I start with a flying spaghetti monster off a cliffside and then try to graduate to microfactories to conserve CPU load, especially once I make the shift to refineries.

So I’ll throw in that there’s a performance hit for huge factories. The game chunks the world state, it’s why your frame rate goes up when you walk to a new area. A huge mega factory in one area will limit you in that area, and it will start to feel sluggish later on. Separating your factories across multiple areas helps because it will spread the load across the CPUs cores, and it will feel faster. Your gpu will also be happier to not need to render everything

I suppose I’d call what I do a “mill and factory” architecture which seems to be similar to yours.

I’ll find a resource site - take for example the infamous now-nerfed cliff in the west Northern Forest, and I’ll put an iron mill there that does everything from smelting up to, say, reinforced plates or modular frames. Same with steel mills, refineries etc.

These will feed a small number of major centralized factories. One that I’m in the process of building the 1.0 version of now is always located in the southern Rocky Desert that I call the Desert Automated Manufacturing Node…In my Update 5 playthrough I amused myself by giving all my facilities rude names with technical sounding acronyms, and the DAMN stuck. I still call it that. It’s the mid-game factory, it makes motors, crystal oscillators, heavy mod frames, circuit boards, AI limiters, high-speed connectors, computers and supercomputers. Big factory that takes up most of the big empty section of the biome. It, along with the late game (radio control units, turbomotors etc.) and now the quantum process factories will ship goods to the Project Assembly Tower where the space elevator lives.

My nuclear power plant is as self-contained as possible; I don’t like pulling from main production to feed power so it gets a whole weird mishmash factory unto itself. This ended up being the only successful sushi belt in my last playthrough, as I needed several kinds of things in fairly small amounts.

I first determine the part I need, look at the map and find a group of nodes that can support the part, then build a microfactory. Basic parts then get sent to larger factories that have assemblers/manufacturers. The exception to this rule is that screws for any factory are made on-site until I find enough recipes to remove them from my production chain. I also tend to stay away from iron/copper/limestone impure nodes (using only normal/pure) until power is no longer a concern.

All factories are visited by train and collect a residual amount that is then sent to the HUB and joining warehouse for my personal needs (one-stop shop).

Is “Flying Spaghetti Monster” a valid answer?

I got halfway through the post before I realized it wasn’t about over-engineering a Java application.

I created stackable blueprints that include a specific type of building, for example constructors. They have an input and output on the ground and i can build them higher and higher as long as the belt is fast enough to push in and out the materials.

By doing that i normally have one or more towers for each component, similar to your mentioned microservice architecture.

On the ground i connect these towers to build the downstream components, essentially creating your mentioned microfactories out of the towers/microservices. Perhaps Manyfactories is a better name, as it’s somewhere in-between micro and mono.

It’s fast, scalable throughout the research tiers and pretty enough for my own standards.

In theory I like micro factory design for how neat and tidy it can be. I’m a really disorganized person though and in practice I make a monolithic mess lol

I did both… never could settle on one or the other.

But finding areas suited to intermediate components (such as oil to plastics, fuel byproducts, etc in one area) then using trains to send them to be used in more complicated factories was fun.

So extraction to intermediate for some things across the map and then all those shipped to a mega factory for larger and final products could be a compromise

If on-site production reduces increases stack size of a raw material by a considerable margin I will do that, which means basically everything except aluminium (I did the math… I think). All those products are then shipped to the main factory to add to the chaos.

On our shared server there’s a big emphasis on anesthetics so I usually build relatively small independent standing factories - but sometimes these factories will do something like bringing smelted iron ingots into modular frames while as other times they’ll just be focused on a single step.

I think the microservice approach is more likely to be vulnerable to unbalanced ratios if that’s a thing you care about - having a belt of iron feeding into a full balanced chain to produce frames is easier to balance once and never worry about again.

Strip mall. Everything has it’s own little store, with the back area where new stock arrives. Even has a nice multi lane road going the middle.

I used to be at your extreme where I would have huge microfactories building e.g. screws and train them all over the place. I was also at your friend’s extreme at one point, doing only a single item on each floor, ending up building as high as the top of the space elevator.

The last playthrough before 1.0 dropped (and the one before it), I have adopted more of a hybrid approach where the only micro factories I tend to build are aluminum, oil processing, and energy production… plastic/rubber, coal plants, fuel processing, turbo fuel, etc.

Then I train it to the megafactory. I also haul in all raw resources except the ones mentioned. The hybrid approach I am liking is to smelt on floor 1, constructors on floor 2, assemblers on floor 3, etc. So I mix things on different floors. It makes it harder to manage, so I have to keep the megafactory smaller. Then I go build another megafactory somewhere else.