factorio full circle

Our Factorio playthrough has come full circle. In the earlygame, everything was jank because we had no idea how anything worked. We had random buildings here and there, we ran back and forth ferrying materials between miners and furnaces, how do you even hook up a steam boiler, who knows. As HGR said, it was like a puzzle game. The best earlygame moment: When HGR figured out how to make a self-sustaining coal miner by using an inserter to feed it its own coal output. It was an act of raw genius. We were streaming for newbie at the time, and newbie just about fell over laughing.

In the midgame, we got organized. We had iron, coal, and copper production down south, with vertical belts bringing the outputs north and production lines branching off those belts. We set up automated factories to produce and deliver potions to our labs, so we could continuously research new technologies. (newbie loved every bit of it. "I don't see why you don't automate more stuff," he said.) Anytime HGR got bored, he would go roaming and wipe out a few nests of aliens.

As midgame stretched into lategame, resources at our main base started to run low. I established far-flung mining outposts connected by a high-speed automated rail system to bring the materials home. I reorganized things to accomodate our new production lines. Meanwhile, HGR had charge of our military development. He made himself exoskeleton power armor with a laser defense system and a flamethrower and went forth to massacre the alien hordes. I accompanied him on a couple of expeditions, but I was really just along for the ride.

Now that we've hit endgame, we got lazy and everything is jank again. By this time, our home base is a morass of interlocking conveyor belts and production lines. Our last two research tasks, the rocket control unit and the rocket silo, require some very inconvenient combinations of items. For instance, to make blue circuits, we need to combine green and red circuits (manufactured in the middle of the base) with sulfuric acid (manufactured in the southeast corner of the base, a tight snarl of pipes and chemical plants). We could tear down and restructure large chunks of our base to facilitate automation. But, c'mon, it's the last two upgrades. So HGR just has our green/red circuits feed into chests, and then he physically picks them up and walks them over to the sulfuric acid plant, and that's how we're making all our blue circuits.

We are not streaming this part for newbie. He would be so sad.

HGR also handcrafts a bunch of parts in his inventory. He queues up a lot of crafts, then goes afk to read Tactical Nexus stuff. One time he afked on the train tracks, and that's how Locomotive Kyle Larouche picked up his second kill.

The most annoying thing to make is electric engine units, which require basic engine units (manufactured at the northernmost tip of our base) and lubricant (manufactured at the oil field a long distance southeast). HGR had charge of our oil field development. The place resembles a hedge maze of pipes with the lubricant plant in the very center. If I cared, I could clean up the place, research fluid wagons, and then construct a rail line to transport the lubricant home, but...nah. I stuck a couple assembling plants in the oil field and then do a lot of running back and forth.