So, today, I’m faced with a dilemma. I am somehow an entire building short in my planned layout here. In the middle-right, we have the first stop, the smeltery, making nothing but Iron Ingots. Middle-left is where all the Iron Ingots go, to be crafted into various products. The little guy on the left is Concrete, and on the right is the final product: Modular Frames. Also, the open spot in front here will be the final building, once Manufacturers are unlocked, making Heavy Modular Frames, uploading to the Dimensional Depot, and sinking all the excess.

In all of this, I have neglected an entire 2 intermediate recipes: Stitched Iron Plate and Encased Industrial Pipe, for which I need at least 11 Assemblers.

Luckily, this won’t be TOO difficult to work around. My plan is to just move the 2 floors of Concrete onto the top of the Iron Products building, add 2 more floors to the top of the old Concrete building, and house the Assemblers there. I’ve still got all the blueprints.

New floors in place.

The reworked bottom floor of the now all-Constructors building.

The lower of the two Concrete floors. Top one has 6 Constructors, like most of the other floors, but I only needed 9 total, so this one has just 3, plus a little extra space to combine all the Concrete together onto one belt.

Bottom floor of the new intermediate-Assemblers building.

Re-routing all the Limestone to run counter-clockwise around the building, instead of clockwise.

Splitting off a small portion of it to feed Basic Iron Ingot.

And finally, sending it up into the factory proper.

With that all sorted out, I’ve got 7 lines of Iron Ingot that need to feed over to 3 lines in the Constructor building. Unfortunately, this is about when I noticed my next little dilemma.

I drew it all out in Satisfactory Modeler to confirm what I thought: my belting plan has a belt exceeding its capacity. The goal with all my planning calculations is that no belt should exceed 480 items/min (a Mk.4 belt). That way, when I’m ready to clock this factory up to 250%, no belt will need to exceed 1,200 items/min (a Mk. 6 belt). But since I didn’t actually draw out the belting like this, during planning, I’ve ended up with a belt that would exceed 480.

This issue also wasn’t too difficult to work around. In this case, the way I have the machines laid out on each floor, it just involved me re-routing a few of the Iron Ingot belts, and also adding a 4th one. Now, each of the high-volume floors (with Iron Pipe) is fed by its own Iron Ingot belt, and the other 3 floors for Rod and Plate all share a belt.

So, now we need 7 Iron Ingot belts to balance down to 4, instead of just 3. This is how that turned out.

The 5 products coming out of the Constructor building all just run straight across to the Assembler Building, except for Iron Rod, which turns and heads to the opposite corner, for Modular Frames.

Products from the Assemblers (as well as a portion of the Steel Pipe, to be used for Heavy Modular Frames) head across to the yet-to-be-built building for exports and Heavy Modular Frames, to either be sunk for now, or continue onward to Modular Frames.

The Modular Frames building pulls in the Rods from earlier, and Reinforced Iron Plates, and then sends the frames back to be sunk.

That actually finishes out all the production lines. We are now producing Modular Frames, and producing and sinking everything that we’ll eventually need for Heavy Modular Frames.

Time for some auditing.

Remember that balancer I briefly talked about yesterday, for Iron Ore? Yeah, there’s a problem with it. Some of the Iron Ore miners are not running at 100% efficiency, due to backpressure.

This Mk. 1 belt here is the sole feed for 2 of the Iron Ingot Smelter floors, which need 37.227 Iron Ore/min each. As mentioned earlier, I can’t just upgrade this belt, because that’ll mean this belt would need to handle more than 1,200 items/min when I up the clock of the whole facility to 250%. I’ll have to rebuild this whole balancer.

This seems to be working. Instead of taking 4 belts and attempting to cross-balance them, I’m taking 1 of the 4 (the one feeding the Foundry floor, which has the lowest demand) pulling 3 overflow lines off of it, and merging those into each of the remaining 3 belts for the Smelter floors.

The Smelters will take a while yet to fully prime to 100%, but they seem to be trending up now.

Sink and Depot for all the products. I’ll check back periodically for efficiency audits, but I think, for now, this factory is done.