All-In-One: Component Maker, Smelter, Lift, Extractor

Overview

This guide will build an all-in-one machine to extract ore, lift it to the surface, smelt it, and manufacture components. This relieves you from having to worry about where, and how, you’re going to route items and power around an unplanned base. These All-In-One machines are designed to be enclosed in a room, about 20x20x20.Depending on the ore being smelted, each component maker will be slightly different, as you don’t make Titanium Gears, or Tin Housings. Each component maker is going to take the form of a large cube of machinery, roughly 6l x 4w x 5h in dimension.

Introduction

There are four general sections. Starting top down, the block of machinery which manufactures components, lift top where the smelters reside, a lift shaft, and extractors off screen. There is also a source of power running down a corner of the lift shaft to an extractor site.

Extractor

Ideally, you are looking for a flat 5×5 surface where you can place a Power Storage Block (PSB) and power 2 extractors with it. In the center of this 5×5 area, is going to be a 3×3 lift shaft. This screenshot demonstrates all the possible locations I can place my extractors around a lift shaft. You only need one set of extractors and PSB though. If you only have one extractor, start with that. Get the system running and expand later.
No matter where the extractors are placed, they always touch a future lift shaft. When the lift reaches the bottom, it will dump all ore without needing any belts. If there are no belts, then mynocks can’t spawn. If there are no mynocks, then you don’t need defense, or extra power.

The reason to try to position yourself with all 4 corners on ore, is to make powering your extractor site easier. If you already know all 4 corners touch ore, you can bring power down any corner of the lift shaft, and it will hook up without issues. If you only have 1 corner on ore, you can get turned around, loose your bearings, and then you have to make wonky directional fixes if you bring power down the wrong corner.

The next step is to place storage hoppers on 2 faces of the extractors. These storage hoppers will unload directly into the lift, without having to use weaponry to prevent mynocks. Additionally, not having an extensive network of belts carrying ore is 4x faster.

This side view demonstrates the hopper sharing. There are only 6 hoppers here, as that’s how much the lift carries. There’s no point in having more, as it won’t be lifted once the hopper is totally full, and if there aren’t enough hoppers, your lift will have to wait. Six Storage Hoppers is the optimal number.

If you don’t have enough machinery to build what’s demonstrated in the screenshot, notice that the layout is symmetrical. Get at least 1 side of it working, with the bare minimum number of equipment, just to get the system working. A half-built system is better than hand carting back and forth.

The easiest way I found to make a lift shaft from this point in the game, is to stand on top of your PSB, and alternate between clearing whats above your head (if there is something), then building glass blocks below your feet. Every 50m, drop a laser pointing down. Do that all the way up to a power source. after you’ve done this 50 times, you’ll probably reverse the process and start from the top and dig down, so you don’t run out of power.

Lift Shaft

In one corner of the lift shaft, coal will be coming up, and in the opposite corner, a laser will be transferring power down. This is why I mentioned ideal positioning earlier. It’s easy to just forget about this step, build your lift system, and then when it comes time to power an extractor, you find out the corner you wanted to transfer power down has coal on it.

The Basic Belts are an intentional build choice, to reduce the construction cost in the early game. If you plan your machines to consume the output of basic belts, dig up sources local to the machines you’re powering. A generator takes 30 seconds to burn coal, so there should never be a situation where you need to get coal anywhere faster than a basic belt can supply it.

This is the complicated part. Shown here is a mockup of the top of the lift shaft.
I have to stand on something in order to take this screenshot, so pretend this big floor isn’t here. What’s going on is the coal line that is coming up the lift shaft, is hitting a turntable and splitting in two directions. All this will happen below your floor, so this turntable setup will be hidden from view, it’s only visible here for screenshot purpose.

The point of having two lines of coal, is to quickly distribute coal all the way round to the other side using minihoppers. Coal will eventually travel using the a single straight line of coal, but it takes a long time. So we hide the complexity of turntable distribution below the floor.

Place the Cargo Lift Controller 3m above the floor.

Smelting

Line one face of the lift with generators. Notice that all the hoppers we placed down are supposed to supply the generators with coal. And there is a laser shooting power down the corner of the lift shaft. This is why I suggested making sure your PSB and extractors end up on corners with ore. Because from the top of this lift shaft, you can no longer see where things are, and if all corners are a viable option, it saves you the hassle of checking to make sure the system works.

Add Storage Hoppers in the middle of the lift face, with some standard belts on either side.

The belts take ore from the hopper, and saturate lines that lead into the input minihoppers for smelting. Make sure to set the permissions on minihoppers to REMOVE ONLY.

Add your smelters on top of the minihoppers. Notice that you are now powering the Extraction Site, Lift, and smelters from just a few generators.

Now complete the ring of minihoppers of coal, and you’ll be able to hook up generators on all faces of the lift and expand up to 12 smelters per lift. Again, if you don’t have all the machines right now to complete this build, do one face at a time.

The final step is to add a few more generators on the very top of the Lift Controller. These are going to power the Induction Charger, which you will place the component maker on top of it.

Here is a view from the backside of what we have built so far

Now you can decorate the lift as you like, covering up all the ugliness. The next stage is building the component makers on top of the Induction Charger.

Future Expansion: Cutting Heads

It will be easy to hook cutting heads up to your lift system by using FALCOR units to deliver the cutting heads to the lift, and then Matter Movers to shoot them down to the extraction site. Drop the laser down a block, and put a battery in it’s place.

Attach a FALCOR to the battery, and the LogiHopper to the Matter Mover. You’ll have to clear a second shaft parallel to the laser. On the laser line, you simply attach batteries on top of your lasers, and attach the matter mover to the battery.

Future Expansion: Induction Coil

When technology allows, you can upgrade the Smelter, and add Induction Coils to them. The LogiHoppers are the exit point for the smelted bars. The hoppers are sideways, so you can see if they’re full from below.

Component Crafter for all Bars

This is a demonstration of how to build component manufacturing that can be added onto incrementally in a way that doesn’t force you to rip up and redesign your base as more capacity to manufacture components becomes necessary. If you build upwards, in a tower, you can devise a number of different ways to push bars up the tower, yet maintain a slim ground footprint. We will deconstruct how it was made, and you can adapt this concept into your own builds.

General Setup

Each component crafting setup is going to be slightly different for each bar. For example, the only thing useful about Titanium is the Bars, and the Housings. But with Copper it’s Bars, Wires, Pipes, like 5 different things. There are some general similarities between all these crafters, and as you build these yourself, you can make adjustments as necessary. Game settings and mutators might have implications to machine layouts.

Step 1

First lay down a stack of 5 turntables.

Step 2

In the middle of the stack, lay a placeholder block down and delete that middle turntable. Reposition it against the placeholder block.

Step 3

Remove two more turntables and replace them with LogiHoppers

Step 4

Cover up the inner working with belts. If build cost is a factor, It’s not a problem to use basic belts here, as wire/stampers/coilers/pcb makers all operate at basic belt speeds. Standard belts won’t help you much when you step down the line saturation.

Step 5

This is an upside down UpSloped Conveyor. It’s pushing bars down to a lower level. Once the lower level is full, a turntable will try to distribute bars upwards.

Step 6

The Storage Hopper usually takes input from the floor below. But it’s also possible to receive bars from a matter mover. What is the top of the hopper is left open for matter mover input, and it allows you to see the green/red indication of it being full or empty.

Step 7

Cover up the inner workings. Bars will evenly distribute themselves around a 3×5 stack.

Step 8

Not every machine needs wire/coil/pcb makers, but do so for this guide, to demonstrate how long the group of machines will need to be. If there are no crafters to put on the line, I would substitute with belts to maintain the length of the machine. I’ve never needed it to be longer than this. Ideally, the idea is to keep this component crafter within the footprint of an Induction Pad.

Step 9

There’s a priority splitter at the bottom which I use to siphon off bars before they go into the component maker. And notice that I’ve turned one of the blocks on the input hopper downwards, so that I can better saturate the bar line. Turing these belts is a nice way to adjust the flow of components as needed.