I’ve been at this for months. I needed Rubber and Plastic. I needed Motors. I needed Heat Sinks and Aluminum Casings. I needed Silica. I needed Nitrogen Gas. I needed Quickwire and Copper Sheets. I needed Crystal Oscillators. And even though I made most of those things already, I needed enough production capacity that I could dedicate sufficient per-minute output to the task of making Radio Control Units, High-Speed Connectors, and Supercomputers plus Cooling Systems and Turbo Motors.

Turns out that lining up all your supplies properly before constructing the final production line is a very good idea. Who knew?

Now, a caveat: I don’t yet have the Cooling Systems production on line because I haven’t, er, unlocked Turbo Motors (for which Cooling Systems are an ingredient). I get that from the milestone I’ve been working on all this time, “Leading-Edge Production.” For all that I might be tempted to burn Awesome Sink coupons to just buy what I need to finish that off… I don’t want to. I mean, I could’ve done that to get the Supercomputers, and didn’t. Why cut the same corner for the Fused Modular Frames?

(The good news is that I have far fewer moving parts to line up in order to get FMFs going. They’re literally just made of iron, concrete, steel, aluminum, and nitrogen gas. I can probably have this up & running in a week, maybe two if I’m lazy or get distracted by shinies.)

So I got the factory built! Fantastic! Am I happy with it, though? Heaven knows I’ve tried complex multi-product builds in the past, like that particularly disastrous attempt at a space elevator shipment mega-factory a few years back. For this build, though, I’m generally pleased. The building needs a lot more beautification and a couple more drone ports but overall it’s done and I don’t cringe just looking at it.

It all fits into the space I wanted to use, which is basically a box outlining the trio of 4-platform train stations which supply most of the materials. Since I gave myself 12 meters of logistics floor overhead, the belting all fits where it needs to with only a modest amount of weird clutter and such.

With that said… I think “ten items in, five items out” is the upper boundary for any project I want to tackle at a single worksite ever again. There’s simply no way to avoid a certain amount of mess when trying to cross-belt all those things in and out of all those different machines. I might, for instance, have been better off simply separating out the Supercomputers side (which includes the High-Speed Connectors) from the Turbo Motors side (which includes Radio Control Units and Cooling Systems). I didn’t have as much overlap as originally expected. For instance, both production lines need Computers but that’s the only medium-complexity item they have in common. Making them on-site worked out okay… mostly… but I could just as easily have moved that to another facility and hauled in the results by train.

(“Mostly”: I’m not entirely happy with the bulk of the Circuit Board production getting eaten up by the HSCs manufacturers while the Crystal Computers assemblers wait for scraps. I should probably have subdivided the Circuit Board output better. I’m not messing with it right now, however. Once the manifolds and the destination storage bins all fill up, this will cease to be a major issue.)

The spacing of machinery up top isn’t quite tidy and evened out but it isn’t horribly lopsided either. And with everything well away from the (eventual) walls, I can play around with whatever design shenanigans take my fancy. Odds are that I’ll try to carry forward the aesthetic I experimented with at the Crystal Os site but I’m not convinced that’ll work for such a huge (nearly) square box. We’ll see, though.

What’s after this? The aforementioned Fused Modular Frames, of course, because I want to unlock this milestone: It grants access to the third tier of Miner, literally doubling the output capacity of any node at which I want to perform the upgrade. This is one of the key “end game” technology unlocks and I look forward to making good use of it when the time comes to dive into the “nuclear powered drone fleet” project.

After that, I think it’s time that I go through the existing factories, reducing the number of unenclosed machine floors with no decorative styling. Walls, windows, roofs, greebles… it’s time to get going on that part of my goal for this “Upend Away” save, isn’t it?