Description
UNTRA self-replicating rail intersection v2
- requires recursive blueprints+
- recommended Ghost on Water
- includes infinity chest and accumulator. These can be removed if desired.
The factory must grow! By itself!
This roundabout rail intersection is specialty designed to self-replicate and deploy at it's fringes. It utilizes the recursive blueprints+ chest to duplicate copies of itself when deployed at the edges, causing it to expand across the map as construction bots fill in the logistic network, forming the skeleton of a 3x3 chunk city block, with an additional chunk as rail intersection border. It has some nice features as well:
- Dedicated oil and water pipes ensure that every city block has convenient fluid access. Only chumps put oil on trains.
- Dedicated red/green circuits ensures the megabase is fully connected
- Lamps in each roundabout and section are connected to the red network
- After replication, the roundabout removes nonessential electronics, cleaning up the messy circuitry, walls and laser turrets in each roundabout once no longer needed.
- It snaps to a 128x128 grid with a 128x 128y offset. City blocks are 3 chunks with comfortable buffer.
This makes it ideal for building the scaffolding of a micro-megabase, one that expands by using it's own blueprint requested on the logistic network. RH-drive rail, ideal for 1-1 train network with room for two. This blueprint could be modified to make a longer city block, however this smaller size ensures all internals can be reached by construction robots.
Usage:
tldr Just place the intersection down once, and then place a copy of this blueprint within a requester chest in the center.
Includes infinity chest and accumulator. Place this blueprint with all features in the editor view, and watch it grow limitlessly, wweeee!
Ideally you should have built your factory to a point where:
- you have researched robotics, and have automated the building of robots, placed into logistics chests
- you have automated the building of everything else this blueprint requires into logistics chests
- raw resources are not a problem; that is, you have enough to supply a good expansion or they are infinite with mods
- you are not using robots to carry blueprints currently or elsewhere in your factory
It is recommended you place this blueprint a few times around your existing base, and preemptively remove any requestor chests where you don't want the factory to expand. Removing the requestor chest from a roundabout prevents it from deploying or replicating.
Just place the intersection down once, and then place a copy of this blueprint within a requester chest in the center.
How it works
The Recursive Blueprint mod deployer chest is incredibly powerful, and is used to deploy a requested blueprint, before copying it thrice and removing the requester chest and roundabout circuitry to stop the cycle.
Inside each roundabout is a requestor chest requesting blueprints. Once fed this blueprint, it will deploy itself at a new intersection, then remove the requestor chest and copying the blueprint thrice, so that each other edge of the rail intersection deploys as well. Once deployed, it will deconstruct the requester chest and roundabout circuitry to stop the cycle.
The internal requester chest sets it's logistic chest once all conditions have been met:
- There is more landfill on the green network than there is detected water in 3 chunks in each direction
- No oil is detected in 3 chunks in each direction
- There are no rocks, trees or cliffs within 1 chunk in each direction
- There are no pending ghosts in the roudabout
- The 🟥 signal is not present on the red circuit network.
These conditions are only checked once every 3600 ticks to limit UPS penalty.
The roundabout internals will also deconstruct itself if it detects four solar panels in the center; this means it has already expanded and formed a corner cell; replication is unnecessary.
Circuit Network Intent
The intent with the circuit network is that the red circuit accepts colors and counts individual cells in the megabase, while the green network reports total counts of available supplies. Because lamps are connected to the red network, colors on the network light up the whole factory.
Importantly, the base should be sending the 🟥 signal on the red network to halt expansion of the rail framework. It's advised to set this signal when raw resources or fluids are low, or if there's insufficient rail construction supplies, bots, or if nearby enemies are detected.
Sweet Features
The roundabouts house a spaghetti of internals, including the self-replicating "brain" that copies it's own blueprint to disseminate to it's boundaries. This brain is a mess of chests, inserters and combinators that duplicate 2+ blueprint copies.
The roundabout also houses two tanks for separate fluids; mega-bases shouldn't be schlepping water or oil on the rails, instead these fluids have dedicated transport throughout the intersection and inputs within the city block.
Edges are packed with accumulators and solar panels, with room to upgrade to SE 4x4 solar panels. Use this template to terraform a planet, and then fill in the city blocks with exactly what your factory needs. Electrical towers also carry the red and green networks, so you can communicate across your base's circuit network.
lasers will guard the block edges while the nucleus center is surrounded by walls protecting delicate internals. This ensures the intersection can expand safely, and survive enough biter attacks without intervention.
Use Cases
Lots of cool things you can do with this blueprint, but the best thing you can do is tweak it perfectly for what you need
Playing Peaceful? Remove the walls!
If you don't need walls or defenses, you can remove the walls and turrets, and get all that sweet room.
Use it Space Exploration!
The blueprint should still work in with the Space Exploration mod ostensibly. Instead of water and oil in the fluid network it can house warm and cool thermofluid.
Rail Intersection == City Block corner
This requires really leaning into the recursive blueprints chest and scanner. A megabase that builds it's own skeleton while leaving you city blocks opens the door for another parallel process that starts filling in those city blocks with manufactories.
This rail intersection is theoretically the corner of a city block. Using both the blueprint deployer chest and the scanner, you can add a station that enables itself once the city block has been scanned to be built, safe and cleaned, to request a train with further instructions on what the city block becomes and deploys itself, and removes the station once deployed.
You can also have a station that could request an artillery train if it finds artillery targets nearby, that deletes itself once it is safe.
Parallelize the self-assembling factory
Theoretically all the following aspects of megabase assembly can be automated in parallel:
- Rail expansion (this blueprint)
- Mining and resource acquisition
- Manufacturing and intermediates measuring
- Energy production and expansion
- Science development
- Artillery wagons and defense
- Modules, upgrades and quality
Roadmap
Considering that news of expanded rails and updated pole sizes, alongside elevated trains, and who knows what else planned for future Factorio SA, my desire to update to a new version should come with the expansion. Until then, minor updates to improve performance and ideal usage. Time to find customers.
