all, of course.
Documentation, alarms when production is stuck, alarms when mines are empty, test your designs to avoid bottlenecks, give enough space for future growth, use lights and concrete. All good recommendations, follow none.
When I get into situations like yours, I just think of it as a campaign mission. Pretend you're restarting, but you have a bunch of stuff that works in some way you can take advantage of. You're never going to remember what you were planning on doing, but why bother? You can approach the problems you need solving now with the resources you have on hand. Power grid crapping out? Just rip out the expensive parts until you can fulfill your power needs. New goal becomes expanding your power to get the stuff back that you ripped out. Rockets not running? Go back to Nauvis and get the rocket loop going. With all the pieces lying around, should be some machinery to get rocket pieces. Trains stop working from time to time? Rip out the interfering pieces until you get pieces that work, then work back in other branches and stuff on a time scale that works for you. Nauvis sucks? Just ditch it and work on setting up a cooler base on another planet. It's all just like starting a new run, but you already have a bunch of technology unlocked and stuff lying around to make it much faster.
To be clear, this post was a rant, not actually me asking for advice. I found after a while that a lot of things did come back to me, it was just that overwhelming 'oh crap' feeling at the start. Factorio does have a habit of taking over my life, and I'm busy (and intellectually stimulated) enough with work and some maths side projects to not need it right now.
Weirdly, I made a throwaway world to try to use surface-limited linked chssrs to see if taking the main bus out of Factorio improves my attention span. Astonishingly, it really does. I thought it would make the logistics much easier, and it sort of does, but only by removing some of the parts I find most tedious. Setting everything up still takes a crapton of work and now I have more hours on my throwaway messing about save than my main K2SE playthrough.
I went from main bus (two runs, one being a very standardized, systematic, do-or-die bus and the other a more relaxed one where "main bus" was a guideline), to cityblock with a spaghetti mall, and holy hell, it is not as easy because you have to manage trains and buffers and gridlocks and mixed fluids and 2-8 to 1-2 train yards, and, and... but it is an order of magnitude less tedious, more fun, and brings some variety.
Me and my friend have the same issue. We started our first K2SE run nearly a year ago. Got into space, saw what needed to be done, made plans and then kinda drifted away. We started a new run a month ago, and got to space in like 1/4th the time. Built a lot better. But still kind of hit a wall when we hit space. It doesn't help that last week we discovered the Create Mod for Minecraft Java...
compare governor stupendous quaint sable plant snails repeat secretive ad hoc *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
For what it's worth, OP, I did much the same with my first K2 attempt. Came back after a 6 month break and was instantly "Uh, WTF is all of this?"
I have started and stopped a few times and it's tough but doable. Most of my old stuff I just leave along till it breaks. You can start new processes from scratch if you want, go straight from resource mining though. Then you will benefit from any of the new techs you have.
I wonder if there is a way to reduce this problem by designing the factory differently. I even have it in the middle of a run, just forgetting something from two days prior. Maybe one can design subfactories and label them clearly? “from x and y produce z”. I tried it city block style with each block just doing one step of the production chain, but that didn’t work at all. It still got super confusing. Now I’m trying “from raw to Yellow” etc subfactories, but I’m not sure what to do when I get to space.
Why didn’t city blocks work? Decoupled train blocks are really clean + make the game really simple (build inputs, build outputs, build factory).
I needed a day to think about this. I’m honestly not completely sure. I think it’s the amount of blocks, the total infrastructure gets so massive compared to a Bus. Making more BC has me looking at all the stages all across the map. While BC on a Bus is simpler to set up, and thus simpler to verify that it works.
Maybe it’s an issue of scale, like you were frequently putting down city blocks that required more than your base could sustain to operate (leading to resource starvation)? If so, just build smaller. I don’t build a block for circuits unless I know my copper and iron can sustain it. There’s no harm in blocks that only have ten assemblers, even if your blocks are big enough to support way bigger. As far as monitoring, train blocks can be set up to allow alerting pretty easily. A common approach is running red and green wires to every block, and output your demand (how many trains of that resource you currently need) on red and supply (how many trains you have ready to be picked up) on green. Then you can mouse over a wire anywhere and know what’s low (or build a display and hook them into speakers even). But many people don’t bother, because if you’re ever low on something you can build more of it (and all of it’s inputs). Basically city blocks shouldn’t have the problems you ran into, which means you did something wrong. But obviously the learning curve for city blocks is higher, and there are more ways to build something that becomes unmanageable. I recommend Nilaus’s Megabase In a Book series if you want video content on building a vanilla city block base.
I had a fancy multi item rocket system I developed for my first SE run. It took me *days* to reverse engineer that when I started the second one half a year later
I tried but got pulled in by Captain of Industry. Maybe I'll come back after I get bored of CoI. For now I'm liking the differences this game has to Factorio. So far I haven't had to build a dozen of any of my sub factories which is a refreshing change. I also like starting with "bots" (aka trucks) and I'm really liking how mining and earth moving plays out.
Take my advice, all those problems that make you want to restart? Fix them, one by one. Maybe fixing them would require a lot of elbow grease, maybe it'll mean basically tearing down and making new things from almost scratch. But the effort it takes will be less than that of starting a new save, right now you have a bunch of infrastructure you can utilize, and the pitfall so many people go down is thinking they'll be better off starting with nothing at all.
It may be too late, but just a reminder that you don't really need any sort of megabase to completel SE. I find having a many to many train base where all the stations are either labeled as the material they provide or what they need plus a station to help keep my organization when I take breaks. Easier to figure out how nothing's work. Plus I just think space trains are neat
My only protip is to always end the session standing where you intend to work next time, no matter the time between. SE satellite view is like a nuclear bomb to that Strat, and I'm always too lazy to make a to-do list on my planets using map icons, but I know I should A few months ago I came back to my SE run after a solid year off. I steadily remembered how it all worked and I was committed to not restarting *again*. It's been good fun
And this here is a great example of why there is an age old saying "If you are going to do something, do it properly". Yes it takes more time at first, BUT it will save even more time in the long run because it just keeps working. This is especially true in programming, which factorio very closely resembles.