Compact Everything Machine (Pre-wires)

Overview

*UPDATE* I’ve made a new design which i talk about at the end of this guide. I’ll leave the original here as it explains a bunch of things but if you’re looking for a design the build the new one is better in every way.An ‘Everything Machine’ is a factory that can produce almost any shape (useful in the endgame) and change to another shape with very little effort. I wanted to make one that could make 4-layered shapes and focused on a balance of usability, allowed for quick and easy resetting for the next shape and didn’t need huge amounts of inputs. In previous versions I had a single line which hooked up all colours and shapes but it took many hours just to connect up the inputs. This version only needs 16 of each red, blue and green and mixes any other colours it needs on-site. It uses 8 lines for each shape but only uses the bottom half of the input and scraps the rest. This means you don’t have to find a full circle, square, star or make fans offsite and bring them all the way over, you can just find any shape with 2 of the same corner next to each other and use that.You can select from all the colours and all the shapes, choose between 2,3 or 4-layered shapes and select whether a corner is missing or has no colour. This design is not perfect, however, eg. it couldn’t make the level 18 shape. This design cannot keep up if all 4 corners on a layer are the same shape, it will still make it but not at full speed, limited by the number of cutters.I welcome any comments or improvements i could make :). Also check out the guides for other everything machines with their own benefits: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2205389066 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2221661211

Full Factory

As you can see, I’ve tried to make the factory as lag-friendly as possible by only having buildings working when they’re needed and replacing all belts with underground belts where i can. The inputs are all organised on the right and have the symbols so its easy to remember what goes where when you hook up the extractors. you can also see that i get most of the inputs directly next to the factory, this saves on lag by eliminating huge belt highways. The furthest input is only <200 tiles away (fans are rarer than most shapes). I save on space by squeezing the colour distribution between the cutter arrays. Unfortunately there’s not much i can do to compact the top section of shape distribution other than having double-stacked belts which is more effort than its worth.

Cutters

I have to produce 4 belts of each corner shape for each layer and i do this with 4 arrays of cutters. The result is 4 belts of the same shape next to each other but for the selection i want to sort them into a belt of each different shape next to each other. So I need to use a complicated spaghetti mess to sort them out… i don’t want to tell you how long it took to work that out (especially since I couldn’t use long underground belts because of the colour distribution).

Shape and Colour Selection

Whenever possible I wanted the selection to just be placing a single belt in the same orientation and i managed to do it here. the shape selector is simple, all on one line. Unfortunately I couldn’t fit the colour on a single line but i managed to lay it out on 3 separate lines which is pretty easy to get used to: Single-colour (red, green or blue, place 1 belt), 2-colour (cyan is green on the left, blue on right. Purple is blue on left, red on right. And yellow is green on left, red on right.) and 3- colour (White, place 3 belts) mixing.
There is 1 selection module per corner going from top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right and starting at the bottom layer. If there is no colour, simple, just don’t put in a colour. If the corner is missing, simple, leave it blank. You can set up a 4-layer shape in 1 minute or less once you get the hang of it.
I also designed the selection so that the belts you put in are the only things on their row. This means you can hold right click and scroll along the rows to reset them without breaking anything else (or select the whole row and click delete, either method is fast).

Mixers and Painters

Stackers and Additional Selections

The stacker arrays first combine the top left and right corners together and the bottom left and right corners then combine them to form a single layer. Because we only need 1 stacker array for 2 painters, I can fit another array between the space for each layer which makes the 2-layered shapes. This is the same again in the centre where the 2 2-layer shapes can combine into a 4-layer shape.
However they don’t have to combine in the centre meaning this design can produce 2 full lines of a 2-layered shape (3.6k per min) or 1 full line of a 3-layered or 4-layered shape (1.8k per min).
For the final selections you just need to place a single belt per corner to say whether it is coloured or non-coloured and like the other selections these are the only belts in the row. If there is a missing corner in each half layer you place a straight belt in the place marked out by an extractor or if its not missing any you place a curved belt. The layer number selection is only in the centre stacker array and switches between making 2-layered, 3-layered and 4-layered shapes with just a couple of belts, easy.

Summary

Most designs I’ve seen have a huge number of belts in a huge corner selection area but I personally prefer the smaller, lag-friendly, mix-it-yourself style. It meant i could make the selection more compact and It saves on colour by only needing 1 of each per corner rather than 4 of each needed to have every colour available. However it does mean i can’t save on colour by painting the shape before cutting it so there’s downsides and benefits to both ways.
Another benefit is that this design can make a 4-layered shape where every corner is the same shape and colour at almost full belt speed, only slowed down to 1.5k per min by the cutters which can’t keep up with a full belt even though they should be able to. A 4-layered shape where every corner is the same colour and 3 are the same shape will work at the full 1.8k per min.

I also haven’t seen another design that can so easily switch from making shapes with different numbers of layers and that easily allows for 3.6k per min of 2-layered shapes in a single factory which is more useful for the lower levels.
Lag optimisation is something pretty crucial in the current state of the game so I make sure this factory is pretty much at the minimum number of belts that is reasonably possible. I have had 4 of this design (7.2k 4-layered shapes per min) active on a world and still get playable fps which is pretty promising.

I’d love to see other designs that people have come up with, please go ahead and leave them in the comments, post imgur links or make your own guides.
Finally I want to thank Lysquid for posting a similar guide the other day. I’ve wanted to show this off for a few weeks but didn’t really know where to do it. Looking at their design inspired me to make this one, and i kinda copied their guide format (sorry :/). go check it out, its a great design, much nicer looking than mine too :).

*UPDATE* New Factory

Instead of making a new guide for this design I thought I’d just add it to this one. I’ve tried to fix as many problems with the old design as possible:

– The output stream is now consistently 1.8k/min, (problem was not the rotators but the cutters).

– Made the selection panel easier, smaller and quicker to use. The shape and colour selection is now all on one line and it pre-mixes all the 7 colours with just 1 input of red, green and blue so you only need to place one belt to assign the colour.

– Put the coloured/non-coloured selection and missing corner selection one 1 line just below
shape and colour selection so you can do it while you select them. These both now can be activated by a single belt. Also simplified selection it so that it defaults to use a coloured corner and ‘both corners present’ unless you select otherwise. The option for 3-layers is on the same
line and 2-layer and 4-layer options are more obvious.

– Double-stacked shape inputs to save on space.

– BIGGEST CHANGE: reduced the number of colour inputs from 16 to just 2 lines of each colour! This was possible because of a technique used in a design by Arschchopf. [link] They selected a full shape then painted it, then cut it into corners which makes selection simple and cuts the colours needed by 4. Then I added double painters so that it required 8x less colour in total. I believe this is the minimum possible colour needed. Doing this meant i could cut out the whole colour distribution and cutter setup reducing the size massively (slightly counter-acted by the wider mixing setup).

This is now the 6th version of this factory I’ve made (the original one in the guide is the 4th version) and I don’t really think I can do any better until the new update. The only downside of this version I see is that It takes a while for all the old materials to get flushed out when making a new shape, partly because of all the spaghetti conveyors during stacking but that’s going to be a problem whatever I do. (My world is also so laggy now that building any more designs would be torture haha. 122k buildings and 85k conveyors game running at just 35% of normal speed). Enjoy the pictures of the new design and if people want me to break down how any of it works I can:

If you can understand what anything in this spaghetti mess actually does you deserve a medal: