Mystic Machinery: Industry is Magic

by Conglomerate

Chapter 6: Downgrades

The plane’s engines buzzed as I landed back on the plateau. The sun was setting, which meant I needed to implement the daylight sensor sooner rather than later. It also meant that I couldn’t send down any more Titanite, which was unfortunate. That didn’t leave me with much to do during the night.

I checked the progress on the drill.

355 km : 118 km

It was on a good schedule, and there wasn’t much I could do to speed it up anyways. Setting the Erudite in its storage, I quickly finished upgrading the Luxite Growing Chambers. As soon as the A.I. was plugged in, they all closed in unison. Good to know that it works.

And so I was left to my own devices. I didn’t have enough resources to develop the base any more, and since the drill was doing its own thing I couldn’t excavate any space underneath effectively. My thoughts went towards alleviating that.

Once the drill made it to the Plumbite area, it didn’t mean I would just have Plumbite to work with, I still needed to mine it and transport it. The drill tech could mine it well enough, but before I could move any resources I had to clear the tunnels of their excess. I could probably get most of it out at my base, where I would have some use for it, but any more would have to be put elsewhere. The drill could also fix that.

Then came the tracks for the trains. The materials would have to be transported first, but that was easily done with a few cargo techs running through the tunnels. Once that was done I could branch out to the other resources, with each passing day sending down more and more Titanite. When everything was good and done, I could start producing, I only needed the capabilities to do so.

There it was, that was what I could work on.

In order to create a factory powerful enough to control the planet, I first needed a factory powerful enough to build it, and a factory powerful enough to build that one and so on and so forth. It all started with the few manufacturing blocks I had at my base. With just a select few fabricators, a component factory, and a single mobile refinery, I needed an upgrade.

To do that however, I needed resources. It would take time to tunnel to every source, but I didn’t need ridiculous income just to reach the next level of production. If I wanted to do this fast, then I would need to multitask. I needed anything and everything, so while the drill kept on drilling away, I took the plane to go and gather some things.

It was dark, it being night and all, and I was neutral to that fact. The bonus was that it made things harder to see, which meant a lower chance at being spotted. Most individuals didn’t work through the night either, which meant I could afford to be a bit more obvious. The downside was that it made things harder to see, and I would be forced to either work through the dark, or light it up, something that would be incredibly visible from almost any distance. With less activity overall though, there was less of a chance of that coming into play to begin with.

Like I said, neutral.

The first on the list was Plumbite. It was very common, which meant I needed a lot of it. Several trips with the plane filled my stockpile, though the surface deposits were quickly dwindling. Next up was Cuprite, which was also pretty common, though it was more specialized in its uses, I only made one trip for it.

The next few resources came easily enough, and with a few tonnes of materials in my storage, I was looking to begin production. First came a line of refineries; I needed some way to process the raw materials I was bringing in, and a single mobile refinery with reduced efficiency wouldn’t cut it. Next up was a few component factories, where the refined materials would then be processed into more complex items. These complex items would then be forwarded to my fabricators, which would take them and any other resources they may need to create the components of my factory.

The whole setup was a very common design, any prospector with even a single hint of knowledge would know how to build one of these. Though you would be surprised at how many don’t even have that. Onto the design though, the whole system was a closed loop, with the only input being resources and the only output being finished blocks. Everything else was enclosed within, including refining, storage, and fabrication, any excess or mistakes in the assembly line would just be funneled back around into storage again.

That is where a glaring issue made itself known.

Logistics. Normally, factories such as these used an excessive amount of conveyors. Conveyors were made with Luxite. I didn’t have a lot of Luxite, and I wouldn’t have a lot to work with in the near future either. That was going to be a problem, besides large scale transport with trains, anything smaller would require the use of conveyors. At the size and scale I was planning, it just simply wouldn’t work out, the sheer amount of space I would need to produce enough Luxite fast enough would just be too expensive, not to mention visibility.

That meant I had to devise another method of moving resources from point A to point B.

But how?

The only other method I had of moving materials automatically was with inserters, and while they could move stuff over short distances well enough, they were nowhere near long enough to span an entire factory. Chaining them together might work, but the insane resource cost of doing so would not be worth it. I needed something simple and cheap.

I could not tell you how long I scoured the fabrication list. It was one of those things where no matter what criteria or option you chose, it was always the same answer; conveyors or nothing. I even opened up the blueprint just to see if there was anything I could do to negate the cost.

A whole lot of nothing.

Except for the version history.

I was hesitant to look at the changelog, most current versions were top of the line, the most efficient and cost effective designs possible while still fulfilling the same purpose, anything before that would just be subpar. With little other options though, I opened it up, and was immediately proved right.

The previous version of the conveyor costed twice as much Luxite, and it even needed some Plumbite to hold together. The next one was even worse, it incorporated some Erudite into the design, and required an obscene amount of Fibrewood and Rubber to create, making it much bulkier in the process. The next few iterations were just less refined versions of the same thing, somehow packing on even more resources as it became less developed.

This was going nowhere.

On a whim, I flipped to the next version, totalling almost three hundred years in the past. The Luxite cost actually went down a peg, and that caught my attention. Looking closer, this design was actually an entirely different model than the current conveyor. Some of the other material costs were flipped as well, with Erudite being phased out completely with the addition of some Cuprite wiring.

Hold on a minute, this might actually go somewhere.

Cycling back a little more, the conveyor design changed even more. Physical belts replaced movement fields, driven by mechanical movement that could be linked together and rotated in almost any direction on a single plane. It still used a decent amount of Plumbite and Cuprite, but there was no Luxite at all within the design.

The design was far from perfect, as the conveyor had many flaws. For one, it had lost almost all sense of verticality, with the only way to move things up and down being on a gentle slope. It hardly had any structure, and needed additional supports if it wasn’t placed directly on the ground. Since it had physical belts though, it could actually move quite fast, but that brought another issue.

It wouldn’t be able to handle more hazardous materials without quickly degrading, and liquids or other loose resources would be out of the question entirely. I would have to use something else for them.

Fabricating a few, I created a simple loop of conveyors, hoping to test out any more nuances that weren’t immediately obvious. One thing that I quickly noticed was that they had a lot of surface area, and could actually hold more of a resource than a modern conveyor. Without the complexities of movement fields however, they could not handle overflow in the slightest, with any excess either clogging the line or falling off completely. They lacked any sort of intelligence either, meaning they couldn’t communicate with each other or know when to stop; the belt would just dump resources off the end until it either ran out or backed up, resulting in even more of a mess.

It made sense, these things were outrageously simple, and I would have to work around that. They would function more as pieces of a larger machine than as modular components. That revealed even more problems. The conveyor belts could not interface directly with any of the other machines, that included the silos and the receiver.

Luckily, this issue was easily solved with the implementation of inserters, they were smart enough to make up for some of the conveyor belts’ failings. They could pick up resources to and from the belts, placing them into any inputs or storages necessary. They could count too, meaning there wouldn’t have to be any guesswork when fabricating blocks, which decreased the chance of any mistakes happening in the process.

That left just one more issue: Liquids.

Modern conveyors were universal in what they transported, these ones were not. They could not physically transport fluids, but following that same philosophy, there was another method I could try.

Pipes.

They were even more simple, just tubes that allowed the flow of liquids in either direction. Actually controlling that flow was a bit more difficult, but the blueprints for pumps and junctions were readily available in the list. There was just one problem. Like the conveyor belts, they also couldn’t interface with the silos, or the inserters. It wasn’t like it could just grab an orb of suspended liquid anyway.

Thankfully I had already devised a solution to this problem thanks to my lack of storage options in the past. By simply attaching the pipes to a larger reservoir or tank of the resource, it would work well enough as a separate system.

I quickly redesigned the fabrication station to incorporate these new restrictions. The closed loop remained, for its purpose wasn’t affected by the conveyors themselves, and by supplementing them with pipes, it could handle all of the resources I had access to. I was a little wary of Rodite however, seeing as how it was incredibly corrosive in both its refined and unrefined forms, so just to be safe, I surrounded the whole system in repair bubbles.

Giving it a few test runs revealed a much more animated process with much more moving parts, but it was overall fine. Good speed, okay handling, and less than ideal size, but it would suffice for my current needs.

It was kind of funny, in an effort to upgrade, I had somehow downgraded in the process. It was necessary however, these belts, inserters, and pipes would become the very foundation of my factories from here on out. Of course that would all change when things went automatic, but that was a quest for another time, because I now had to figure out just what to do with thousands of cubic meters of loose stone and rock.

To Be Continued…

Comments

[Booster Spice]

Thousands of cubic meters of rock if you aint building upwards? More subtle lower level ridges and sttep sided chasms, but for resources, crush, grind and sieve?

[Dagon M Dragoon]

oooOOOoo the factory is born and it must grow!

[Aiwhisper]

Ohh interesting how you’re making factorio tech the precursor to the tetra tech blocks.

[herobrins mom]

11775923
The factory must grow!