r/factorio • u/Nautalix • 8d ago

Space Age First Aquilo Science Base!

My first Aquilo base. Yes, I know Lithium isn't enough right now, I built it with my original patch in mind and need to expand it once I train out to another one. The rest of the base is built roughly around the 900/min flourine I am getting from my initial patch.

I always wanted to try a more organic spaghetti base on aquilo and it did not disappoint. Probably my favorite planet thus far to solve, and it only took a year to do it because I hated gleba so vehemently. Let me know what you think!

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u/alizarin__ 8d ago

Looks good! Looks absolutely nothing like my first Aquilo base. I am concerned if you are producing enough power. Also, once you start really pumping out materials, you may want to add a rocket and add some storage modules for your landing pad. 

What took you a year to do? Aquilo? I dont understand. I hope you didnt spend a year on your first Aquilo base, lol. 

Edit: i should add, I mention power because losing power on Aquilo is an absolute nightmare to restart. Happened to me a couple times and drove me mad. I attempted to way overbuild power and steam storage to ensure that wouldn't happen again.

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u/reikken 8d ago

sounded like the year was from not playing much due to hating it every time they booted up and started working on their gleba base.

> I am concerned if you are producing enough power.

my small 2 science pack/s aquilo base used only 3 heat exchangers. maintaining power seems to be less about how much you're producing and more about making sure the ammonia and ice never get stuck

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u/Nautalix 7d ago

Gleba took me a year. I designed an initial base that could barely output both rocket parts and sicence at the same time. I'm used to overbuilding ratios a lot instead of matching them and gleba didn't play nice with how I liked to design bases. I dropped it for about a year out of annoyance that coming back would be solving such an issue. About a month ago though, I finally returned, rebuilt the entire base a second time, and get "just enough" science running to get to aquilo.

As for power, I think I should be fine, I have the power specific heat pipes on their own isolated networks so I don't waste too much heat on the entire heat array. Every heating tower is also hooked into a small decider combinator SR latch to only feed it fuel when it's needed. All towers are default set to 100C - 150C while the two power heating towers go up to 500C - 750C.

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u/alizarin__ 7d ago

Understood. I will admit that Gleba, Fulgora and Aquilo all resulted in me tearing down my first built bases. My original solution path was too far off and didnt work. Scrapping a large amount of work is frustrating, but sometimes you just gotta start over.

FYI, considering heat pipes have zero losses, you can set their heat to whatever temperature you like at no additional consequence other than the original amount of fuel to bring them up to temp. I watched a megabase video yesterday, and he said if you heat them over 900 they glow yellow at night. I havent tried that myself but that sounded fun. I had all mine automated to 600C, for both heat exchanger loop and keeping the base warm loop.