The Foundry on Nauvis. Overpowered? Factorio Guide / Tutorial

FACTORIO SPACE AGE - USE THE FOUNDRY ON NAUVIS TO BOOST PRODUCTIVITY

The foundry will heavily boost production on Nauvis. With just small amounts of calcite you can quadruple the productivity of your base and replace traditional smelting blocks with the foundry's liquid metal smelting.

Is it overpowered?

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[thomasdickson]

"That's 65% more bullet per bullet" is all I can think of.

[Лёхасникерс]

At the enrichment center we cast plates from liquid metal. Thats 261% more iron per iron!

[kacek]

If you want to make a big number, calculate the cost of a piece of blue belt (bonus points if underground) with foundries and without them. difference is astronomical.

[angeldude]

There is an additional factor to making LDS: productivity _research._ Steel, plastic, and LDS all have "infinite" research to increase their productivity. Due too the +300% productivity cap, it's possible to reach a point where the foundry doesn't actually add _any_ additional productivity to the recipe. This is also true for steel, so an postgame LDS build could honestly have casting iron into iron plates, smelting the iron in a furnace into steel, and then crafting the steel into LDS in an assembler. You just exploded a 1-step recipe into a 3-step recipe.

[yetaloz]

Another interesting application with molten metals on Nauvis is the sheer efficiency of just having a train network that uses molten iron/copper fluid wagons.

A fluid wagon can carry 50000 units of molten iron and a cargo wagon can carry 4000 Iron plates.
You'll notice that, with each Iron plate costing 10 molten iron, you get 5000 Iron plates per fluid wagon (with the 50% productivity bonus from foundries, it goes up to 7500!!!). This increases transport efficiency by 87.5%!!!! Not even mentioning that throughput in pipes was overhauled in 2.0 and has almost no bottlenecks compared to belts!


Overall, this thing is busted, it certainly invites alot of people to visit vulcanus first, which is a good choice! However I will always prefer Gleba due to the Bio Labs.

[zuthalsoraniz]

Another advantage of using the foundry on Nauvis is the greatly increased throughput (for the same cost) of transporting liquid iron or copper vs transporting plates. Even if you use the worst-case for the foundry (20 units of liquid=3 plates), a pipe using just single sets of normal pumps, with 1200 liquid/s throughput, is effectively 180 plates/s, equivalent to a fully stacked blue belt, at far lower cost. And when we look at long-range transport, a fluid wagon with 50k molten iron or copper is equivalent to 7.5k plates, nearly twice the 4k plates that fit into a cargo wagon, and this just gets better for the molten metal transport if you are using the other more efficient recipes, or are using productivity modules.

[KeithOlson]

...and then there are the big miners! One important point you didn't mention is that, once you've upgraded your resource tech on Nauvis, you can completely ignore it for *MUCH* longer, as the deposits take exponentially longer to deplete. (I just plaster each deposit with big miners bolstered with prod mods and 10 speedy-boi beacons each and let them do their thing. Bliss!)

[ОлегПолканов-дн]

Also fluid wagons are more effective in transporting molten ore rather then plates.
1 cargo wagon - 4k plates
1 fluid wagon - 50k molten ore = 2500 cycles for foundry - 5k iron plates before foundry bonus and 7, 5k plates in total.
Well... Time to redesign half of my transport network)

[DasPanoptikum]

You convinced me to upgrade my smelting array. Did not know that the numbers go so crazy with foundries. Also many thanks for the comparison with the EM plant, I'm more of a foundry guy for cables and I'm glad I know that I don't miss out on any productivity

[penguindrummaster]

I kind of wish you had touched on a niche benefit of the foundry I've been using: concrete from a foundry can use productivity modules, where assemblers cannot. So, not only do you get the base 50% productivity of the foundry, but an additional 4 productivity module slots. That's in addition to the recipe being generally cheaper through a foundry as well (check my numbers on that claim though).

So yeah, when building rocket silos, nuclear reactors, and other similar buildings, a foundry will dramatically reduce the resource cost of producing all of the requisite concrete.

[NixxNikoli]

You really are the finest Factorio channel. No other channel teaches me things about the game so well or so concisely

[DavidSmith-crmb]

in regards to foundries and LDS: use circuit networks to track buffer chests of your ores and plastics, and use control logic to select which system gets used on the fly, just like oil cracking, except for LDS being made from two different highly productive methods.

[astrosoup]

Everything you make looks so organized and nice. I swear I feel like restarting every time i watch your video

[jmsyoxj]

You can also produce concrete in foundries, which is fantastic for paving the base.

[azulcrescent]

Fanatstic video as always! I knew foundaries were amazing but seeing the numbers laid out like this makes it obvious how absolutely nuts they are haha. (no wonder Biochambers are the black sheep lol) Hope the 10x science run is going well!

[Jonalith]

Those satellites are also an easy infinite source of iron ore, even if they are slower than mining.

[xmana_]

so overpowered you didnt even need to mention the basically infinite throughput of metals with pipes

[GelberDracheLP]

By the LDS comperrison
Because have have the assembler as a extra step with there slots, if you put qualiäty moduls in it you will get more then the casting
It is the same thing like the copper cabels

[macdjord]

You missed that, just like LDS and copper cables, steel plates and iron sticks can _also_ be made more efficiently by first casting iron plates then putting those into a furnace or assembler to make the final item. For iron, this is only more efficient if you have quality Prod3 modules and some Steel Productivity research, while for iron sticks, putting *any* productivity on the assembler will be better.

[kevlap]

My main reason to use the foundry is simplified layout and logistics. it's just so much simpler to manage molten iron and copper than huge swaths of plates to make steel and cables