My Friday at work was pretty slow and I had plenty of time to work in the factory today. Let’s see what all got done:

Science Packs

I was able to successfully rip up all Research Labs and reroute the Science Packs from the Initial Base to the local Train Depot for transportation to the new base. From the new base, I was able to properly lay out around 20 Research Labs with Fast Inserters between them, then get all of the colors around them for the taking. Blue Science that is now being made at the new base easily can go straight to the Research Lab area.

Also, Purple Science Packs are now being made at the new base right next to the Research Lab area, so it doesn’t have to travel far. Yellow Science Pack research has been done but I’m still a while away from that.

More Filtering Woes

It’s basically bad luck, but I wound up transporting both Iron Gears and Steel Plates together. The problem is that I’m not really using or doing anything with the Gears just yet, so they tend to hold up the line. I took some time to think about a way to say “if Gears are not moving, redirect them to another belt for temporary storage” but I just couldn’t think of a way. If Balancers could be connected to the circuit network, then I could make it happen. I am testing out a new theory: Have the buffer chests send the item counts out to the network, then tell the Filter Inserters to blacklist depending on what signal is being put out. I’m hoping that if the number of Gears is really high, then only Steel Plates will be put out and vice versa. Something tells me that I’ll be telling you next week that this didn’t work.

Blue Belts!

Yes, since Purple has been unlocked and is now being made (very, very slowly), I can now start making Blue Belts! I am storing them up in a Steel Chest for now but will be placing them where needed as I can.

Smelting Time

The iron and copper patches at the initial base are really starting to dry up. And just bringing iron plates to the initial base isn’t really working like I hoped, so maybe it’s time to build a massive smelting base where I can just bring in ore, smelt and deliver to specific sites. This is going to be a hard one because of the number of items I’m going to have to have to get things going. Which leads to another big issue right now:

Power

Steam isn’t handling all the things I’m trying to do, neither are the patches of solar and accumulators I continue to put down (literally hundreds of them). It’s time to go nuclear and I’m pretty close to getting things kicked off.

I use a Ratio Guide for when I can’t remember the proper ratios on nuclear power, so I turn to this post and it works really, really well. So far, I have everything made and laid out, I just need uranium. The biggest hurdle right now is that my Sulfuric Acid is a good ways away from my nuclear plant and uranium patch. I’ll have to “bottle it up” and ship it now just to mine it, then I’ll have to wait forever to get the right Uranium to process and throw into the reactor.

This is Day 18 of #100DaysToOffload.