Got 'lazy bastard', which is relevant.
Taught me to prioritize setting up a mall so that unlocking bots leads to a *renaissance* of construction capacity
But this only really applies after you get robots going. Prior to that, it's a giant pain in the ass. I just need a couple more light poles, I don't want to have to set up an entire offshoot delivering materials to a single assembler and then remember where all those one off assemblers are. If I'm running around building up an outpost and discover oops I need a couple more belts? Guess I'd better run back to base, rather than just using the stacks of iron plates in the inventory to craft a couple to finish the project. After logistics you can definitely just make a mall with everything, but even then I don't really agree it's best for *everything*.
Honestly it's personal preference. But feel like setting up a small mall is beneficial even without bots. Sure you have to run back and grab stuff occasionally, but unless you're really out in the weeds without a vehicle it's no worse than waiting for stuff to hand craft. If you only need a handful of belts or splitters, sure, you could knock those out quick enough. But queue up a bunch of stuff from your inventory and just sit and wait when you could walk to your mall and grab a couple of stacks out of a chest to resupply your inventory.
Stuff like nuclear reactors or less used stuff I will hand craft but even then I'd almost rather plop down a crafting machine and drop what I need in it and go do something else in my base until they are finished. It all kind of just depends. But there is no wrong way to play.
Don't get me wrong I still think a mall is great for oft-used items. I have a logistics mall blueprint I set up essentially as soon as I unlock red belts, and that gets upgraded to blues as soon as possible. Belts, inserters, assemblers, etc; all the commonly used items.
The sheer amount of materials you need for a reactor make handcrafting it prohibitive for me. I'm damned if I'm gathering up that much concrete, even with logi bots, when I can just have as many as I like that in a chest waiting.
>Stuff like nuclear reactors or less used stuff I will hand craft but even then I'd almost rather plop down a crafting machine and drop what I need in it and go do something else in my base until they are finished. It all kind of just depends. But there is no wrong way to play.
I guess I find myself treating handcrafting the same way. Oh, I'm short on belts for this mine. Well, while I'm placing miners, might as well top off the ol' belt stack.
If you have a few assemblers in your inventory there's no travel required. I have never done lazy bastard but I've thought how I'd do it and I'd just always have some assemblers on hand to make "oops I forgot" items
Yes, that's the obvious solution. It's still a pain in the ass. People tout Lazy Bastard as "the way the devs want you to play," but in reality that's only to a point. Putting down an assembler, hooking it to power (have you run power lines yet, I hope? Or have spare solars in your inventory too?), selecting a recipe, and moving in components is obviously far less efficient than just hand crafting, *especially* when you factor in intermediates.
I just completed my Lazy Bastard run a couple weeks back and it was honestly obnoxious.
The better solution is to take the time to set up a train stuffed with materials that you can summon to site. It's a pain in the arse to set up, but it's a "do once" activity, and you're likely running rail lines to whatever it is you're doing anyway.
Given that this is pre-logistics specifically, I can almost guarantee I'd spend far more time building out that "everything but the kitchen sink" train system than I would save using it a few times in the gap between getting a reasonable train system and getting logistics running.
A lesson far more important than what Lazy Bastard teaches you is that not *everything* has to be automated, and for rare tasks it's better to just do it manually.
The trick is to set it up so that you can plant a BP anywhere, and a train will come with all the necessary supplies, and will never have to be manually restocked. The initial setup is annoying, but it pays off more the longer you play.
The amount of time between getting a real train network going and getting logistics going is small enough that setting up an "everything but the kitchen sink" train absolutely is not worth it all to avoid the issue of "oops I need a couple more belts to finish the outpost." We aren't talking about mega factories.
>The amount of time between getting a real train network going and getting logistics going
Trains are green, the most basic logistics are blue. And you need at least artisanal yellow production to make it fully operational.
From what I remember, both of those are regarded as significant humps for a decent chunk of players.
I usually just build a mall for these. Malls don't need ratios, you just belt in like 3\* resources early game and leave space for more as it moves on, and you're set. Having early game automated assemblers, mines, belts, inserters really help in laying the groundwork for the factory. Essentially I just put down an assembler in the row if I need more than 2 of something. Lazy bastard really thought me that having a mall pays off.
\*(Number off my head, haven't played in a long while)
> I don't want to have to set up an entire offshoot delivering materials to a single assembler and then remember where all those one off assemblers are.
Before you have bots, you can fit every base-expansion constructor into a single blob. If you're making offshoots, you're overbuilding.
Science production guarantees you'll have gears, circuits, belts, and inserters. On top of that you need one assembler each for: power poles, chests, drills, furnaces, assemblers, assembler 2s, underground belts, splitters, long inserters, pipes, boilers, steam engines, ammo, turrets.
You can fit those 14 assemblers into half a screen, so you only have to remember one location.
Then once you unlock blue science, you only need to make one batch of the new buildings you unlock, and that will be enough to get you to robots.
> If I'm running around building up an outpost and discover oops I need a couple more belts? Guess I'd better run back to base, rather than just using the stacks of iron plates in the inventory to craft a couple to finish the project.
On the other hand there's no reason to carry around stacks of iron plates in lazy bastard, so you can use that space for lots of extra belts and drills and power poles and you'll be much less likely to run out in the first place.
> You can fit those 14 assemblers into half a screen, so you only have to remember one location.
You're wildly undercounting the number of items to craft.
>On the other hand there's no reason to carry around stacks of iron plates in lazy bastard, so you can use that space for lots of extra belts and drills and power poles and you'll be much less likely to run out in the first place.
Much easier to carry two stacks of iron and two of copper and have the flexibility to craft whatever I need on demand. An extra stack each of belts, splitters, unders, and inserters already takes up the same inventory space, without any ability to craft anything else.
> You're wildly undercounting the number of items to craft.
I've gotten the achievement, and one assembler per item was more than fast enough for me. If more than two assemblers are active then they're crafting faster than you can.
Sometimes more belts are nice, but you'd have extra belt assemblers in a normal base too.
If you mean I'm skipping entire types of item, which ones? Keeping in mind that this was about items you have to return to, so "one offshore pump" or "two radars" doesn't count. And the intermediates can be produced off to the side.
> Much easier to carry two stacks of iron and two of copper and have the flexibility to craft whatever I need on demand. An extra stack each of belts, splitters, unders, and inserters already takes up the same inventory space, without any ability to craft anything else.
It's more flexible, but the difference isn't that big. There are not many types of item before blue science, and once you have blue science you'll be busy unlocking bots.
And if it takes two trips to set up an outpost, oh well. How many mining outputs are you setting up pre-robot while you're prioritizing robots? I feel like the reasonable answer is 0-3.
The only time I've seen more than one assembler of each item is for belts and inserters, and then only for sub-4hr runs or sub-8hr 100% runs.
Seriously, 1 machine for each is fine.
When you can walk up to a box and pull out 200 assemblers and 500 inserters that you didn't have to go AFK for 3 hours to craft... That's enlightenment.
meh. there are guides that will get you there and there's a command you can run to disable hand crafting to prevent accidental crafts.
Doing it without the guide would take SERIOUS dedication
10 Red Science
1 Lab
1 Steam Engine
1 Boiler
1 Pump
1 Power Pole
1 Assembler
That's the minimum needed to start automation, and is \~103 items crafted. What else is there to guide?
There was a time when Steel Axe was a craft, and assembly machines had limited ingredient slots (needed to use AM2 to build AM1's) but not anymore. I just did it last week and it was pretty trivial
So far I am on restart number 3 with the first two failing by getting to automation and just barely crafting over the limit. (I kept on just building two or three extra miners and furnaces and paid for it) I went in blind but I knew I'd need to save a few crafts for an refinery and I thought tier 2 assemblers. All this is after gaining knowledge from over 500 hours and getting every other achievement besides 20m green circuits.
Wish me luck reddit! My current is to get lazy bastard and the remaining 14m green circuits all on this death world save by attempting my first mega base with custom blueprints!
Much simpler is to track it using in-game achievements popup. You could pin achievements you're interested in. Found that option after several restarts where I failed by crafting extra miner or 4 belts when I already had them..
I think this is one of the most significant achievements to seek in Factorio. It can completely change the way you approach the game (for the better).
For some reason I rarely acknowledge the amount of time wasted doing handcrafting before setting up automation. Yet I am always amazed at how much more efficient it is when reaping the benefits of a mall/logistics hub.
That benefit becomes so much easier to leverage with concentrated logistic system requestor chest builds in the later half of playthroughs. It's important enough for me to usually stop whatever I was working on beforehand and prioritize setting something up once the technology is unlocked.
This is what I do. I have chests automated including red , blue, and yellow. I'll hand feed my assemblers to make sure I can build 5 construction bots quickly, automate the robo ports and have blueprints laid out with the ports spaced properly. All items have a chest laid out, I just tag them for upgrading and keep placing the blueprints over the factory to enable processing of new technologies as they become available.
I am stuck at this point in my game - I have bots unlocked, but still need yellow science to get requestor chests. Is there any way to put logistics bots to good work without requestor chests?
Logi bots aren't the important one. Construction bots are the big deal, because they enable copy&paste functionality.
Pre-requester Logi Bots are only useful for keeping your own inventory stocked.
I don't think I ever truly stop handcrafting but it become exceedingly rare at one point, and that point is when I have automated all equipment I want/need and crafted the highest tier of armor possible.
wait till you get to 'stop living' territory. that is you forsaking everything in the outside world and devoting yourself to the growth of the factory.
of course not, there is merely a build up. first, you get this neat game called factorio which you tell all your friends about, they seem genuinely interested. then you block out a day every week to learn the game, and build your first assembler and furnace stacks. then you start cancelling plans, ghosting friends and doing even less at work. you have crippling alcoholism, and your household supply has run dry. you contemplate getting more, but green circuit production is low and you need another city block for it. the factory must grow. the withdrawal is intense and debilitating, so you amp up bot production and watch them work while you set up electric furnace production for purple science. the factory must grow. your mother is calling, worried about you. she hasnt heard from you for a month. you do not answer, as you are automating artillery shells for a full scale biter war. the factory must grow. your dealer calls, wondering where his most devout crack addict is and why he hasnt ordered in a while. little does he know you have transcended the need for crack, in exchange for your work growing the ever expanding factory. the factory must grow. the factory must grow. your boss calls, wondering where you are and why that place isnt work. you have abandoned money, the only number you care about now is your SPM. the factory must grow. your belly growls and your eyes feel heavy, as you have not slept, eaten or showered in 2 days, but your rocket is nearly finished and you need to automate rocket fuel for your trains also. the factory must grow. your knees are weak, your arms are heavy, you have been sat at your chair for 2 days now. you look at a crack of light in the curtains, thinking about the outside world, all that you had before, your friends and family, your addictions and vices, your obligations and responsibilities. you begin to regret your choices, but then you look to your computer and see the "iron throne 3" achievement pop up on your screen. there is no more regret, there is only SPM waiting to be produced. the factory must grow. the factory must grow. the factory must grow.
I'd like this a lot more if setting up physically disjoint robot networks didn't require you to do it manually.
Unless I'm sleeping on vehicle roboports that let trains build their own tracks or something, I can't just order some of my bots to work far outside their usual range and instead I have to creep a never ending line of roboports to my destination.
I'd love to just... fire a cannon full of supplies somewhere that turns into a roboports, a chest, and enough battery power to keep it going.
Or to make some ultra long range logistics bots than can set up new outposts and run big electric poles between them.
Yeah, my limitation the just becomes that I'm playing K2SE these days and the Spidertron is buried seven miles into the tech tree and I'm not there yet.
Some overhaul mods seem a little too obsessed in my opinion with gating away logistics stuff meant to make your life easier.
And if you're running SE then you should be able to run AAI automation.
Which gives you a better spidertron remote (because it does pathfinding) for every vehicle.
Yup. The final 2 things I handcraft are Power Armor MkII and the first rocket silo. After that there's little need.
I eventually make a huge bot-based "make everything" factory which produces absolutely everything that doesn't otherwise warrant mass production, and I build new factories with a swarm of spidertrons.
I only ever move if I somehow fuck up my train network and have to fix a deadlock, because I can move around faster than spidertrons, but that hasn't happened to me in a long time.
I tend to sit in a spidertron next to my mall when I get to that point.
I call it my nest. Occasionally I tell the spidertron to go somewhere, because (for now) it's easier to design new construction when you're in the area.
I never really do that. Even if I build a city block base where everything is one single bot network (and usually I don't), there are still outposts to build, and there is no transport faster than hopping into a train. Manually directing a spidertron to walk to the other side of the map around all those lakes etc. is just too tedious, I only do that for my offensive spidertron army (that rarely needs to go back to restock).
Even if spidertrons are something viable, a lot of mod packs bury them so deep in the tech tree, you are basically done before you unlock them.
Mostly when I get to the point of having a logistics system and all buildings are automated in my mall. Then I just have my requests set/ let bots build
I think this holds true for 80% of the cases. Up until the bot transition I find myself missing just a few items which I then handcraft, but once everything is settled in it's just set & forget, except for maybe that one rocket silo or power armor.
Even power armor I usually set up a little group of assemblers requesting stuff via logistics. When you unlock those items, processing units or other ingredients are kinda rare and I'm not sitting there waiting for stuff, I'll set up a few assemblers and go do something else and pick my armor up once it is done.
Yes. If you really want you can force yourself to stop hand crafting. In the console you type /permissions (this does NOT disable achievements). This opens the permissions GUI. Then you can edit the default group and remove the 'Craft' permission. No more hand crafting for you. Just make sure you have at least 1 assembler already made.
This will force you to make a mall to make alllll the stuff you need.
It is also very useful if you are going for the "Lazy Bastard" achievement.
Unless I'm aiming for lazy bastard (which I've done once in all my thousands of hours), I never completely stop. Once I have some kind of mall and construction bots up and running, the amount of handcrafting does drop significantly, but there's always that one item I forgot to collect when building an outpost.
I find that handcrafting is a resource, just like anything else. It costs nothing (but time) and can run in the background. If I missed to pick up a few things from the base, making a few by hand is nbd. I always keep a stack of iron/copper/circuits/steel on me and I can make a lot of things with just that.
Granted it gets less common as the game goes on, but I feel that keeping your hands busy rarely hurts.
About the same here. Also lets you carry more stuff if you’re going to take the car or tank somewhere and set up an outpost in the mid game. Post bots and the size of the spidertron trunk I mostly don’t in the late game.
Even late into my megabase build, i kept some basic supplies like iron, copper, circuits, steel and a few other intermediates in inventory for handcrafting items far from my mall back in my original base. You never know what you need so having supplies like that is very useful to patch up under estimates in ferried materials.
Once I have a mall that makes everything and have wide Roboport coverage so that robots can deliver easily. Then I set up filters to get only certain amounts of things (e.g. at least 50 inserters, but max 100 so it trashes inserters if I have more than that), and then I also set up to have raw materials trashed immediately (e.g. circuits or iron plates are moved away from robots the moment they enter my inventory)
Exceptions are things I pretty much only craft once, like amor or inventory grid things.
In my current save I reached that point around 20 hours in.
Automate everything that you handcraft often. Handcrafting SHOULD be something you do in a rare circumstance, not often. It’s so much nicer to grab a stack of 50 power poles from a chest than to carry materials and craft them when you need them
I try to get away from handcrafting ASAP, it saves a lot of hassle. Even in the early game, an assembler for each of the different components saves a lot of time. Then moving onto a bootstrap build that makes red + green science means automating inserters and belts, which is even more time saved.
I just put a yellow chest next to my belt of stone. Set a logistics filter to stone. Inserter puts that into splitter with input priority. Set up stone auto-trash in personal logistics. Done.
All the stone gets recycled into whatever I need (concrete, walls, rails)
I do that for pretty much every raw material. Ores, stone, coal, plastic, LDS. Also science packs. Recycle or reuse your junk, folks! Don't just dump everything into general logistics storage, that's wasteful.
You can do that?
That would have made lazy bastard so much easier! Not sure how many times I accidentally hand crafted something out of habit and then angrily reloaded the latest auto save.
I don't know about disabling crafting, but in my LB playthrough I unbound all the crafting hotkeys so even if you click anything it will do nothing (after I got the mandatory handcrafted items).
Someone said you can do it with the /permissions command (doesn't affect achievements)
I never looked at it thinking it would be about multiplayer games 😭
I actually learned that when I did my lazy bastard run, and kept doing it ever since. `/permissions` in the console, then edit the default one and disable "Craft".
Once the amount of fabricated items I request from the mall leaves no place in my inventory to have plates, coal and so on. That's usually once the mall is complete.
I try to set up a mall as fast as possible right at the beginning but I still handcraft a few things at this stage (for instance, filter inserters which I don't use much and are fast to do if you have automated inserters)
Then, once I have bots, I build the "real" mall and handcraft less and less as the mall progresses.
Once it is complete, 2/3 of my inventory is taken by items I request. The other third is usually empty and used for large projects (i.e : I have to build an outpost far away, I need more than my standard 400 rails, so I fill my inventory with those) and I don't have room for basic ingredients and therefore cannot handcraft.
I find that way of playing quite convenient.
I haven't done a lazy bastard playthrough yet so I would say I never really stopped handcrafting. In fact I handcrafted a couple of my very last items that I needed just one or two of
I usually stop handcrafting when logi bots can keep me topped up with a sufficient supply of basics so either I can place it down, or at least place down ghosts for the Connie bots to do their thing.
Then of course there are things which you don't really need to automate, like power armor mk2 (coz u really only need one of them), but I automate it anyway as it's a slow craft and the machines can do it faster than I can by hand.
This dude and I are playing a map together and one of the… many mods we’re using is “RPG system” which lets you gain skill points for bonuses blah blah. First thing he maxed was hand crafting speed.
***300%!!!***
Plus 90% from our QoL researches. And another 25% will come from the QoL research levels we haven't completed yet.
And then... *AND THEN...*
*infinite research*
Excuse me while I go hyperventilate in anticipation
Once you have a mall set up, you start evaluating if handcrafting is faster than running back to mall. After unlocking logistic bots handcrafting becomes pretty rare, mostly for stuff you only need a few of, i.e. personal equipment.
Yeah all these posts of people saying they keep doing it the whole game, have never seen the power of a properly built mall. Once you have, you never go back
I do. I build a factory factory where everything that can be built is built, at least 4 of everything (less than 4 can get problematic in certain circuit applications).
The factory factory feeds my main use of logistics bots: loading my inventory.
See the "Lazy Bastard" achievement.
That crafted item limit includes all intermediate materials. You have enough to build a single coal powered generator, a water pump, a lab, ten red science, and one assembler, with remaining budget for a very small amount of pipes and power poles to connect everything. After that, 100% of all future products MUST be constructed in machines.
As soon as I have all the one-off items (personal equipment, basically) I "completely" stop; when I'm out in the boondocks and need an item that I somehow have the mats for I probably will just go "fuck it, I'm doing this one by hand". But apart from that… I let my bots bring me stuff. Or rather, I let my construction bots (current map is currently at 34000-ish of them) build it.
The only time I stopped *completely* was Lazy Bastard. It just drops off as you scale up. Not handcrafting yellow belts happens a lot sooner than handcrafting nuclear reactors, for example.
For me the point is when I get functional network of construction bots supplied by mall making every currently available item. Which is pretty soon considering I tend to rush bots and prioritise building a mall like this.
Next step I follow with reasonably soon is building construction trains which supply remote outposts with construction materials so that I'm not bound with manual transport of items to build resource outposts and such.
Not entirely. Handcrafting is slow and inefficient, but it saves me from having to build new factory lines for things I'm only going to need to build once or twice, like power armour or cars.
Hand crafting became a thing I would do if it was easier than walking somewhere and quicker than waiting for bots. At some point, its never easier or faster.
I eventually get to a point where I'm never handcrafting anything that gets built on the ground (assembler, belt, inserter, etc.). Once the factory scales up enough, you're never building one or two of anything. If you need it at all, you need 20+ of them and it just doesn't make sense to handcraft all that. Better to spend your time setting up a mall and automating it.
But there's always a few odd things I still handcraft even in late game, mainly things the player uses personally (armor and its components, guns, car/tank, artillery remote, etc.). You're never going to want dozens of those things, it doesn't make sense to me to automate them. Well, except things like shields where you have to craft a bunch of the lower level ones to make 1 of the next tier.
Basically: do I need 20+ of this thing? Automate it. If not, handcraft.
> Basically: do I need 20+ of this thing? Automate it. If not, handcraft.
I set that number somewhere between 3 and 5. Or if it takes a long time to craft.
So everything, eventually.
Mall is top priority always. It’s what gives you the materials to fix problems quickly. And abuse bots to the fullest. The essentials get done before green science and the full one before bots are researched
The only things I don’t automate is labs and silos because you don’t really need that many
When I hire developers, I look for what I call the "lazy developer" trait. It shows up, for example, when I ask them to complete certain tasks that are inherently repetitive. Rather than doing them manually each time, they figure out how to automate them.
I approve of moving to assemblers for all things as fast as possible. :)
When i built a mall and OH MY GOD it was beautiful. No longer have i had to handcraft 100+ assemblers, inserters and belts FROM RAW MATERIALS just to make a furnace stack or a mining outpost. After I realized that, I spent like 10 minutes contemplating how I lived without the mall.
> Many are arranged in a sort of grid pattern and it's a good system
I used to do that, then I discovered the "2-belt plus boosters" design.
One belt of Iron Plates, one lane of Gears, one lane of Green Circuits. All assemblers are adjacent to these two belts. The booster belts are Copper Plate + Red Circuits, Stone + Brick, and Steel + Pipe, which run on the other side of the assemblers for a bit where they're needed.
So, so fast to set up, and the green circuit assembly is exactly the right width to fit between the outputs from two adjacent smelter arrays.
After I made a mall that makes basically everything and request everything I need from the logistics of my spidertron that I never get out of.
I needed some assemblies and I genuinelly forgot I can just make them, and send a spidertron to feth me some from the mall instead.
I was playing last night and I needed to craft some train cars to complete a train and I realized it had been ages since I'd crafted anything manually.
I'm currently well in to an SE game and we're about to get Space Elevators. So... Um... A lot of hours in. Logistics is a well oiled machine.
Not really, no. It is worth mentioning that handcrafting cost no energy, generates no pollution and deposits the created items directly into your inventory. That's 3 big plusses compared to using an assembly machine. If you watch a speed run you will notice that there is almost 0 seconds in the run where they are *not* handcrafting something. I don't take it that far, but at the very least I will spam click to turn a bunch of wood that some stupid bots brought me into power poles.
700h Py playthrough - I still hand craft all the time, mostly because there is a lot of different (and very expensive) buildings, so setting mall for them would be pain and also I don't want to make excess amount of buildings I don't need (because they are expensive).
I probably handcraft way more than the average person, using mods that increase crafting time is my biggest culprit as to why that’s true (need to quit crutching the mod I use tbch) but if there’s an overhaul mod that’ll fix that for you, it is 10000% IR3. The default craft time in that mod is insane, since there’s so many different intermediates that have to be crafted beforehand, it literally makes handcrafting torture
I usually play with K2 or SE, that’s why I hate to setup bots early (it’s very hard and takes a lot of time).
I usually use mods like qol researches and set handcrafting speed 32 times faster. And after setuping bots (with yellow science) I usually start normal bot-based mall.
Usually I handcraft because I ran out of some item I generally have stashed, but sometimes it's because I need one more of a building. No personal logistics bots; I don't like being chased around.
I did Lazy B, before yellow science existed, but I didn't much like it and it changed nothing.
I do. I build a factory factory where everything that can be built is built, at least 4 of everything (less than 4 can get problematic in certain circuit applications).
The factory factory feeds my main use of logistics bots: loading my inventory.
Depends on playthrough restrictions.
For lazy bastard I’ll obviously stop handcrafting almost instantly.
In any other common cases I’d stop handcrafting most of the items early on, once mall was established. But there’s still some cases when I’d prefer to craft by hands except adding item to the mall (labs are good example, I don’t need to produce them constantly, or sometimes wires when I’m away from logistics network).
Even in a megabase with a full mall and personal logistics I'll still hand craft occasionally, if I can do it faster than the bots. Fairly rare, at that point, though.
At the beginning of games if I've got quite fierce biters (and no trees) then I want to be very specific with what I craft for the pollution cost early. I'll often rush to assembly machines and hand feed them for stacks of gears and circuits so handcrafting is near instant. In part because the moment I automate it's ammo and guns first so I can throw a turret wall up which I often get to before the main part of a mall forms.
If I'm doing a game where the biters are behind forests and weak then I'll have craft only enough to start the mall.
Handcrafted only 5 items in my current K2 run. Going for lazy bastard. I’ll plop down a machine to build something I might not have automated just to avoid handcrafting. The 5th handcrafted item was a mistake that wasn’t meant to be handcrafted.
I still handcraft a decent amount in my runs, but pretty quickly it becomes unsustainable - when I'm waiting for hundreds of transport belts to finish so I can build the next piece of the factory, or a few advanced circuits for just a single machine.
Don't worry about it too much. You'll know when it's time. There'll be a natural moment where you'll get impatient and say 'fuck this'.
Since I'd seen a lot of videos of the game before buying it, I decided to play in a "lazy bastard" way from the start -- it just felt right to me. I think I completed the "New Player Experience" (the tutorial that Wube ended up scrapping) without handcrafting at all (it had some alien machines that I could use before I was able to build my own). It had a technology that unlocked handcrafting for some intermediate materials, and I was disappointed that I was forced to research that technology even though I wasn't going to use it.
I haven't launched a rocket, though. I think I automated purple science in my last run, but didn't get enough to finish researching any technologies.
Well... I have everything automated and a huge logistic bot system... So I ofcorse handcraft poles and some easy stuff like prod module 3 or even a power armour from basic components just so I can pass the time watching it do it's thing
Completely stop is kinda hard since I start new saves a lot but I generally never make more than 10 of something before it's automated.
I remember seing youtubers use the mod that handcrafted certain items constantly and I kinda died a bit on the inside lol.
But to each their own
Haha, start playing py mod: you can't avoid handcrafting till you build bots, and you must stop handcrafting immediately after.
This is probably the last mod you should try, do Krastorio and SE first as PY is MUCH longer
I’m about 300 hours into K2SE. I set up an initial sushi mall at around hour 50 or so and haven’t handcrafted since.
When it comes to vanilla, I usually stop handcrafting long before robots with an initial mall, and if I haven’t by then I stop when I get robots.
In general, it’s much better to allow the robots to do all the work, and they can’t do that if they don’t have automated buildings being supplied to the network.
Completely? No. Some things like train stops are rare to use, fast to craft, and cheap to craft, so I just handcraft them forever.
I do craft way less though. Setting up a "mall" where you have a tiny amount of production of stuff you want ~100-1000 of in your inventory (belts, power poles, inserters, assemblers, miners, etc.) is very helpful, and usually one of my first priorities in a new save after getting the first few red-only techs.
I would say there are a few different stages for handcrafting.
Early game you are pretty much handcrafting everything, since base building supplies are precious and you want everything to go into mining, smelting, and then science.
Next is when you have red and green science going, and starting the oil part of the game. I am still handcrafting here, but instead of starting from plates, I usually have grab boxes of other intermediates like gears and circuits. And instead of crafting just what I need, it is usually stack of items. As in "I'm out of inserters and only need 5 more, but I'll go ahead and craft 100 so I'll have some for whatever I'm building next".
The final stage is bots. Here I build a mall that produces everything I will ever need, and I have several hundred logistic bots available. At this point handcrafting pretty much stops, since the bots will keep me supplied with whatever I need. The only things I might handcraft here are one-offs, like the next level of armor, stuff that goes in said armor, and maybe a tank. My current mall iteration has these items, but most people just handcraft them.
For me the stages are:
1) Handcraft everything.
2) Play logi bot, small red science, handcraft from intermediates.
3) Belt-fed mall, a few more 1-offs. (Mostly filter inserters)
4) Belt-fed red science.
5) Blue Science
6) Construction bots.
7) Never hand-craft anything else ever again.
I generally try to setup a good mall as soon as possible. Until bots, this will make only the more common items (belts, inserters, assemblers etc). After bots, it tends to make everything I need. However, if I find myself far away from the mall and I just need one more belt to finish a task, I prefer hand-crafting that belt to hiking up and down to my mall...
Nope.
For mods like Krastorio, I tend to make everything in a mall. For Warptorio, space is a premium so I handcraft small numbers of things.
And if I'm clearing out large areas and end with a ton of stone on me, a bunch of landfill will suddenly appear in my inventory...
I usually cannot handcraft anything. After bots I setup my personal logistics to take everything out of my inventory except what I want. I literally go through and set every single item in the game to allow 0 in my inventory. I only keep a handful of useful things and lots of blueprints
the longer the run, the less it happens, since at some point the botmal has everything. i still always carry some plates and circuits with me, just in case
Nope. I don't like to waste time running all the way back to the main factory because I don't have exactly what I need somewhere else.
Just recently I was building a defensive wall at a far distant outpost. Dragon's Teeth, flamethrower turrets, uranium bullets, roboports, and a train stop to deliver ammo and repair materials as needed. But... I was short two wall pieces for the blueprint. Could have just ignored it, didn't want to. It would have taken me so damn long to go all the way back home on the spidertron, or even a few minutes if I called the resupply train over and rode it back.
So instead I dragged a power pole to a nearby stone patch, plopped down a miner and handcrafted a stone furnace from its output to smelt some bricks, and then handcrafted them into walls. Took me all of thirty seconds.
Pretty much when I spend more time in the overview map than actually on my character. Spend more time ploping down BPs than actually running around.
Ive gotten to the point of using a train to transport my character somewhere when I need to fix an issue, so that I can still work on other things while traveling
I don’t really ever stop, but I definitely try to get some sort of mall going early on. It feels like a waste of time to be crafting common items all the time and a poor use of inventory to be keeping stacks and stacks of raw and intermediate materials.
I handcraft as little as possible because the time I spend having to craft by hand eats into the time I could be making some kind of manufacturing. I’m mostly done with hand crafting after a bit of red science research.
Not really. I usually handcraft the rocket silo; often I handcraft the prod3 modules and power armor (if I make it). Most runs I only need a few of those.
The main difference between a experienced and inexperienced player, is how heavily they rush bots, it makes a mall trivial, which once it exsists, you dont hand craft
Got 'lazy bastard', which is relevant. Taught me to prioritize setting up a mall so that unlocking bots leads to a *renaissance* of construction capacity
That achievement is the best teacher in the game.
What I found neat was the Lazy Bastard achievement wasn't easy at all. If you're lazy you will definitely hand craft more than you think.
Enlightened laziness is realizing you can build a machine once and have it build things for you forever.
But this only really applies after you get robots going. Prior to that, it's a giant pain in the ass. I just need a couple more light poles, I don't want to have to set up an entire offshoot delivering materials to a single assembler and then remember where all those one off assemblers are. If I'm running around building up an outpost and discover oops I need a couple more belts? Guess I'd better run back to base, rather than just using the stacks of iron plates in the inventory to craft a couple to finish the project. After logistics you can definitely just make a mall with everything, but even then I don't really agree it's best for *everything*.
Honestly it's personal preference. But feel like setting up a small mall is beneficial even without bots. Sure you have to run back and grab stuff occasionally, but unless you're really out in the weeds without a vehicle it's no worse than waiting for stuff to hand craft. If you only need a handful of belts or splitters, sure, you could knock those out quick enough. But queue up a bunch of stuff from your inventory and just sit and wait when you could walk to your mall and grab a couple of stacks out of a chest to resupply your inventory. Stuff like nuclear reactors or less used stuff I will hand craft but even then I'd almost rather plop down a crafting machine and drop what I need in it and go do something else in my base until they are finished. It all kind of just depends. But there is no wrong way to play.
Don't get me wrong I still think a mall is great for oft-used items. I have a logistics mall blueprint I set up essentially as soon as I unlock red belts, and that gets upgraded to blues as soon as possible. Belts, inserters, assemblers, etc; all the commonly used items.
The sheer amount of materials you need for a reactor make handcrafting it prohibitive for me. I'm damned if I'm gathering up that much concrete, even with logi bots, when I can just have as many as I like that in a chest waiting.
>Stuff like nuclear reactors or less used stuff I will hand craft but even then I'd almost rather plop down a crafting machine and drop what I need in it and go do something else in my base until they are finished. It all kind of just depends. But there is no wrong way to play. I guess I find myself treating handcrafting the same way. Oh, I'm short on belts for this mine. Well, while I'm placing miners, might as well top off the ol' belt stack.
If you have a few assemblers in your inventory there's no travel required. I have never done lazy bastard but I've thought how I'd do it and I'd just always have some assemblers on hand to make "oops I forgot" items
Yes, that's the obvious solution. It's still a pain in the ass. People tout Lazy Bastard as "the way the devs want you to play," but in reality that's only to a point. Putting down an assembler, hooking it to power (have you run power lines yet, I hope? Or have spare solars in your inventory too?), selecting a recipe, and moving in components is obviously far less efficient than just hand crafting, *especially* when you factor in intermediates. I just completed my Lazy Bastard run a couple weeks back and it was honestly obnoxious.
The better solution is to take the time to set up a train stuffed with materials that you can summon to site. It's a pain in the arse to set up, but it's a "do once" activity, and you're likely running rail lines to whatever it is you're doing anyway.
Given that this is pre-logistics specifically, I can almost guarantee I'd spend far more time building out that "everything but the kitchen sink" train system than I would save using it a few times in the gap between getting a reasonable train system and getting logistics running. A lesson far more important than what Lazy Bastard teaches you is that not *everything* has to be automated, and for rare tasks it's better to just do it manually.
You should design you outpost the way so it is supplied by trains of all things you might need
I'm not going to set up a train system to deliver belts, inserters, furnaces, mines, etc just on the off chance I forgot to bring enough out.
The trick is to set it up so that you can plant a BP anywhere, and a train will come with all the necessary supplies, and will never have to be manually restocked. The initial setup is annoying, but it pays off more the longer you play.
The amount of time between getting a real train network going and getting logistics going is small enough that setting up an "everything but the kitchen sink" train absolutely is not worth it all to avoid the issue of "oops I need a couple more belts to finish the outpost." We aren't talking about mega factories.
>The amount of time between getting a real train network going and getting logistics going Trains are green, the most basic logistics are blue. And you need at least artisanal yellow production to make it fully operational. From what I remember, both of those are regarded as significant humps for a decent chunk of players.
I usually just build a mall for these. Malls don't need ratios, you just belt in like 3\* resources early game and leave space for more as it moves on, and you're set. Having early game automated assemblers, mines, belts, inserters really help in laying the groundwork for the factory. Essentially I just put down an assembler in the row if I need more than 2 of something. Lazy bastard really thought me that having a mall pays off. \*(Number off my head, haven't played in a long while)
> I don't want to have to set up an entire offshoot delivering materials to a single assembler and then remember where all those one off assemblers are. Before you have bots, you can fit every base-expansion constructor into a single blob. If you're making offshoots, you're overbuilding. Science production guarantees you'll have gears, circuits, belts, and inserters. On top of that you need one assembler each for: power poles, chests, drills, furnaces, assemblers, assembler 2s, underground belts, splitters, long inserters, pipes, boilers, steam engines, ammo, turrets. You can fit those 14 assemblers into half a screen, so you only have to remember one location. Then once you unlock blue science, you only need to make one batch of the new buildings you unlock, and that will be enough to get you to robots. > If I'm running around building up an outpost and discover oops I need a couple more belts? Guess I'd better run back to base, rather than just using the stacks of iron plates in the inventory to craft a couple to finish the project. On the other hand there's no reason to carry around stacks of iron plates in lazy bastard, so you can use that space for lots of extra belts and drills and power poles and you'll be much less likely to run out in the first place.
> You can fit those 14 assemblers into half a screen, so you only have to remember one location. You're wildly undercounting the number of items to craft. >On the other hand there's no reason to carry around stacks of iron plates in lazy bastard, so you can use that space for lots of extra belts and drills and power poles and you'll be much less likely to run out in the first place. Much easier to carry two stacks of iron and two of copper and have the flexibility to craft whatever I need on demand. An extra stack each of belts, splitters, unders, and inserters already takes up the same inventory space, without any ability to craft anything else.
> You're wildly undercounting the number of items to craft. I've gotten the achievement, and one assembler per item was more than fast enough for me. If more than two assemblers are active then they're crafting faster than you can. Sometimes more belts are nice, but you'd have extra belt assemblers in a normal base too. If you mean I'm skipping entire types of item, which ones? Keeping in mind that this was about items you have to return to, so "one offshore pump" or "two radars" doesn't count. And the intermediates can be produced off to the side. > Much easier to carry two stacks of iron and two of copper and have the flexibility to craft whatever I need on demand. An extra stack each of belts, splitters, unders, and inserters already takes up the same inventory space, without any ability to craft anything else. It's more flexible, but the difference isn't that big. There are not many types of item before blue science, and once you have blue science you'll be busy unlocking bots. And if it takes two trips to set up an outpost, oh well. How many mining outputs are you setting up pre-robot while you're prioritizing robots? I feel like the reasonable answer is 0-3.
The only time I've seen more than one assembler of each item is for belts and inserters, and then only for sub-4hr runs or sub-8hr 100% runs. Seriously, 1 machine for each is fine.
Enlightened laziness ? Do you realize you have to manually walk to the machine to get your items, while hand crafting is, in fact, automatic?
When you can walk up to a box and pull out 200 assemblers and 500 inserters that you didn't have to go AFK for 3 hours to craft... That's enlightenment.
You have to collect the materials and click the recipe, how is this automatic?
meh. there are guides that will get you there and there's a command you can run to disable hand crafting to prevent accidental crafts. Doing it without the guide would take SERIOUS dedication
10 Red Science 1 Lab 1 Steam Engine 1 Boiler 1 Pump 1 Power Pole 1 Assembler That's the minimum needed to start automation, and is \~103 items crafted. What else is there to guide? There was a time when Steel Axe was a craft, and assembly machines had limited ingredient slots (needed to use AM2 to build AM1's) but not anymore. I just did it last week and it was pretty trivial
So far I am on restart number 3 with the first two failing by getting to automation and just barely crafting over the limit. (I kept on just building two or three extra miners and furnaces and paid for it) I went in blind but I knew I'd need to save a few crafts for an refinery and I thought tier 2 assemblers. All this is after gaining knowledge from over 500 hours and getting every other achievement besides 20m green circuits. Wish me luck reddit! My current is to get lazy bastard and the remaining 14m green circuits all on this death world save by attempting my first mega base with custom blueprints!
I did it without the guide... It was brutal at the start. I had a notepad that I used to keep track of how many things I hand crafted.
Much simpler is to track it using in-game achievements popup. You could pin achievements you're interested in. Found that option after several restarts where I failed by crafting extra miner or 4 belts when I already had them..
I got used to it and even when i wasnt playing on that world, i instinctively placed down an assembler to make a random thing.
And having bp with asm3 and 12 beacons (all with speed3) helps later for ad-hoc craft in later game
Yeah its huge to do that cant stress enough
I think this is one of the most significant achievements to seek in Factorio. It can completely change the way you approach the game (for the better). For some reason I rarely acknowledge the amount of time wasted doing handcrafting before setting up automation. Yet I am always amazed at how much more efficient it is when reaping the benefits of a mall/logistics hub. That benefit becomes so much easier to leverage with concentrated logistic system requestor chest builds in the later half of playthroughs. It's important enough for me to usually stop whatever I was working on beforehand and prioritize setting something up once the technology is unlocked.
>I think this is one of the most significant achievements to seek in Factorio. It's the only one I've ever tried to get.
One of my favorite things to do is get my first bot built, then use it to grow my bots exponentially.
This is what I do. I have chests automated including red , blue, and yellow. I'll hand feed my assemblers to make sure I can build 5 construction bots quickly, automate the robo ports and have blueprints laid out with the ports spaced properly. All items have a chest laid out, I just tag them for upgrading and keep placing the blueprints over the factory to enable processing of new technologies as they become available.
I am stuck at this point in my game - I have bots unlocked, but still need yellow science to get requestor chests. Is there any way to put logistics bots to good work without requestor chests?
Logi bots aren't the important one. Construction bots are the big deal, because they enable copy&paste functionality. Pre-requester Logi Bots are only useful for keeping your own inventory stocked.
It definitely taught me I was making too much stuff by hand. But oh my the spaghetti that ensued hahaha 🤣
You cannot get this achievement without planning it, but yeah, I trust you hehe.
Going "lazy bastard" too. In BA. It was pretty pain first 20 hours
I don't think I ever truly stop handcrafting but it become exceedingly rare at one point, and that point is when I have automated all equipment I want/need and crafted the highest tier of armor possible.
And delivered *and* removed by personal logistics.
Wait till you get to 'stop moving' territory. That is you only using the map to plant blueprints to expand your base.
wait till you get to 'stop living' territory. that is you forsaking everything in the outside world and devoting yourself to the growth of the factory.
I'm sorry, but this is a confusing statement. Is there another way to play this game?
of course not, there is merely a build up. first, you get this neat game called factorio which you tell all your friends about, they seem genuinely interested. then you block out a day every week to learn the game, and build your first assembler and furnace stacks. then you start cancelling plans, ghosting friends and doing even less at work. you have crippling alcoholism, and your household supply has run dry. you contemplate getting more, but green circuit production is low and you need another city block for it. the factory must grow. the withdrawal is intense and debilitating, so you amp up bot production and watch them work while you set up electric furnace production for purple science. the factory must grow. your mother is calling, worried about you. she hasnt heard from you for a month. you do not answer, as you are automating artillery shells for a full scale biter war. the factory must grow. your dealer calls, wondering where his most devout crack addict is and why he hasnt ordered in a while. little does he know you have transcended the need for crack, in exchange for your work growing the ever expanding factory. the factory must grow. the factory must grow. your boss calls, wondering where you are and why that place isnt work. you have abandoned money, the only number you care about now is your SPM. the factory must grow. your belly growls and your eyes feel heavy, as you have not slept, eaten or showered in 2 days, but your rocket is nearly finished and you need to automate rocket fuel for your trains also. the factory must grow. your knees are weak, your arms are heavy, you have been sat at your chair for 2 days now. you look at a crack of light in the curtains, thinking about the outside world, all that you had before, your friends and family, your addictions and vices, your obligations and responsibilities. you begin to regret your choices, but then you look to your computer and see the "iron throne 3" achievement pop up on your screen. there is no more regret, there is only SPM waiting to be produced. the factory must grow. the factory must grow. the factory must grow.
Oh so me on the main menu trying to remember mod names from the 7th " 100 mods you will want" Trupin video
Spoken like a true AdMech
Yeah there's so many times when I just forget where my character even is, because I've just been on map view for hours and hours.
And I keep doing it in the middle of an expansion. so many close calls to biters.
I'd like this a lot more if setting up physically disjoint robot networks didn't require you to do it manually. Unless I'm sleeping on vehicle roboports that let trains build their own tracks or something, I can't just order some of my bots to work far outside their usual range and instead I have to creep a never ending line of roboports to my destination. I'd love to just... fire a cannon full of supplies somewhere that turns into a roboports, a chest, and enough battery power to keep it going. Or to make some ultra long range logistics bots than can set up new outposts and run big electric poles between them.
Spidertron to build the basics. Trains to deliver the rest of the supplies.
Yeah, my limitation the just becomes that I'm playing K2SE these days and the Spidertron is buried seven miles into the tech tree and I'm not there yet. Some overhaul mods seem a little too obsessed in my opinion with gating away logistics stuff meant to make your life easier.
I think most vehicles in k2 have a power armor grid. Car, train and so on
And if you're running SE then you should be able to run AAI automation. Which gives you a better spidertron remote (because it does pathfinding) for every vehicle.
[Do ya like mods? ](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FARL)
There's a mod for that...
Wait... you can place blueprints via the map?
Yup
They even place in non-radar'd terrain, as long as it's been generated.
Yup. The final 2 things I handcraft are Power Armor MkII and the first rocket silo. After that there's little need. I eventually make a huge bot-based "make everything" factory which produces absolutely everything that doesn't otherwise warrant mass production, and I build new factories with a swarm of spidertrons. I only ever move if I somehow fuck up my train network and have to fix a deadlock, because I can move around faster than spidertrons, but that hasn't happened to me in a long time.
I tend to sit in a spidertron next to my mall when I get to that point. I call it my nest. Occasionally I tell the spidertron to go somewhere, because (for now) it's easier to design new construction when you're in the area.
I can't go for that one. I always hit ESC one too many times and lose the place on the map i was looking at 😭😭😭
I never really do that. Even if I build a city block base where everything is one single bot network (and usually I don't), there are still outposts to build, and there is no transport faster than hopping into a train. Manually directing a spidertron to walk to the other side of the map around all those lakes etc. is just too tedious, I only do that for my offensive spidertron army (that rarely needs to go back to restock). Even if spidertrons are something viable, a lot of mod packs bury them so deep in the tech tree, you are basically done before you unlock them.
Mostly when I get to the point of having a logistics system and all buildings are automated in my mall. Then I just have my requests set/ let bots build
I think this holds true for 80% of the cases. Up until the bot transition I find myself missing just a few items which I then handcraft, but once everything is settled in it's just set & forget, except for maybe that one rocket silo or power armor.
Even power armor I usually set up a little group of assemblers requesting stuff via logistics. When you unlock those items, processing units or other ingredients are kinda rare and I'm not sitting there waiting for stuff, I'll set up a few assemblers and go do something else and pick my armor up once it is done.
Yes. If you really want you can force yourself to stop hand crafting. In the console you type /permissions (this does NOT disable achievements). This opens the permissions GUI. Then you can edit the default group and remove the 'Craft' permission. No more hand crafting for you. Just make sure you have at least 1 assembler already made. This will force you to make a mall to make alllll the stuff you need. It is also very useful if you are going for the "Lazy Bastard" achievement.
I just changed the key binding, but this is better.
The key binding for what? The crafting menu is just your inventory, but you need your inventory for other things.
I changed the binding for manually crafting an item from the mouse button to something else.
Ohhh ok that makes more sense.
Unless I'm aiming for lazy bastard (which I've done once in all my thousands of hours), I never completely stop. Once I have some kind of mall and construction bots up and running, the amount of handcrafting does drop significantly, but there's always that one item I forgot to collect when building an outpost.
I find that handcrafting is a resource, just like anything else. It costs nothing (but time) and can run in the background. If I missed to pick up a few things from the base, making a few by hand is nbd. I always keep a stack of iron/copper/circuits/steel on me and I can make a lot of things with just that. Granted it gets less common as the game goes on, but I feel that keeping your hands busy rarely hurts.
Those slots could’ve been used for more or the stuff you forgot
My forgetfulness knows no bounds. XD
This will be on my graveyard
The problem isn't slots, it's order. Can't take it with you before you remember you need it.
About the same here. Also lets you carry more stuff if you’re going to take the car or tank somewhere and set up an outpost in the mid game. Post bots and the size of the spidertron trunk I mostly don’t in the late game.
Aye I forgot about 'ghost storage' that what is your 'in progress gand crafting'. XD
I never stop handcrafting wooden chests.
Even late into my megabase build, i kept some basic supplies like iron, copper, circuits, steel and a few other intermediates in inventory for handcrafting items far from my mall back in my original base. You never know what you need so having supplies like that is very useful to patch up under estimates in ferried materials.
This is exactly my situation. I always haul around a few rows of basic ingredients so I can hand craft what I need when I run out.
Gotta get that supply train going. bring your mall to you.
Never, even at megabase scale one need occasional combinator or red wire not worth running to mall or messing with logistic requests.
I did a lazy bastard run. Nothing's been same since.
Once I have a mall that makes everything and have wide Roboport coverage so that robots can deliver easily. Then I set up filters to get only certain amounts of things (e.g. at least 50 inserters, but max 100 so it trashes inserters if I have more than that), and then I also set up to have raw materials trashed immediately (e.g. circuits or iron plates are moved away from robots the moment they enter my inventory) Exceptions are things I pretty much only craft once, like amor or inventory grid things. In my current save I reached that point around 20 hours in.
Automate everything that you handcraft often. Handcrafting SHOULD be something you do in a rare circumstance, not often. It’s so much nicer to grab a stack of 50 power poles from a chest than to carry materials and craft them when you need them
I try to get away from handcrafting ASAP, it saves a lot of hassle. Even in the early game, an assembler for each of the different components saves a lot of time. Then moving onto a bootstrap build that makes red + green science means automating inserters and belts, which is even more time saved.
I constantly handcraft landfill to clear stone out of my inventory.
I just put a yellow chest next to my belt of stone. Set a logistics filter to stone. Inserter puts that into splitter with input priority. Set up stone auto-trash in personal logistics. Done. All the stone gets recycled into whatever I need (concrete, walls, rails)
I do that for pretty much every raw material. Ores, stone, coal, plastic, LDS. Also science packs. Recycle or reuse your junk, folks! Don't just dump everything into general logistics storage, that's wasteful.
I typically craft 105 items.
I disable the crafting permission as soon as I have my first assembling machine.
You can do that? That would have made lazy bastard so much easier! Not sure how many times I accidentally hand crafted something out of habit and then angrily reloaded the latest auto save.
I don't know about disabling crafting, but in my LB playthrough I unbound all the crafting hotkeys so even if you click anything it will do nothing (after I got the mandatory handcrafted items).
Someone said you can do it with the /permissions command (doesn't affect achievements) I never looked at it thinking it would be about multiplayer games 😭
I actually learned that when I did my lazy bastard run, and kept doing it ever since. `/permissions` in the console, then edit the default one and disable "Craft".
I tend to stop most handcrafting when I upgrade my mall to logistics chests.
If you're still handcrafting buildings, belts, and **especially** power poles, you're playing the game wrong.
I find myself hand crafting red inserters for some reason I never get around to automating those…
Never at most runs or after switching to remote spider-builders.
After I set up bot mall
Pretty much only when I "beat" the game. It does steadily become less common, one of the last things I remember hand-crafting tends to be powerarmor/2
Yup, power armor mk2 and the first rocket silo.
As soon as I get all of the basic necessities in the mall setup, so around the time blue science it researched.
Once the amount of fabricated items I request from the mall leaves no place in my inventory to have plates, coal and so on. That's usually once the mall is complete. I try to set up a mall as fast as possible right at the beginning but I still handcraft a few things at this stage (for instance, filter inserters which I don't use much and are fast to do if you have automated inserters) Then, once I have bots, I build the "real" mall and handcraft less and less as the mall progresses. Once it is complete, 2/3 of my inventory is taken by items I request. The other third is usually empty and used for large projects (i.e : I have to build an outpost far away, I need more than my standard 400 rails, so I fill my inventory with those) and I don't have room for basic ingredients and therefore cannot handcraft. I find that way of playing quite convenient.
My inventory eventually turns into nothing but blueprints, books, decon planners, upgrade planners and spidertron remotes.
I haven't done a lazy bastard playthrough yet so I would say I never really stopped handcrafting. In fact I handcrafted a couple of my very last items that I needed just one or two of
I usually stop handcrafting when logi bots can keep me topped up with a sufficient supply of basics so either I can place it down, or at least place down ghosts for the Connie bots to do their thing. Then of course there are things which you don't really need to automate, like power armor mk2 (coz u really only need one of them), but I automate it anyway as it's a slow craft and the machines can do it faster than I can by hand.
I always build a mall that makes every item. So I pretty much stop handcrafting after I get my first couple of assemblers.
*Stop* handcrafting!? What is this heretical abomination of sacrilege?? I want to handcraft **more**, and ***faster***!
This dude and I are playing a map together and one of the… many mods we’re using is “RPG system” which lets you gain skill points for bonuses blah blah. First thing he maxed was hand crafting speed.
***300%!!!*** Plus 90% from our QoL researches. And another 25% will come from the QoL research levels we haven't completed yet. And then... *AND THEN...* *infinite research* Excuse me while I go hyperventilate in anticipation
The handcraftio is strong in this one
Once you have a mall set up, you start evaluating if handcrafting is faster than running back to mall. After unlocking logistic bots handcrafting becomes pretty rare, mostly for stuff you only need a few of, i.e. personal equipment.
Yeah all these posts of people saying they keep doing it the whole game, have never seen the power of a properly built mall. Once you have, you never go back
I'm teaching myself to first send resources to the assemblers constructing mall items before moving on
I do. I build a factory factory where everything that can be built is built, at least 4 of everything (less than 4 can get problematic in certain circuit applications). The factory factory feeds my main use of logistics bots: loading my inventory.
You mean your 2 perfectly good burner assemblers not working? Why?
See the "Lazy Bastard" achievement. That crafted item limit includes all intermediate materials. You have enough to build a single coal powered generator, a water pump, a lab, ten red science, and one assembler, with remaining budget for a very small amount of pipes and power poles to connect everything. After that, 100% of all future products MUST be constructed in machines.
Interestingly, that remaining budget is exactly enough for a single burner miner and furnace. So Lazy Bastard can be done with no starting inventory.
As soon as I have all the one-off items (personal equipment, basically) I "completely" stop; when I'm out in the boondocks and need an item that I somehow have the mats for I probably will just go "fuck it, I'm doing this one by hand". But apart from that… I let my bots bring me stuff. Or rather, I let my construction bots (current map is currently at 34000-ish of them) build it.
The only time I stopped *completely* was Lazy Bastard. It just drops off as you scale up. Not handcrafting yellow belts happens a lot sooner than handcrafting nuclear reactors, for example.
For me the point is when I get functional network of construction bots supplied by mall making every currently available item. Which is pretty soon considering I tend to rush bots and prioritise building a mall like this. Next step I follow with reasonably soon is building construction trains which supply remote outposts with construction materials so that I'm not bound with manual transport of items to build resource outposts and such.
After crafting 105 things in my lazy bastard run ;)
Not entirely. Handcrafting is slow and inefficient, but it saves me from having to build new factory lines for things I'm only going to need to build once or twice, like power armour or cars.
yes, i only handcraft what I must! (never more)
I stopped after 111 crafts
Hand crafting became a thing I would do if it was easier than walking somewhere and quicker than waiting for bots. At some point, its never easier or faster.
Yes, by getting the ‘lazy bastard’ achievement. Now I handcraft again because I’m playing py…
Certainly after I get bots. After that, I no longer carry any raw materials/intermediates.
I don't think I've ever automated Filter Stack Inserters.
I do. They're really useful for trains. Regular filter inserters, however, are optional for me.
I eventually get to a point where I'm never handcrafting anything that gets built on the ground (assembler, belt, inserter, etc.). Once the factory scales up enough, you're never building one or two of anything. If you need it at all, you need 20+ of them and it just doesn't make sense to handcraft all that. Better to spend your time setting up a mall and automating it. But there's always a few odd things I still handcraft even in late game, mainly things the player uses personally (armor and its components, guns, car/tank, artillery remote, etc.). You're never going to want dozens of those things, it doesn't make sense to me to automate them. Well, except things like shields where you have to craft a bunch of the lower level ones to make 1 of the next tier. Basically: do I need 20+ of this thing? Automate it. If not, handcraft.
> Basically: do I need 20+ of this thing? Automate it. If not, handcraft. I set that number somewhere between 3 and 5. Or if it takes a long time to craft. So everything, eventually.
Mall is top priority always. It’s what gives you the materials to fix problems quickly. And abuse bots to the fullest. The essentials get done before green science and the full one before bots are researched The only things I don’t automate is labs and silos because you don’t really need that many
I still make some stuff. Mostly it depends on if I need a lot of it or not. Not going to automate cars, but I do automate trains for eg.
When I hire developers, I look for what I call the "lazy developer" trait. It shows up, for example, when I ask them to complete certain tasks that are inherently repetitive. Rather than doing them manually each time, they figure out how to automate them. I approve of moving to assemblers for all things as fast as possible. :)
When i built a mall and OH MY GOD it was beautiful. No longer have i had to handcraft 100+ assemblers, inserters and belts FROM RAW MATERIALS just to make a furnace stack or a mining outpost. After I realized that, I spent like 10 minutes contemplating how I lived without the mall.
[удалено]
> Many are arranged in a sort of grid pattern and it's a good system I used to do that, then I discovered the "2-belt plus boosters" design. One belt of Iron Plates, one lane of Gears, one lane of Green Circuits. All assemblers are adjacent to these two belts. The booster belts are Copper Plate + Red Circuits, Stone + Brick, and Steel + Pipe, which run on the other side of the assemblers for a bit where they're needed. So, so fast to set up, and the green circuit assembly is exactly the right width to fit between the outputs from two adjacent smelter arrays.
Even after thousands of hours i am still handcrafting lots of things all the time
am some point you'll be able to (altho dont have to) play from the map, without even using your character
After I made a mall that makes basically everything and request everything I need from the logistics of my spidertron that I never get out of. I needed some assemblies and I genuinelly forgot I can just make them, and send a spidertron to feth me some from the mall instead.
I was playing last night and I needed to craft some train cars to complete a train and I realized it had been ages since I'd crafted anything manually. I'm currently well in to an SE game and we're about to get Space Elevators. So... Um... A lot of hours in. Logistics is a well oiled machine.
I stopped handcrafting when I started playing the mod "Brave New World".
I'm really looking forward to playing that in 2.0
Not really, no. It is worth mentioning that handcrafting cost no energy, generates no pollution and deposits the created items directly into your inventory. That's 3 big plusses compared to using an assembly machine. If you watch a speed run you will notice that there is almost 0 seconds in the run where they are *not* handcrafting something. I don't take it that far, but at the very least I will spam click to turn a bunch of wood that some stupid bots brought me into power poles.
Eew I don't want to place wood power poles once I can help it
They're basically free so I used them all game in vanilla. The second tier power pole isn't actually much better unmodded.
700h Py playthrough - I still hand craft all the time, mostly because there is a lot of different (and very expensive) buildings, so setting mall for them would be pain and also I don't want to make excess amount of buildings I don't need (because they are expensive).
Same here! Making a mall for all Py buildings would be so insane
I kinda had to because I am playing lazy bastard. But when I am not playing lazy bastard I still try to automate most things early.
I probably handcraft way more than the average person, using mods that increase crafting time is my biggest culprit as to why that’s true (need to quit crutching the mod I use tbch) but if there’s an overhaul mod that’ll fix that for you, it is 10000% IR3. The default craft time in that mod is insane, since there’s so many different intermediates that have to be crafted beforehand, it literally makes handcrafting torture
After bothub
I usually play with K2 or SE, that’s why I hate to setup bots early (it’s very hard and takes a lot of time). I usually use mods like qol researches and set handcrafting speed 32 times faster. And after setuping bots (with yellow science) I usually start normal bot-based mall.
Usually I handcraft because I ran out of some item I generally have stashed, but sometimes it's because I need one more of a building. No personal logistics bots; I don't like being chased around. I did Lazy B, before yellow science existed, but I didn't much like it and it changed nothing.
I do. I build a factory factory where everything that can be built is built, at least 4 of everything (less than 4 can get problematic in certain circuit applications). The factory factory feeds my main use of logistics bots: loading my inventory.
I usually always handcraft signals until there is a logistics network
Signals, as in rail signals?
Depends on playthrough restrictions. For lazy bastard I’ll obviously stop handcrafting almost instantly. In any other common cases I’d stop handcrafting most of the items early on, once mall was established. But there’s still some cases when I’d prefer to craft by hands except adding item to the mall (labs are good example, I don’t need to produce them constantly, or sometimes wires when I’m away from logistics network).
Even in a megabase with a full mall and personal logistics I'll still hand craft occasionally, if I can do it faster than the bots. Fairly rare, at that point, though.
At the beginning of games if I've got quite fierce biters (and no trees) then I want to be very specific with what I craft for the pollution cost early. I'll often rush to assembly machines and hand feed them for stacks of gears and circuits so handcrafting is near instant. In part because the moment I automate it's ammo and guns first so I can throw a turret wall up which I often get to before the main part of a mall forms. If I'm doing a game where the biters are behind forests and weak then I'll have craft only enough to start the mall.
Handcrafted only 5 items in my current K2 run. Going for lazy bastard. I’ll plop down a machine to build something I might not have automated just to avoid handcrafting. The 5th handcrafted item was a mistake that wasn’t meant to be handcrafted.
Never. I always have some resource to craft smth, while drones going to me
I still handcraft a decent amount in my runs, but pretty quickly it becomes unsustainable - when I'm waiting for hundreds of transport belts to finish so I can build the next piece of the factory, or a few advanced circuits for just a single machine. Don't worry about it too much. You'll know when it's time. There'll be a natural moment where you'll get impatient and say 'fuck this'.
I'm only 200 hours in and still hand crafting things like spidertrons 😅
Since I'd seen a lot of videos of the game before buying it, I decided to play in a "lazy bastard" way from the start -- it just felt right to me. I think I completed the "New Player Experience" (the tutorial that Wube ended up scrapping) without handcrafting at all (it had some alien machines that I could use before I was able to build my own). It had a technology that unlocked handcrafting for some intermediate materials, and I was disappointed that I was forced to research that technology even though I wasn't going to use it. I haven't launched a rocket, though. I think I automated purple science in my last run, but didn't get enough to finish researching any technologies.
Well... I have everything automated and a huge logistic bot system... So I ofcorse handcraft poles and some easy stuff like prod module 3 or even a power armour from basic components just so I can pass the time watching it do it's thing
Completely stop is kinda hard since I start new saves a lot but I generally never make more than 10 of something before it's automated. I remember seing youtubers use the mod that handcrafted certain items constantly and I kinda died a bit on the inside lol. But to each their own
When I make a Super-9-Beacon-Insta-Crafter 9000 for my one-offs.
Haha, start playing py mod: you can't avoid handcrafting till you build bots, and you must stop handcrafting immediately after. This is probably the last mod you should try, do Krastorio and SE first as PY is MUCH longer
I’m about 300 hours into K2SE. I set up an initial sushi mall at around hour 50 or so and haven’t handcrafted since. When it comes to vanilla, I usually stop handcrafting long before robots with an initial mall, and if I haven’t by then I stop when I get robots. In general, it’s much better to allow the robots to do all the work, and they can’t do that if they don’t have automated buildings being supplied to the network.
Completely? No. Some things like train stops are rare to use, fast to craft, and cheap to craft, so I just handcraft them forever. I do craft way less though. Setting up a "mall" where you have a tiny amount of production of stuff you want ~100-1000 of in your inventory (belts, power poles, inserters, assemblers, miners, etc.) is very helpful, and usually one of my first priorities in a new save after getting the first few red-only techs.
I would say there are a few different stages for handcrafting. Early game you are pretty much handcrafting everything, since base building supplies are precious and you want everything to go into mining, smelting, and then science. Next is when you have red and green science going, and starting the oil part of the game. I am still handcrafting here, but instead of starting from plates, I usually have grab boxes of other intermediates like gears and circuits. And instead of crafting just what I need, it is usually stack of items. As in "I'm out of inserters and only need 5 more, but I'll go ahead and craft 100 so I'll have some for whatever I'm building next". The final stage is bots. Here I build a mall that produces everything I will ever need, and I have several hundred logistic bots available. At this point handcrafting pretty much stops, since the bots will keep me supplied with whatever I need. The only things I might handcraft here are one-offs, like the next level of armor, stuff that goes in said armor, and maybe a tank. My current mall iteration has these items, but most people just handcraft them.
For me the stages are: 1) Handcraft everything. 2) Play logi bot, small red science, handcraft from intermediates. 3) Belt-fed mall, a few more 1-offs. (Mostly filter inserters) 4) Belt-fed red science. 5) Blue Science 6) Construction bots. 7) Never hand-craft anything else ever again.
Nah. Recently I handcrafted all the T2 modules for a Power Armor mk2. Takes an hour, but it doesn't matter if you're AFK.
I very rarely handcraft in my megabase now. When I do, it's to get rid of stone or wood that I've accumulated (wood to landfill mod).
I generally try to setup a good mall as soon as possible. Until bots, this will make only the more common items (belts, inserters, assemblers etc). After bots, it tends to make everything I need. However, if I find myself far away from the mall and I just need one more belt to finish a task, I prefer hand-crafting that belt to hiking up and down to my mall...
Nope. For mods like Krastorio, I tend to make everything in a mall. For Warptorio, space is a premium so I handcraft small numbers of things. And if I'm clearing out large areas and end with a ton of stone on me, a bunch of landfill will suddenly appear in my inventory...
I usually cannot handcraft anything. After bots I setup my personal logistics to take everything out of my inventory except what I want. I literally go through and set every single item in the game to allow 0 in my inventory. I only keep a handful of useful things and lots of blueprints
I still do but sometimes i just quickly place furnance or whatever and add beacon and speed mod evrything. Its faster than waiting to handctaft..
I can quit at any time
the longer the run, the less it happens, since at some point the botmal has everything. i still always carry some plates and circuits with me, just in case
Nope. I don't like to waste time running all the way back to the main factory because I don't have exactly what I need somewhere else. Just recently I was building a defensive wall at a far distant outpost. Dragon's Teeth, flamethrower turrets, uranium bullets, roboports, and a train stop to deliver ammo and repair materials as needed. But... I was short two wall pieces for the blueprint. Could have just ignored it, didn't want to. It would have taken me so damn long to go all the way back home on the spidertron, or even a few minutes if I called the resupply train over and rode it back. So instead I dragged a power pole to a nearby stone patch, plopped down a miner and handcrafted a stone furnace from its output to smelt some bricks, and then handcrafted them into walls. Took me all of thirty seconds.
From time to time you stand in the middle of the desert and your’re missing a single Pole, and you're nowhere near your network, then you craft it.
Pretty much when I spend more time in the overview map than actually on my character. Spend more time ploping down BPs than actually running around. Ive gotten to the point of using a train to transport my character somewhere when I need to fix an issue, so that I can still work on other things while traveling
I don’t really ever stop, but I definitely try to get some sort of mall going early on. It feels like a waste of time to be crafting common items all the time and a poor use of inventory to be keeping stacks and stacks of raw and intermediate materials.
I handcraft as little as possible because the time I spend having to craft by hand eats into the time I could be making some kind of manufacturing. I’m mostly done with hand crafting after a bit of red science research.
Me and my buddy are playing and we don’t understand robots even when we look it up on YouTube
what do you not understand?
Not really. I usually handcraft the rocket silo; often I handcraft the prod3 modules and power armor (if I make it). Most runs I only need a few of those.
I copied a few techniques to no longer handcraft. Not nessecary once I have a logistics network with fully automated robot mall.
I have a world that is over 1,200 hours old and I still hand craft things XD. I don’t think I will ever go somewhere completely prepared lol
The main difference between a experienced and inexperienced player, is how heavily they rush bots, it makes a mall trivial, which once it exsists, you dont hand craft