500h pYanodon's Base Is Getting Spicy! - Base Tour 3 - Factorio pYanodon's S3

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:01]Well, hello everyone and welcome to a special version of an episode of my Py and Todons season 3 playthrough. This is going to be a little bit of a base tour and kind of review of 500 hours of Py and Todons. Uh this is the alternative energy version of the mod pack. It is full Py.

[00:00:22]If you're curious about playing Py and Todons yourself, I highly recommend just diving into full Py and Todons.

[00:00:27]Um I know they're working on the space version of Py. I don't know when that'll come out, but that will be I feel like that's going to be a significantly different feel. So, I've yet to experience that, but yeah, this is my base. So, what we're going to do in this episode is we're going to go through a little bit of the milestones and kind of use that as a springboard to kind of explain parts of the base, but I also there's a couple systems that I think I've put a lot of work into in terms of circuitry and like figuring everything out. A lot of stuff in Py is what I would define as like a basic build. Even if it looks like a lot, it is just inputs going to buildings, which then maybe go to other buildings, which then have outputs, which go back to trains, right? And then there's nothing like inherently that crazy about a lot of stuff in Py.

[00:01:20]Um it adds up to a lot of different things, but there are certain systems that I've put a lot of a lot of work into. And you know, then there's some other systems like all the oil stuff, which can be interesting cuz you have different priorities, but overall, um the flora and fauna I think is part of what makes Py the most unique. The turd system makes Py very unique. If you don't know what that is, there's a lot of upgrades where you have to pick one of three. Well, you don't have to pick.

[00:01:44]You can pick none of them, but you can pick one of three upgrades, and sometimes they significantly change recipes or they add productivity bonuses, things like that. Um and then there's different families of recipes in Pyanodons, which I also think is very cool. There's like all the metals and ores, which they're not all exactly the same. If you've ever played like Sea Block with Bob's Angels, they're kind of all exactly the same.

[00:02:09]Once you get to tier two and three, they might have a separate ingredient that you add in for each thing, but like the process is still exactly the same.

[00:02:18]Whereas here, you know, usually crushing is the first step, but some of them might give you gravel as the byproduct.

[00:02:24]Some might give you stone, and then they might give you grade one instead of grade three, or they might give you grade four when you crush. And then you turn the grade four in a in a screening building for one of them, but in another one, you get grade three out and put that in a crusher instead. And so, they're all a little different, even though in terms of the overall types of buildings, it it can be very similar.

[00:02:45]You'll notice each of these builds looks very different. That one's not or, but this one's mostly screening.

[00:02:52]Copper is mostly screening.

[00:02:55]You know, you've got iron, which is crushing and screening and secondary crushing and blast furnace and there's just a lot of cool stuff.

[00:03:02]And then there's all the flora and fauna, which again, if you don't know Py, that is a system where you put modules in the buildings that represent the like things you're using to breed more of them.

[00:03:15]And then on top of that, there's different recipes for that item. So, here I'm opening up recipe book, but you can see like Grad has different a lot of different recipes to produce Grad, and they use more complex ingredients, but produce more output faster. And so, you end up kind of increasing the complexity of all of your stuff as you go throughout. And that's pretty cool. I like that system far more than I like quality. I'm not a huge fan of quality.

[00:03:43]So, I'm glad that we have what we have in Py.

[00:03:46]So, yeah, this is the base. It's been I haven't done a base tour, I think, since 300 hours. So, we've gotten a lot done.

[00:03:52]We're going to review all the milestones since then.

[00:03:55]Um Yeah, let's just dive in. What What do we got here for milestones? Let me I haven't even opened this up in a while.

[00:04:03]I guess we've completed a million automation packs.

[00:04:07]Um Logistics science we finished right before 300 hours.

[00:04:14]As well as military.

[00:04:17]And then pie science two Or sorry, no, that didn't make any sense. Logistics science we completed at 74 hours. I was like, that doesn't sound right. Yeah, it was like chem science is what we completed right after 300 hours. So, yeah, chem science um is kind of I feel like you you get logistics science and then you get pie two not that far after, but a lot of people will build trains in this time, so that takes a lot of time to get trains going. And then once you have pie two going, then at that point there's a lot to do.

[00:04:52]Um so, you can kind of rush pie two, but then you've got a lot of backlog to work on, or you can work on the backlog in logistics science, and then you don't have as much to do to get to chem. But, we hit chem science at 330 hours after 205 for pie two. So, there was 130 hours there.

[00:05:09]And almost the same amount between logistics and pie two.

[00:05:13]Whereas you can see it was only uh from chem science to pie three science was I guess also about 130. I guess we were pretty consistent there.

[00:05:25]Um Well, yeah, let's look at some of these milestones. So, we did Um isn't there a way to sort this by time?

[00:05:38]Now that I'm looking at it, I think there is a way to sort it by time.

[00:05:41]Um Milestones list by group. No.

[00:05:48]There we go.

[00:05:50]I thought there was Oh my goodness, that is overwhelmingly large. Holy cow.

[00:05:56]They need to um make that have a maximum size there. So, it looks like right at 300 hours was red circuits, epoxy, small parts, rayon. So, let's look at our red circuit build. I was actually just showing it to you. It's the one place I've put the excellent tiles. I don't really I think the excellent tiles are a little too bright, a little too blue, a little too busy, but I wanted to put them somewhere.

[00:06:17]So, I started using bots um in certain places. I have the mod that allows you to It's called logistic network channel, and it allows you to set certain robo ports, which then the robots within and certain requesters to a different channel, which means there is a local network here. If I just highlight the building, you can see.

[00:06:41]Only these robo ports and the channel one requesters and providers in the area here are allowed to interact with each other. So, it's really nice to be able to deliver a bunch of items via train, and then you can load those into a provider, and then you can use bots to ferry those to where they need to go here. You don't have to connect everything with a belt.

[00:07:02]And yet, I also have a global uh construction network. So, like to build new parts of the base, I can still use construction bots, and I really like that. I think the idea of channels of logistics networks kind of should be in vanilla Factorio um because you can't do something like this in vanilla Factorio. What you have to do is basically avoid certain areas with your robo ports and then build deep inside of that empty zone a new set of robo ports, and then you have to bridge that gap with trains or belts.

[00:07:35]Um so, it's just really nice being able to overlap everything, and you don't have to worry about it. And that saves a ton of belt spaghetti. So, I'm happy to use bots in this capacity. Uh um Um And yeah, I mean, you know, the red circuit setup is not super interesting, but you need a lot of stuff for it. So, that's why it takes you 300 hours to get there. Ooh.

[00:07:53]Looks like we're using a lot of trains right now. I don't see this warning pop up very often.

[00:07:58]So, yeah, we got red circuits, then we moved on. Uh our goal at that point was basically everything we need for for modules, cuz modules make a huge difference in pie. And so, you need advanced small parts, which we got twice, apparently.

[00:08:14]Uh Navin's rayon self-assembling monolayer material, EVA, electric engine units, and then finally, you can get uh your prod modules. Our engine units we're just making in the auto mall.

[00:08:26]They're nothing crazy. Um advanced small parts at one point, I don't remember when we did this, but we did a lot of converting to the advanced casting system um using molten metals, advanced castings, and hot air. So, we're making gears that way, we're making tin cable, making copper cable.

[00:08:48]Uh we're making bolts that way. And then over here Oh, nope. I thought over here we had advanced parts.

[00:08:56]I was wrong. Where are the advanced parts?

[00:09:00]Guess they're just in their own block.

[00:09:03]Somewhere else. Ah, they're down.

[00:09:05]Yeah, advanced parts need a lot of ingredients as well.

[00:09:10]Of course, we've stuffed productivity modules back into everywhere that it fits at this point, cuz we need as many as possible. But yeah.

[00:09:18]So, that's that. Um our train system, I think we've reviewed this a little bit, but for those who haven't seen any of these uh videos before, essentially, we're using cybersyn.

[00:09:30]And we're using a two-channel model, where channel two is for byproducts and trash, and channel one is for main products and main requests for things.

[00:09:40]And when we have byproducts, we provide them on channel three, which is really channel one plus two.

[00:09:46]But it's not like a third channel, it's just providing them on both channel one and two. And channel one requesters are higher priority, so that way the things that really need items get them first.

[00:09:57]The things that are trashing things will be the lowest priority, so that we only send them there if that's the last place they need to go. And there's a whole slew of interesting uh conversations around uh trash channels, how Cybersyn and LTN work. You actually need to provide it to only channel one until it reaches a certain threshold, and then you can provide it to channel two for trashing. Cuz if you provide it to trashing, even if it's a lower priority request on the trashers, they end up it's a long story. But if you want to talk more about that, hit me up on Discord.

[00:10:28]There's also a very strong case to be made that you actually need three channels, meaning like one, two, and three are all separate, and then some stations are talking to all three of them uh to be maximum efficiency. But that's more for players who use hard mode than otherwise, cuz I can trash items locally and fluids locally, which hard mode players cannot do.

[00:10:51]I'm not playing hard mode.

[00:10:53]By the way, uh Cybersyn has this inventory management system, which is really nice, and you can see like what items you're currently lacking. The yellow is in transit, but the red is like stuff I don't have. So it helps you kind of identify. Uh this is one of the most useful tools actually for my base, of seeing like what am I missing currently. And it also tells you how long it's been missing. If it's only been missing for 30 seconds, it just maybe hasn't been scheduled yet. But if it's been missing for 20 minutes, that probably means I don't have enough.

[00:11:22]So that's really useful.

[00:11:24]Um And back to the milestones, where were we?

[00:11:30]So then we move on towards nuclear, which is kind of the last bit before uh or I guess modules and then nuclear. So, yeah, modules in Py really change the game. So, my Py base before had lots of really big builds like this. You don't see as many of these anymore because these were tier one buildings with no modules and no beacons. By the time you get modules, you're very close to beacons. And then when I don't know if you get beacons right after or if there was one Maybe you don't get beacons until after chem science, so it's a little bit later, but only like 30 hours later kind of thing. Um But yeah, it's a really cool system cuz you're you're basically getting tier two buildings around a similar time as getting modules, which are speed, prod, and efficiency, same as regular Factorio. And then you're also getting um beacons. So, between all of that, you can make builds that are 10 times as fast, you know.

[00:12:28]Um and beacons in Py are very cool. I really like I actually think it's the best system of any mod I've played. I've played with quite a few modded beacons styles. Um and I'm even counting Space Age as kind of a modded style. You know, back vanilla Factorio, there were beacons and you could have as many as you wanted and they stacked linearly.

[00:12:49]And then there were mods like Space Age or sorry, Space Exploration that had the system where it was like big area beacons, but you could only be affected by one beacon. Um then there was like Krastorio, which had sort of that, but there were two types of beacons. And then there was Space Age, which did very similar to what vanilla Factorio did, but had diminishing returns, which I liked.

[00:13:12]And now there's PyAndons, which has its own unique system, which is a little bit kind of like what we have in Krastorio ish. But each beacon has two uh types of transmission wavelengths. I don't know what you want to call them. AM and FM. And you can set either one to be one through five. So, there's 25 combinations of AM FM.

[00:13:38]And the different AM channels will affect how big the area is. So, I have a little blueprint book of AM one through five here, so we can see. So, that is AM one.

[00:13:51]AM two, three, four, five.

[00:13:54]But, the number that AM is is multiplied by the FM to get the transmission efficiency or distribution efficiency.

[00:14:04]Basically, how many What's the multiplier on the strength of the modules? So, here, if you look over at the side of the screen, you can see 0.4 for AM two FM two. And that means 40% of the module power that is in this beacon is being shared with the buildings. So, we're getting 40% of two speed modules, aka 80% of a speed module is being applied to all these buildings because of this.

[00:14:26]But, what's Then, what's interesting about AM and FM, you might be like, "Well, why would you not just leave AM on one, so you have the most area?"

[00:14:33]Well, because then it's the AM times the FM that gives you the efficiency. So, AM five distributes more module, but to a smaller area. And then you might be like, "Well, why would you not just always have FM five?" Well, FM increases the power usage by a cubic amount, whereas AM only increases the power usage by a quadratic, aka squared, amount. So, FM five uses a crap ton of power.

[00:15:05]And so, you're you're balancing power usage with area, with um other things. And then finally, you can use multiple beacons.

[00:15:17]So, that's what's really cool about Pi is it's not just one beacon per building.

[00:15:21]You can use two beacons as long as they do not as long as they don't use the same AM or the same FM.

[00:15:29]So, if you think about how that works, you essentially are eliminating if you make a 5 by 5 grid of AM FM, every time you add a beacon, you're eliminating one row and column from what those buildings can now use. So, you could have five different beacons affecting one building, but that's the most you can ever have. Um you often don't do five affecting one building cuz it's a lot of work to set that up, but you might do three affecting one building.

[00:15:54]Um And yeah, so it's a it's a really cool system. It's very configurable. It feels like you can get what you need out of it. Um it feels pretty powerful when you finally have beacons and modules and tier two buildings. You can turn a build that was 20 buildings into a build that's one building. So, you'll notice a lot of my older builds have like lots of buildings and some of my newer builds have like two buildings. Let's see. I don't know what would be like this. You know, cuz it's like, well, I've got a beacon, I've got prod modules, I've got tier two buildings. I don't need There are even places you can tell where I built it before I had modules and then I instead just built a beacon, upgraded the buildings, put in prod modules, and called it a day cuz this this is like You can see the crafting speed here is 2.4 on each building.

[00:16:44]And that's not even counting the productivity.

[00:16:46]Whereas before I had eight buildings, you know, that totaled up to a crafting speed of eight. So, this is more This is far more items per second in half the space. So, there's a lot of revamping your base to use beacons and modules. Uh I do like it. I think you could argue it's maybe a little too powerful all at once to get all of that, but you earned it. At that point in the game, you're 300 hours in. I think it's only fair. Um So, yeah, that's kind of the big idea there. And then nuclear was another big topic.

[00:17:15]My nuclear build is uh the nuclear in PyAndons is very interesting. So, at the very beginning, you kind of have to follow this process of getting yellow cake, which is from uranium, processed uranium, and then you turn that into cells, and then you burn the cells, and then you turn that into an antimony [clears throat] phosphate. You can get all that processed to this plutonium oxide, and then that turns into a variety of blue rocks, different isotopes of plutonium, which then you really only need one of those for your nuclear samples, which goes into chem sci.

[00:17:50]And you're trying to figure out how to turn those rocks into each other. So, there's different combinations of plutonium mixed with plutonium peroxide that end up becoming two different versions of plutonium. And there's like four different recipes for this, and you're trying to solve this like matrix of calculations to figure out how do I end up not overrunning my base on certain ones. It's It's very interesting, very cool math.

[00:18:15]Like if you want to analyze it properly, you need to use mathematical concepts, which is really cool.

[00:18:21]Um and then the next big thing I feel like, apart from just standard progress in our base, was working towards having enough brains to run vat brains. So, vat brains are another interesting concept in Py. It looks like we started that.

[00:18:35]Yeah, about 360 hours here. Um We also upgraded to tier two trains, which was nice. But But uh vat brains are a cool concept in PyAndons where you can get more productivity from your labs, but not from prod modules. Instead, you have to run these buildings called vat brain biocomputers. And whenever these are running, all of the labs within their radius get because we're using cartridge mark two, they get plus 50% productivity.

[00:19:03]You can get up to 16 vat brains around a single lab, which gives you, in this case, plus 800% productivity. But the problem is you have to need you need a lot of that brains. These only run for 20 seconds off of one cartridge.

[00:19:16]So, there's certainly a balance to be struck between how many that brains you have. I went kind of mad recently. This was at the end of Kim science by the way. I didn't do this at the beginning of Kim science. Beginning of Kim science I had a build over here, which I've since removed, that I think was like two that brains for like 16 labs or something. It was It was pretty low on but I only had four that brain computers total.

[00:19:42]And a bunch of labs.

[00:19:44]And now I have the inverse of that.

[00:19:46][laughter] So, now my base The thing This is This is arguably one of the worst things about PyAndons, I will say.

[00:19:53]Which is there's not a lot of ways to make brains. And brains are one of the major costs of these that brain cartridges.

[00:20:03]Uh you need 30 brains per cartridge mark two. And there's not very many interesting ways to make brains. You can scale up augs, which are these guys. You can scale up uh vraux, which are these guys. And then arguably, I learned that I actually might think this is the best one. You can scale up ulrix.

[00:20:25]Other than that, I don't really think there's any competitive creatures for brain making on terms of how much it costs to make the creature that you then render. So, you got to get a lot of brains somehow if you're using a lot of that brains and there's not a ton of interesting ways to do it other than just mass produce stuff.

[00:20:41]Um Speaking of mass producing animals, this is the crap. The centralized repository for animal processing.

[00:20:50]And boy is it uh is there a lot that's gone into this? Because as we've needed more and more brains, we've needed to handle absurd amounts of items. If I need 15 brains a second, well, when you render an aug uh into See if I can find the recipe. When you render an og, you get uh one brain, and eight meat, three bones, two skin, two lard, three guts, and 100 blood. And you need to deal with all that. And even though I'm not in hard mode, it still isn't easy. I mean, it's simple, maybe, but it's not easy to get rid of that much meat and bones and lard and skin and guts. And so, uh just the number of items you have is absurd. If we're wanting 15 brains a second, you have like more than 150 items a second. Even though I'm using stack inserters here with a red belt, and now we're at stack size five, these belts are still so much that I needed two belts for all of it. And you can see we need a ton of slaughterhouses, and they're all beaconed heavily. They're all at crafting speed nine.

[00:21:56]It's just wild how much we've needed to scale all this up. This is a sushi loop for the inputs. The outputs all go into this main warehouse, which I then designed. This is This is what I think is interesting about a base towards these kinds of designs. Um you guys understand how inputs and outputs work, but this stuff, you know, this is Krydex's craziness. Um So, there's kind of two main types of items is how I categorize it. It's like you've got the stuff that spoils and the stuff that doesn't. The stuff that doesn't spoil goes into this like train loader.

[00:22:28]And then if we have This is to provide to the main network, and then if we have more, it goes into here, which is stuff that gets trashed. Um And then the stuff that spoils all goes here. And then when we have too much of that, it goes up here to Some of it gets turned into jerky, cuz you need a supply of jerky, but it takes hours to spoil.

[00:22:49]And so, I have an entire warehouse full here of just spoil into jerky. And then so that way I always have one warehouse full of jerky, one warehouse or I should call them deposits. One deposit full of stuff spoiling into jerky, and then stuff that is additional on top of that goes to be deleted. Now, the thing is there's different ways to delete animal parts. There's literally just burning it cuz I'm not on hard mode, I'm allowed to do this. Hard mode people can't do this, which is unfortunate for them.

[00:23:19]I am turning jerky into biomass as well, so I have a lot of that.

[00:23:23]But then there's these atomizers, and you unlock these recipes at various points, but this allows you to turn guts into acetic acid or meat into cyanic acid or guts into chlorine. And so we're processing, if we don't have enough of those fluids, we send extra parts to become those things first. And so we're filling up a bunch of, you know, different tank fulls of those. You can turn blood into urea, and urea can be turned into cyanic acid and ammonia. So there's all sorts of stuff you can do.

[00:23:51]And we're running all of that now off of rocket fuel, which is nice cuz previously we only had a We didn't have fuel as nice as rocket fuel. It's a more recent development.

[00:24:02]But yeah, this whole crap is controlled by this crazy brain, which is looking at how much we have of each ingredient, dividing it by a number that kind of says it it's kind of normalizing all of these into percentages. Like I have 80% of the brains I want. I have 47% of the blood that I want. And so it's it's normalizing all of those numbers.

[00:24:23]And then these guys are looking at if I have certain breakpoints that I'm underneath of different items or fluids, slaughter this animal.

[00:24:37]So like if I have less than 50% of the brains I want, I'll turn on the route rendering signal.

[00:24:43]Whereas if I have less than 70% of the chitin I want, I would turn on the route rendering signal. Or 20% of the meat, etc. etc. So this is kind of giving reasons to slaughter different animals rather than just slaughtering each animal separately.

[00:25:00]This way I can kind of again, it's a centralized repository. It's the crap.

[00:25:05]Uh and so we can have all of the different parts complementing each other. So that way we're not wasting a bunch of animal parts that could be needed somewhere else here and the same from over there.

[00:25:18]They're all getting dumped in the same pot.

[00:25:21]Would I do it differently if I were to do it again?

[00:25:26]I would maybe design it a little better from the ground up. I actually really like it overall as a system. There are some downsides to it. Like sometimes some of the downside is Factorio's fault cuz you can't read you can't read on green and set recipe on red for example. So the buildings reading their own contents can create recipe signals because you can set the recipe of a building from I wish there was another checkbox here.

[00:25:56]You can set the recipe based on an item rather than based on a signal.

[00:26:03]If that makes sense. Cuz like you can send item signals. Like if I sent an item signal for a steel chest, that's different than sending a recipe signal that only exists as a recipe, right?

[00:26:16]Like this signal right here is not an item, the full render all racks, but I can send it as a signal. And what I would like is if there was a setting where buildings would only set recipes from special signals, not from items.

[00:26:32]Because what we've had is sometimes items are read in the building, but then that's transmitted to other buildings and it set a signal. Anyway, it gets to be a whole mess. And there are ways that I've tried to fix it. And then this is a thing that makes it so the top half is rendering a different, potentially a different thing than the bottom half. So we can render two types of things at once.

[00:26:52]Uh there's a lot of beacons trying to speed everything up. Um there's a timer that refreshes the stack inserters. So, this thing is every 20 ticks, it is setting the stack size to one.

[00:27:08]So, that way they, no matter what they're holding, they swing out and drop what they have. Um otherwise, stack inserters get stuck outputting multiple things. So, that's what that's about. Uh the extra cages are recycled back to cage new animals, and this is a sushi loop that's trying to keep a certain amount of animals stocked up on the belt.

[00:27:30]There's a bunch of pumps emptying out cuz I did slushy output pipes, which is kind of necessary since all of the buildings could render different types of animals.

[00:27:43]So, all of those pipes go to the same network, which then dump into different buildings.

[00:27:49]You need a lot of pumps when there's this many uh buildings dumping out, and they're they're all on their own they're all desynced with each other. Um you need a ton of pumps because when a pipe network is emptying out, the pump speed is slowing down, the pump out speed from that network. So, you need like 20 pumps so that cuz the minimum they ever pump is 0.1 per tick, which is, you know, so, if you have 10 pumps, you're getting a minimum of one per tick, which is 60 per second. So, if you think about it, it's like 10 pumps is very different than 20 pumps because the minimum is twice as big. No matter how empty the pipe is, you will get that 0.1 per tick.

[00:28:34]So, I think if I were to build this again, I would start out with like 20 output pumps per type. You know what I mean? And that way we'd we'd probably not we we had to do some weird stuff to try to get this to work out correctly.

[00:28:47]Um But yeah, that's I don't know there's a lot of pieces I didn't explain, but a lot of many hours have gone into the crap and upgrading the crap and configuring the crap and the crap is very messy at this point.

[00:29:01]And yet it is one of my proud accomplishments.

[00:29:05]Very big fan of it.

[00:29:09]Um So yeah.

[00:29:12]That's that. Uh another system we put a lot of work into was this vat brain system. How does this all work? Because the problem is you don't want to run vat brains constantly. That's a huge waste of resources. You only want to run vat brains when you're doing research.

[00:29:28]Part of the problem is we need a huge amount of vat brains here because of how the scaling works. If you're doing 16 vat brains on around one lab, there's a lot of empty overlap here. So you want to fill that empty spots with labs, but then those labs need vat brains around them.

[00:29:45]And so the bigger you get, it's the same thing as adjacency bonuses with like nuclear.

[00:29:50]You know, if you have two this is like each one is having two neighbors, but if you do this, well these ones have three neighbors, but these still only have two neighbors. So then you do this. So these all have three neighbors, but these still only have two neighbors. So it's this thing where the bigger you go, the more the more it approaches, you know, asymptotically approaches its most efficient state and it's the same thing with vat brains and labs. So that's why I built it this big was to try to be a little bit more efficient with my vat brains cuz you need to go pretty big for that. If I built it half this size, it would use like I think like 20% more vat brains um or something like that.

[00:30:28]So it's a pretty significant difference.

[00:30:30]But the problem is it researches like really fast. I do a research in 3 minutes now, which for PI is pretty fast.

[00:30:37]Um And so I can't have them running constantly.

[00:30:41]The vat brains you can control the signals, but the problem is you can't wire up labs.

[00:30:48]It just you just can't even wire them up at all. So, how do you know when to run the vat brains? And I'm talking from an automated perspective. How does the factory know when to run the vat brains?

[00:30:58]Not so easy of a question.

[00:31:01]My initial design was measuring inserters inserting into the labs and it would measure from one tick to the next, is there a difference in the chests?

[00:31:16]Cuz if if the if the number in in the chests goes down, that means you inserted. You could also just read the inserter hand contents, I guess, would also work.

[00:31:24]And as soon as they grab something, that means that science must be running cuz the inserter grabbed something.

[00:31:31]The problem is they're not constantly grabbing things.

[00:31:35]Now, if things get out of sync, which I'm imagining they have by now, I don't know, they're still pretty in sync.

[00:31:41]Like, look, those two buildings have the same. Yeah, see, this is the problem.

[00:31:44]When you build all of it from scratch, you have this issue where they're all in sync, assuming the science supply has kept up.

[00:31:53]All of the science packs are in sync with each other and so they all insert one pack at the same time, but then it runs for a while without needing to insert more. And that's bad because now you can't just measure the last time you inserted cuz you might go 3 seconds without inserting, which means these will need to run for 3 seconds after you've stopped science. And that 3 seconds could be 10 minutes of brain production. I don't remember what the ratio is, but it's pretty big. So, I was like, I want this to be more immediate, like within 1 second I want it to stop.

[00:32:23]And there was no way to figure that out.

[00:32:25]You also can't know for sure what's the longest period of time you'd go without inserting science.

[00:32:30]It might be 6 seconds, you know, and in in that case you're potentially um yeah, it just becomes an issue it wasting that brains. So, I was like, how do I do this? How do I know if science is running other than just measuring the inserter inserting into it?

[00:32:49]And then I thought, well, I could maybe measure the amount in the provider chest, but that ends up being kind of the same math as the inserters, cuz they go out in waves.

[00:33:00]Um So, yeah, there's not an easy way to have an instant reaction system. So, what I went with is measuring power.

[00:33:11]Measuring power is not easy in Factorio.

[00:33:15]Uh because there's no way to do it. Now, some people thought about accumulators as a way to measure power, which yes, you can measure accumulators, but the problem there is you need enough accumulators to power the entire system.

[00:33:29]Um otherwise, you have this weird like back and forth situation where an accumulator's charging and then discharging, but like if it's discharging down to a certain amount, then you have to provide more power so that it can properly keep power on, cuz if the accumulator's losing power, well, it needs to stop losing power cuz you need to keep all your stuff powered. So, then you have to add more power into the system, but then you have to remember that it's still currently needing the extra power. And so, if the accumulator charges back up, you shouldn't go So, you're going to need some crazy SR SR latch RS latch, whatever you want to call it, system no matter what, even if you use accumulators. It's This is not that different than if you just used accumulators, to be honest. Um it might be a little worse, let's be honest. But, what I ended up doing uh what did I end up doing here? So, what we did is some real chaos.

[00:34:27]Essentially, the idea was let's cuz power is instant. As soon as all the labs turn on, they're using a certain amount of power. And then as soon as all the labs are on, I can know what that amount of power is, use that to trigger all the bat brains turning on. As soon as those turn on, they also increase the power usage of labs by the way, which is not told to you anywhere. That was kind of an annoying realization. So the lab power usage changes significantly. And then the bat brains are also on, and so then you have a new total. And as long as that total is being used, you want to keep the bat brains running. And then as soon as the labs turn off, which then has a separate number, then that's when you want to turn off the bat brains. So theoretically, if you're measuring how much power this is all using on a tick by tick basis, you should be able to figure it out.

[00:35:17]So what we're doing is we're measuring uh this is essentially figuring out how much steam am I using per tick.

[00:35:25]And this is measuring in um I think it's one tick intervals.

[00:35:34]Yeah.

[00:35:36]And so then this is tallying the last second worth cuz we have to average it out a little bit, otherwise we get some weird stuff. Um cuz this is still pumping out, you know, there's a little bit of like buffering in the pipe and stuff that can be slightly problematic.

[00:35:52]Um So we we're averaging out over 1 second.

[00:35:56]And this is just a crazy I I'm sure all of these combinators are like really inefficient. But we're averaging out over 1 second, how much have we used?

[00:36:04]And then this is a memory cell that is essentially only outputting a pulse once every second of how much have we used.

[00:36:13]And then that pulse is getting locked into this memory cell, and that's basically saying how many uh units of steam have I used in the last second.

[00:36:26]And that's how we're measuring power.

[00:36:28]Then the problem is when you're filling up the steam tanks, that's interfering with the emptying out of the steam tanks. So, you can see there's a little bit of an issue. And I'm just now realizing I maybe could have just had another steam tank that we also Oh, but you can't measure what's in the pump.

[00:36:49]That's the difference.

[00:36:52]And then if that one's constantly filling, then that's interfering with the difference. So, yeah, you have to have one that's just emptying out so you can measure how much is leaving, but then eventually it's going to be empty, which is a problem. So, then it swaps over to this one, which is full, but then it has to lock out cuz when it swaps over, it has some weirdnesses with the difference signals. And so, I had to lock out for 3 seconds like when you switch over tanks, don't update the amount you're using for 3 seconds until after you've switched. So, hopefully it's stabilized by then. It's a whole mess. And I added these tanks so it switches less often. It's a whole mess. But the idea is we got some SR latches here that ideally it's measuring the state of the system when we're when we turn on the labs.

[00:37:35]Let's actually see if it works. Um This will be a good test.

[00:37:39]Uh let's put our money where our mouth is. Does this actually work?

[00:37:43]Okay, so I start the research.

[00:37:46]And that brains turn on within like 1 second.

[00:37:51]And then you can see here that we're using far more of the of the steam.

[00:37:58]And then hopefully this is all set up in such a way that when I stop the research, it all turns off.

[00:38:10]So, that's pretty cool. That's pretty nifty. As much as this might be like hair-brained solution times 10 and it took me way too many hours, that's pretty cool.

[00:38:20]Uh it responds very quickly. We don't waste much vat brain at all with that system. So, I'm pretty proud of that as much as again it's like this is not elegant. I'm sure there's a better way to do the exact same thing.

[00:38:32]It does work.

[00:38:34]At least it had one issue which I couldn't fully explain and I made a minor tweak and it hasn't happened again since, but hopefully it works. It's been pretty consistent since I made that change.

[00:38:46]Um, but yeah, that that's one of the biggest things we've done. This is a little measurement on essentially doing the math of like because Py and Dons has different requirements per pack.

[00:38:56]So, you can see we need way more automation packs now. And we also need vat brains per pack if you math it all out. And so this this is kind of mathing out each resource based on the current ratio. And then it's telling me essentially which is the limiting factor. So, right now I have not 7,900 vat brains. I have enough vat brains to do 7,900 science groupings. That's what I call, you know, this is one grouping.

[00:39:25]So, essentially right now I could do 7,900 worth of science.

[00:39:30]Um, and so that helps me kind of figure out what I can queue up. And then it goes up to, you know, 9,000. So, yeah, that that's one of the bigger things we've done. Um, looking at milestones, a lot of stuff is just inputs and outputs and new flora, new fauna.

[00:39:44]Um, let's see if there's anything really noteworthy here.

[00:39:48]Um, logistics and, you know, construction bot tier two was really nice. Um, oh, the the solar power is kind of been our main power solution.

[00:39:59]So, that might be worth looking at. So, solar power in this game there's a couple ways to do it. There is regular solar panels, but they're not very good.

[00:40:07]Instead, there's these thermo solar panels. Um, and so these guys heat up uh, molten salt and then you convert the molten salt at 2,000° into pressurized steam and molten salt at 1,000°. That's exchanging the temperature there. And then you use that highly the hot pressurized steam to produce uh power in a steam turbine. And so this is kind of a stockpile of pressurized steam from solar panels. And I have a little warning that tells me when that gets low, which it just went off this last episode. So I built a fourth section of steam power. Each one of these can handle about 5 GW uh constantly, which is not that bad. 5 GW from an area this small forever for free is pretty cool.

[00:40:59]Um at the same time though, this system can handle about 12 GW and it runs off of a tiny amount of refined natural gas.

[00:41:07]We're talking like How much does this use?

[00:41:11]Uh it uses 107 for like 12 GW. So that's not that hard to just use actual power sources either, but I like the idea of infinite it it feels cool to me. I don't have to worry about logistics. Um so that's what we're doing for now. There are lots of ways to make power at this point in the game and there will become even more competitive nuclear ways to make power. So you've got nuclear, you've got thermo solar, you've got wind power, which we didn't really touch at all. Uh and then there's tidal power, which is not very strong. We looked at tidal plant mark twos and I think they're way too weak. They need to be like five to 10 times stronger to be worth the cost that they have. Uh they're very expensive. So this was a much cheaper route, I think, the solar.

[00:41:59]Um other than that, I mean, obviously there's hundreds of new products that we've made in the last 200 hours, but I don't really know if many of them are that interesting. I'm just trying to think about systems in my base. The crap is one of the more interesting systems.

[00:42:16]We've done a lot of up-marking, but that's if you've ever played Planetons, you know Well, I guess you have to play a decent amount to get to it, but it's similar to when you first get a creature, how you have to make it a certain way, and then you can reproduce it, and then you get into the loop where it sustains itself. A lot of Mark II creatures are the same way. You have to do a special recipe to get a chance at a Mark II creature, and then once you have one, or maybe you need three or five of them, then you can start reproducing them. So, I've done a bunch of that over time. Um We've set up a bunch of other stuff.

[00:42:49]Rubber.

[00:42:50]This is all silicone stuff. We got This is the vanadium stuff. We got What in the What in the world is this?

[00:42:58]Resorcinol. I think that's for aerogel.

[00:43:02]I don't even remember what needs aerogel.

[00:43:05]Uh we got nanofibrils here with no water, so that's an easy fix.

[00:43:10]Okay, I know what happened there.

[00:43:12]So, that's fixed. Um Wait.

[00:43:19]What?

[00:43:22]How did acetone get into this pipe?

[00:43:27]Huh.

[00:43:29]Oh, it was probably that I see what happened. Okay.

[00:43:32]It got built in a certain order. All right. Well, we fixed that. Glad we spotted that.

[00:43:37]Um botos are interesting. Later on you get a turd upgrade that allows them to be a lot faster and cheaper, but they they explode once in a while, like nuclear explosions, so you have to have like And I don't know exactly how big it is, but you know, a giant area that everything in that area will get destroyed, which means you're going to have to be careful with like belts and chests and not lose a bunch of resources, and and just ferry in the minimum amount of resources so it can run. So, I am excited for that um at some point.

[00:44:08]Uh, more animals, more random builds. I've got a bunch of tiles ready to go to pave the world, but the problem is it uses a lot of bots.

[00:44:18]This is kind of my default paving around the rails that I'm trying to do. I need to do some more placing of this blueprint.

[00:44:26]And then, maybe eventually I'll fill in the insides of these when I have faster bots or something, I don't know.

[00:44:35]Um, but yeah, I think that's kind of a a decent base tour. I think the vat brain and the new science stuff is most of it.

[00:44:41]The crap is pretty interesting.

[00:44:44]A lot of these systems, um, they all start to blur together when you've played this much Py and Dons, like they all have some amount of uniqueness to them, like up up-marking or upgrading the Olriks, like you have to rejuvenate them cuz they're tired, you know, which is the first animal that's like that if you didn't do the aug power system, that is. And so, like, there's a lot of different systems, but they're also all kind of similar. So, I don't know if any of them are particularly interesting. I made that forever ago, still running.

[00:45:15]Um, other than that, I don't know if we have any other new systems that are massively interesting that we've built in the last 200 hours.

[00:45:30]Uh, looking through.

[00:45:32]Nuclear is wild once you get a little further, too.

[00:45:36]This is iron plates, molten iron. Molten iron is so much better than regular iron.

[00:45:42]A lot of animal food. This is one that we've had to continue upgrading.

[00:45:46]Um, if I were to go back and do it differently, I would have made a better starting setup for all the animal food that was more like, uh, expandable.

[00:45:57]Cuz this is getting kind of messy.

[00:45:59]You can see I have 190 logistic bots just in that This is in the local bot network. And I also need to replace all the tier one bots with tier two bots.

[00:46:07]You can see how much faster they are and they carry twice as much.

[00:46:10]Um we've upgraded some of these plants like by a ton. Like I can get 50 Relatia a second out of just these buildings.

[00:46:19]Compared to the original build, which was this big, I think it made like five a second. You know, it it's crazy how the Pyenadons uh higher tier recipes plus higher tier buildings plus higher tier modules all combined together to make really fast stuff.

[00:46:35]Like even the tier one seaweed, we get 62 seaweed a second out of this.

[00:46:41]Crazy. Um So, yeah. There you go. That is kind of a base tour, a little bit of looking at milestones. Are there any other milestones that are really interesting?

[00:46:52]Um Sap trees are our first mark four thing.

[00:46:56]That's kind of interesting.

[00:46:58]Um Still haven't made my first helium. We did just make our first glass fiber recently. Yeah, but we're working our way towards module twos right now, which require blue circuits, a few other things. So, we're probably still hm I don't know.

[00:47:16]If I had to guess about 20 hours away from having module twos.

[00:47:21]Each of these blocks represents something I don't have yet.

[00:47:25]That is Not all of them are a full build. Some of them are just like literally one building.

[00:47:31]But some of them are I guess I did do that one and I'm almost done with this one. But some of them involve a lot of grief and pain, like this one. Uh so, yeah. I I don't know how many episodes it's going to be, but I'm going to guess something about 20 episodes and then I might have module twos, which is a huge boost, obviously. Uh because module twos have literally any upgrade that's in place without having to change anything else is big a big deal, but the ratio of speed to energy consumption is better, which makes a big difference cuz a lot of PyAE and Don's buildings use fuel as their power, which means efficiency matters for not just electricity, right?

[00:48:13]Efficiency is also affecting how much fuel the building burns. So, that starts to make a a really big difference when these subtract a little bit more and these are giving you more speed for for the same amount of energy increase, you can cancel out the energy increase more easily and get more speed out of it. And then on top of that, obviously, productivity doubling from 10 to 20 is massive, though you do have to account for that with um speed modules and beacons around it cuz the speed goes way down. But, yeah, that'll be the next big progression of the base and then past that, it'll be uh prod science, production science, which is a huge deal. There's so many things that appear in production science. It's kind of like the end game, I think, starts in production science. I would say we're still in the mid game, but once you've once you're doing production science, I think you're kind of moving into the end game, where most things become possible in production science.

[00:49:13]So, yeah, I hope this has been enjoyable as a base tour. Uh if you have any questions, feel free to let me know in the comments. Please join the Crydania Discord. We can chat there a lot easier back and forth. If you're inspired to start your own PyAE and Don's run, I definitely recommend it. It's really fun. Just get the whole thing and you just got to approach it with the Zen Garden experience. You're not there to win, you're not there to beat the pack, you're just there to have some fun, to get some stuff done.

[00:49:37]And maybe maybe you'll find after you've showed up a bunch of times to the Zen Garden that you're 200 hours in and you've made a lot of progress. And then you're 500 hours in and you've made even more progress. And eventually, you show up to the Zen Garden enough times just to prune some trees and do a couple things and you'll find you've beaten the pack. That's what I'm hoping for.

[00:49:58]If I had to guess, I think I will get victory before 1,000 hours. I think we are more than halfway done, but I'm not totally sure. I'd be curious to see someone else's milestone chart who's completed the game. And if I kind of scale my milestones to their milestones, where does victory land in the timing?

[00:50:14]Obviously, everybody's a little a little bit different, but at least for a ballpark estimation, I'm not really sure if we're looking at like 800 hours, 900 hours, if we are just about halfway and it'll be 1,000 hours.

[00:50:28]But I think that's roughly it. I don't think it's going to be before 800.

[00:50:33]And I don't think it's going to be after 1,000. I think that's a fairly safe estimate. Anyway, I'm going to call the episode here. Um if you'd like to join the uh Pyanodons world, there's a Py Discord as well.

[00:50:46]There's a lot of people there that are happy to help out. Um my auto mall system, I didn't cover it in this because we built it before 300 hours, but I did make an actual release a YouTube video release on how this works.

[00:51:00]I go over the entire blueprint and I provide the blueprint. If you want to make your own, I explain every combinator. I even wrote descriptions um on how they work. So, if you want to modify and make your own version that does some different things, but this is a count perfect system, which is not the easiest to make that work. And there are some downsides to a count perfect system, but what I like about it is if I say I want three of a building, it only makes three of a building.

[00:51:28]But if I say I need 50 of a building, all 10 of these will end up working on making that building. So, that I really like that about the auto mall and it has worked flawlessly for the last 200 hours. I've had zero issues with it. Um I have had to request I had to add in this thing where once we move to a tier two version of a building, we have to request the tier one version back into the system because I'm using logistics network channels. But that's more of a logistics network channel thing than it has anything to do with the auto mall. So, yeah, I've been really pleased with this system. It's It's worked perfectly. I haven't needed to expand it. Anything that I need tons of that has its own building like inserters and stuff. So, this is just for actual buildings, you know, that do crafting.

[00:52:12]And these are all the different categories.

[00:52:16]Someone reminded me that I could just add more sections and I was like, oh, interesting. Didn't think about that.

[00:52:24]So, instead I have different combinators for each section.

[00:52:27]So, yeah, I'm going to call it there.

[00:52:28]Thank you for watching this base tour.

[00:52:30]If you're here watching live, stick around. We're going to keep streaming for a little bit longer.

[00:52:35]But if you're coming from the recorded version on YouTube, thank you for watching. Let me know what you think down in the comments about this Pyanodons base and hopefully I'll see you in another video or in the Discord.