Week 2: Base Design Philosophy

Furnace stacks and footprint trade-offs, then the named layout styles — spaghetti, bus, bot base, tileable base, train base — and what each buys and costs.

3 August 2026

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Outline#

• Furnace stacks — compact multi-row smelting, and how inserter reach and belt-side placement determine how many furnaces one belt pair can feed.
• Base design and footprint — footprint as a deliberate design variable: smaller means less travel and cheaper infrastructure, but harder to expand later.
• Spaghetti — the organic, unplanned style, and why it stops scaling once no one can trace a belt by eye.
• The bus — a small number of parallel main belts carrying core intermediates the length of the base, the first real architecture decision a base makes.
• Bot base — replacing belts with logistics robots and storage/requester chests, trading routing complexity for power and robot overhead.
• Tileable base — repeatable, blueprint-sized production blocks that copy-paste cleanly.
• Train base and megabases — trains and stations as the bus between distant outposts once one map area can’t supply everything.