My friend and I routinely have conversations about factory design.
His ideal factory ships every ore in its raw state to a single building, which can then move the ore to different floors/sections for processing. He goes further than most and separates each product into its own “room”, so all steel bars are made in one room then shipped to the steel beam and steel pipe rooms. Importantly the factory should be designed so that you can “infinitely” expand a room if you need more of that resource.
I prefer what I call “microfactories”, where each component is created in a small, independent factory and the result is shipped to a main repository for builder use and for the space elevator construction. If you need modular frames, for example, you would find a group of ores and build a small factory on it and build every sub-component you can in it. Ideally, it would not rely on any other microfactory’s outputs, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. Often I will have a small cluster of microfactories all dedicated to shipping their output to a final microfactory for processing.
So what do you all use?
Note: He claims his design is more analogous to microservices (from software architecture) than mine, and that mine is something apparently called “pirate architecture”. I think he’s out of his mind on that one.
I first determine the part I need, look at the map and find a group of nodes that can support the part, then build a microfactory. Basic parts then get sent to larger factories that have assemblers/manufacturers. The exception to this rule is that screws for any factory are made on-site until I find enough recipes to remove them from my production chain. I also tend to stay away from iron/copper/limestone impure nodes (using only normal/pure) until power is no longer a concern.
All factories are visited by train and collect a residual amount that is then sent to the HUB and joining warehouse for my personal needs (one-stop shop).
You’ve described my ideal scenario, but my friend just doesn’t understand me… thankfully you do
I first went into Satisfactory with the same mindset: megafactory with rooms for everything, but scaling and space requirement quickly became an issue. I’ve diverged from this mindset, especially since in early game (with tiers unlocked, recipes undiscovered), refactoring the flow of production and logistics is pretty much guaranteed, which leads to undoing all of your hard work. The philosophy of wu wei applies here.
If you are in the end-game, I guess you could create a megafactory, but at that point, I think FICSIT would say that really isn’t efficient or practical and more for aesthetical reasons.