Factorio - Ultimate Guide to Pyanodons Mods

Pyanodons mods are a lot of fun to some people. Just give it a try, don’t be shy. Install the latest mod of the mod pack, Pyanodons Alternative Energy, including all the dependencies that are installed automatically. Start a new game, select the “Pyanodon recommended” preset and have fun. Stop if you don’t have any fun at all. Otherwise, come back here after a few hours to make sure you didn’t make any mistakes with your setup – there is a whole chapter about mods and map settings later.

Before Starting the Game

Are You Ready for It?

Most factorio players consider PyMods to be the most complex and difficult mod pack available. Most players who start will never finish it. To do so you need to invest several hundred, probably even over a thousand hours into it.

Personally, I believe there are three kinds of players when it comes to PyMods.

Kind 1: It just isn’t fun. The complexity and slow progression of PyMods are just not your thing. If you are rejected by the thought of complexity or you try it and the fun doesn’t start in the first 10 to 20 hours, this is probably you. There are lots of other great mods, which you might enjoy more.
Kind 2: It’s fun, but it’s too long to finish. You start the game. Everything feels fresh, just like your first game of Factorio. After 100 hours you are at the second or third science pack, and realize how much is needed to actually finish the game. You either can’t or don’t want to invest that much time and quit. Still, you had a fun time, likely similar to building a vanilla megabase or finishing one of the smaller overhaul mods. If you have found your way to this guide, you probably fall into this category.
Kind 3: It’s fun and you see it through. You accept the challenge and just don’t allow yourself to fail. Some parts will feel like work, but in the end you had a great experience and can be proud of yourself. Very few players actually achieve victory in PyMods.

Should you try it? Absolutely! If it’s not your thing you will find out very quickly, not wasting much time. In the other case you’ll have a lot of fun.

The difficulty of PyMods originates from several factors, decide for yourself whether you’re up to it.

The vanilla game introduces its concepts slowly, and even then advanced oil processing with its multiple products, and fluid handling in general, already is a hurdle to some players. PyMods give you a full package of problems from the get-go. There is no tutorial or anything of that kind. I recommend to have launched a rocket in vanilla or have played other overhaul mods to know at least the basic concepts in factorio.

It takes a long time to finish PyMods. Don’t expect to finish this mod unless you have a proven track record in completing large overhaul mods. It is a lot of fun to play, even if you will never finish it. You should simply adjust your expectations to your experience.

Recipe chains in PyMods have some loops and lots of byproducts, both items and fluids, from the very beginning. Already knowing how to prioritize those and how to deal with excess does help you not get overwhelmed so quickly. You will learn these skills by playing PyMods, but it might involve some painful troubleshooting.

There are a lot of fluids in PyMods. Multiple fluid inputs, multiple fluid outputs, high-throughput fluids, low-throughput fluids, closed loops with fluids. Being experienced with fluid mechanics does help you build a productive factory. Eventually you will learn everything you’re going to need, but the start might be a bit slower if doing so, and you might find yourself troubleshooting quite often.

You are more or less forced to build an enormous train network at some time. If you build train networks without any experience you might end up with trains blocking your junctions and throughput issues at stations. Nothing that you can’t fix, but at the scale of PyMods this becomes tedious. If you made it to the point where trains are available, you’re also able to learn everything you need for your train network. Non-blocking junctions, stackers, balancing wagons, basic circuit networks for your stations. Consider taking a break from PyMods, build a vanilla megabase using trains (maybe in editor), and come back to PyMods with all the knowledge you gained.

The recipe chains in PyMods are pretty involved. I recommend being experienced in one of the many factorio calculators. Alternatively you know how to do the calculations by hand or you add buildings until all the belts and pipes are full.

Is Py Ready for You?

The current state of the mod pack is quite stable, compatibility issues with other mods have been mostly resolved. If you start a game now you will be able to finish it.

The developers are still active, fixing bugs and fine-tuning balance. PyAE is officially feature-complete until the release of the next py mod (Py Stellar Expedition) and the upcoming 2.0 release. There might still be updates that break existing saves. No one forces you to update, though. If you’re waiting for a time without changes you’ll probably wait forever. The early game in particular is very stable and quite polished at the moment. The latest big changes involved the nuclear chains in the mid and late game (which you’ll never reach, ha ha). Probably there never was a better time to start your Py journey.

Is Your Hardware Ready?

In general, yes. Personally I have 3.5ms update time at Py science pack 2 on my computer, which is 10 years old. In my speedrun I’m two science packs further, with a lot of upscaling that is required at this point, but I’m still at 14ms. That’s close to the 16.66ms limit needed for 60 UPS, but at this point I’m already behind the biggest UPS bottleneck. I could research the inserter capacity upgrade (reducing inserter swings) and switch to moduled and beaconed builds (reducing building count by a lot). I can use higher-tier buildings and modules, so I expect that I can maintain 60 UPS until the end of the game if I want to.

Of course, there are several ways to reduce your UPS, which can lead to bad performance:

Building too big – having ten times the SPM with a tenth of the UPS does not save you any time, quite the contrary.
Destroying all byproducts, just to craft them somewhere else.
Stacking and unstacking every item.
Using a lot of containers with many slots.
Adding mods that add complex steps to even get the basic resources, like PyBlock or Omnimatter.
Playing with biters and/or pollution.

Despite Factorio being mostly CPU-limited I can recommend a decent GPU with enough VRAM, because the graphics in PyMods are huge. If you have issues, the Eradicator’s RAM & VRAM Saver mod might help.

Selection of PyMods

For the “Full Py” experience, simply install Pyanodons Alternative Energy, it includes the whole mod pack as dependency.

You can choose a simpler and shorter game, using just a subset of PyMods. However, you’ll miss out on a lot of fun, and most advice given to you might not apply to you anymore.

The developers have given two suggestions to shorten the game:

“Short Py”: Py Fusion Energy + Py Industry + dependencies
“Medium Py” Py High Tech + Py Petroleum Handling + Py Raw Ores + dependencies

A community member came up with the following drawing to illustrate it.

There exist some additional mods with “Py” in the name, but these are not part of the official mod pack. All official mods are those owned by the user Pyanodon.

Personally I suggest you just start with “Full Py”. If the time commitment is too much, just stop at some point. This way, I assume, you’ll have more fun than finishing “Short Py”, although personally I haven’t done anything else other than “Full Py”.

There is also PyBlock from one of the developers. The version on the mod portal is updated for PyAE, but even the start isn’t balanced yet. So at the moment I can’t suggest giving it a try.

And then there is PyHardMode, also from one of the developers. This definitely increases the challenge of the mod. My personal suggestion is to not install this mod unless you made it at least to Py science pack 2 without it. In theory it’s possible to add it to an existing save, but I can’t recommend it. The main effect of the missing void opportunities is in the early game, that you’ve already left behind. And it means going through your whole factory, which isn’t small anymore, and adjusting it to the new rules – a tedious task.

Selection of Additional Mods

This is a very controversial topic, full of personal preferences, however the general advice is to use whatever mods you like. Py is difficult enough as is, so feel free to add QoL mods to make it easier or remove the challenges you find tedious – no one is going to judge you. However, for every “cheat” you’ll miss out a sense of achievement in the natural Py progression. For example, it feels great to gain access to your first personal roboport. You’ll miss that if you play with a mod like Nanobots or Companion Drones.

I also want to encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and try something new. After all, if you add the same set of QoL to each overhaul mod you play, they will all feel the same. If you have built a vanilla megabase with LTN on a rail grid using Bulk Rail Loader for stations, and you do the same with PyMods, you will have a hard time telling the difference. Yes, the start is different and all the recipes and buildings are new. Nevertheless, once you have reached trains, you’ll slap down city blocks using the same basic layout.

Nevertheless, here is a list of mods that other players often use when playing PyMods.

Calculators & Information:

There are also standalone programs like:

Tracking Progress:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Milestones

Improved Character:

Better Trains:

Loaders:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/miniloader
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-loaders
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/deadlock-beltboxes-loaders
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/DeadlocksStackingForPyanadon (for stacking you also need this)

Easier Start:

My personal modlist is just “Full Py”, plus the Milestones mod. No QoL mods at all. As you can see I’m a purist and I like to experience the game as the developers intended. The Milestones mod is used to keep track of my progression and compare my progress to that of other players.

For planning I use YAFC with some personal adjustments. It’s maximized on my second monitor the whole time.

Map Settings

This is another topic which is dominated by personal preferences. However, let me give you some information.

First of all, there is a “Pyanodon recommended” preset, which you can select and just start the game. It has fewer ore patches than usual, which are quite rich. There are large bodies of water and a few, but very long, cliffs. Enemies and pollution are disabled and the research queue is enabled. I’m using these settings and enjoy the game a lot. I’m a purist, as I already said.

In regards to ores, make sure that your starting area contains a good amount of raw coal, iron and copper, near to each other but not overlapping. Use the world preview to check it before starting your game (these ores have the colors you know from vanilla). Stone, native flora (bioreserve) and aluminum are also expected to be in your starting area. Sometimes one resource patch is “behind” another resource, which makes the start difficult or almost impossible.

The first non-starter ores you need for progression are tin, quartz, lead and zinc. It helps to have those nearby (less than 1000 tiles). If that is important to you I recommend exploring your surroundings using cheats, then reset your game and start normally. The map preview is not great for this because some ore patches have very similar colors and are difficult to distinguish. But no matter how much time you invest into finding the perfect seed, you can expect to not play on a perfect map – you just need so many resources that at least a few of them will be far off.

It is possible to use RSO Mod, and it was kind of recommended to use before PyAE was released, because there were so many starting resources that they would overlap almost every time. That has been changed, there are only a handful of starting resources now. So it comes down to personal choice. If you use RSO your game will be different in a few ways:

The default coal patches are extremely rich, which is not the case with RSO’s default settings. Make sure to have enough coal around, you’re going to need it. Compare your starting area with the starting area of a non-RSO game. In my tests RSO generated approximately the same amount of resources, except just 2% of the raw coal. Adjust the RSO settings (e.g. “Starting richness multiplier”) to make sure you have enough resources around.

The default ore generation makes some resources spawn in single nodes, like a single oil well in vanilla (e.g. geothermal water, salt, sulfur). This is intended and you will be happy for every single one of these resources you explore and exploit. With RSO these resources will be generated in larger groups, you will not value them in the same way.

In general, resources in RSO are spread out quite a bit. There are so many resources in PyMods that you can have bad luck. I have seen people needing thousands of belts for one of their first non-starter ores.

Personally I recommend not using RSO, because of all the mentioned differences.

It is theoretically possible to disable water, however your starting lake should contain at least 1 seaweed and 3 fishes which you’ll need for progress (you’ll need at least 13, but each fish gives 5 when mined). Grab them and store them in a safe place. Don’t use them accidentally in handcrafting. Early in logistic science (3rd science pack) you’ll gain a possibility to pump water everywhere with just electricity. There are also mods like Stone Water Well to have that earlier, without power costs, smaller and with higher pumping speed.

In the case you decide to disable water, be warned: In the late game there is a creature which you can only build on the coast. You’ll be either restricted to your starting lake or need some waterfill mod.

Also you need fish for early wind power, so if you don’t include natural water you’ll miss out on that power source – and of course on tidal power plants.

Some players like their water spread out over the whole map in small speckles, to have easy access to water everywhere. Personally I like the few large bodies of water. Yes, it makes your early water pipes annoying, but you won’t need landfill everywhere for the rest of the game.

You can increase or decrease trees as you like, but don’t disable them completely. After the first science pack you will be able to automate wood production, however you need to cut down a few hundred trees, both for the science up to that point as well as to collect at least 15 sap to progress. You’ll suffer if you don’t have any trees in your neighborhood. Too many trees can also hurt because it’s painful to mine them by hand – so unless you use Nanobots or Companion Drones, don’t overdo it.

The developers and most Py players will suggest disabling biters. However, it is possible to play with biters if you tune them down to a minimum. You should only consider this if you know what you’re doing and you have experience with Py – in which case this guide is probably not for you. Just don’t do it. It’s not fun to invest a considerable amount of time, just to be overrun by biters while still not being able to automate ammunition.

Cliffs are a real challenge in Py. Cliff explosives are available just a bit after trains, but a bit in PyMods is still many hours. Personally I always disabled cliffs in vanilla, because I found them just annoying. However I play with cliffs now. Never before did it feel so fulfilling to blow them up. I also decided to start with train spaghetti (no rail blocks), cliffs helped me achieve this goal. By the way, underground belts reach longer and can jump over most cliffs. I had several small cliffs under my main bus and it was fine. I encourage you to play with them, they aren’t as bad as they look.

As a reference here is the map I use (seed 3465381579). Not everything is ideal, but it shows you what was important to me. And as you can see you’ll need very good eyes to distinguish the many blue ores – the unmarked shades of blue are niobium and molybdenum.

The Start: Towards Automation Science Packs

The Goal

Your first milestone is unambiguous: Craft your first automation science packs and feed them to labs. No, your goal is not to build a gigantic smelter column, your goal is to start researching.

Feel free to skip this section, it’s really not that difficult or long; 1 to 2 hours is a good time for new players. Come back after you have achieved this goal, you might have missed a few details.

The Way

Since the release of PyAE the first science pack is really straightforward. Just like in vanilla you need to handcraft some items because you lack assembling machines. Just like in vanilla you need iron and copper. Just like in vanilla you need electricity. This is where the similarity ends.

I’m not going to describe every step here, you will need to figure out these things or your own. If this is too much for you, either learn to do things on your own or stop here. You won’t find ready-to-use blueprints for basically anything in PyMods.

Nevertheless, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Just like in vanilla, use the resources inside the spaceship wreck, make good use of the items you start with and scale up iron first. Find a good balance of scaling up plate production vs. starting to craft science.

Hint: When you begin to wait on handcrafting instead of plate production you have probably scaled up plate production too high. You need assembling machines to help you craft, which requires you to complete your first research.

A button in the top left corner opens the “Pyanodon codex”, a very useful in-game help which explains some concepts and provides a lot of extra information, like a list of all fuels (solid and liquid) with their fuel value, or a list of all fluids and how to get rid of them. It also gives information about concepts introduced via scripting. Take your time to read it – now or whenever you encounter strange things.

Burner Phase and Ash

You will probably build the classical coal miners feeding each other in the very beginning. However you’ll see very soon that it is tedious to feed that coal to your ore miners by hand – coal production and consumption is just too high for that. Automate it as soon as possible!

Burning coal leaves you with ash. That’s Pyanodon’s way to make you suffer. Personally I find that mechanic neat because it forces you to think out of the box and design new blueprints. To make things worse, you don’t have access to splitters for a few hours. I recommend designing your own blueprints for the burner phase. This phase lasts longer than you might think, having those blueprints at your disposal will come in handy later.

To make the burner phase actually fun, Pyanodon decided to give you some great tools, though. And it is fun, in my personal opinion Py has one of the best burner phases of all mods: The burner mining drills are amazingly fast, the high coal throughput and the ash output create unique challenges, it’s long enough to reward good designs, and on top of it it feels great when you’re finally over it.

All inserters are actually filter inserters. Unlike normal filter inserters they are set to “blacklist” when building, so they act like normal inserters by default (a bit like what’s coming for 2.0). Set the filter to move or leave ash where it belongs or to build splitter abominations. By the way, the mechanical inserter is not a burner inserter, it requires neither coal nor electricity, it runs completely free. Therefore it’s quite useful, even later in the game.

Your underground belts are longer than usual. This allows you to build differently from what you have done in vanilla. It also allows you to run belts over most buildings, which are a bit bigger than you might be accustomed to.

Also don’t forget to (ab)use normal belt mechanics: Belts have two lanes. Inserters put items on the farther lane. Side-loading a belt onto an underground belt blocks one lane – you can use this to filter items if you use the two lanes carefully. Inserters prioritize taking items from the near lane. Side-loading belts prioritizes one input.

There are some consequences of the ash design, which require you to set filters. For example when you want to output ash from boilers, you need to set filters, otherwise they will output the coal as well. Later when you have access to assembling machines, also make sure not to contaminate belts with ash. Inserters outputting onto a belt will also output the ash unless you set filters.

While coal stacks only to 50, ash stacks to 1000. Because inserters are kind of expensive early on, think about when you want to properly dispose of ash. You can leave ash in your drills, furnaces and assembling machines for quite some time until they jam. Just set the inserter filters correctly and empty the machines by hand from time to time. Automate ash disposal eventually – maybe when you gain access to splitters, maybe when you gain access to the first recipes using large amounts of ash, maybe after a machine jammed for the first time, maybe never.

Forget everything you know about ratios and speeds. Even the inserter speed has changed (0.6 items per second). The only constant is the yellow belt speed of 15 items per second. However, that is the one number which is mostly irrelevant in the beginning – unless you are overbuilding.

Early Mining and Smelting

The burner mining drills cover a 4×4 area. This makes it possible to cover the whole coal patch, even with proper ash disposal. Design a blueprint for this. You’re going to need it.

Think about smelting iron/copper on top of the ore patch, the ratio of burner mining drills to stone furnaces is close enough to 1:1. It saves you a lot of resources you would otherwise need for belts and inserters. Thanks to the increased coverage of the burner mining drill it is possible to cover the whole ore patch, even with smelting on the patch, coal input and plate/ash output. Design a blueprint if you decide to smelt on top of the patch – it may be fun for you.

Stone and Kerogen

Stone mining is a weird little puzzle in itself. You can make a burner mining drill insert directly into a stone furnace for some low-effort stone bricks, but that will jam after a short time. For the beginning it’s enough to just mine into a chest and insert from the chest into a furnace, you won’t need that many stones and stone bricks. Throw the overflow kerogen into boilers, chests, or ore processing from time to time.

However if you want to set up something bigger and more automated it gets tricky. How should you move the mixed belt into a line of stone furnaces, with too much kerogen that needs to overflow somehow? Have fun. This is probably one of the first splitter abominations you will replace with a real splitter. It is also too early for it, that’s a problem for the future you.

Electricity

Have you already thrown a stack of raw coal into a boiler and see it vanish in a blink? It wasn’t even enough to fill the internal buffers. Have fun designing a blueprint for power that converts a full belt of raw coal into a full belt of ash. Look closely at the ratio of boilers to steam engines. It’s different from vanilla and adds to the challenge.

Here is another tip: You need 2.06 inserters to keep your boiler running on raw coal, and the same amount for ash removal. Round down and don’t waste precious resources.

Did you know? It takes quite some time to fill up chests with ash, even for boilers running nonstop. But you would never do such a thing, would you?

However, for the beginning it is enough to just place a single boiler with a single inserter and a single chest of raw coal. After all the buffers are filled, the actual machines needed for your first science packs don’t require that much electricity.

Wood

Early on you have no way to automate logs. This will be one of your next goals. For now you need to cut down trees by hand. However, you can already build a machine to help you with processing the logs into usable wood.

You can set up some automated mining and do one long woodcutting trip. When you come back you’ll find a pile of iron/copper plates inside a chest that should last you for a while. Ideally you have enough wood until you can automate log production.

Or you can start by just cutting down enough trees for your first few science packs to get the ball rolling. However, if you do many small woodcutting trips you’ll spend more time running around and you need to keep a close watch on your wood storage, otherwise your research might stop unnoticed.

Automation Science: The Basics

Basically all the technologies allow you to grow your factory. There isn’t much around that feels useless in the beginning. So just start with the techs that are available. It might be wise not to research faster than you can build, with a few notable exceptions.

Automating Automation Science

Just like in vanilla, use your first automation science packs to gain access to assembling machines. Unlike vanilla, these don’t run on electricity. Their power consumption is so slow that you can either defer proper ash disposal for many hours or think about using a fuel that doesn’t produce ash, like logs/wood. I’m also sure you’ll find a chest of ash somewhere for those planter boxes. That will last you for a very long time, there is no need to run an expensive belt right away.

Decide whether you want to have a dedicated production of small parts or share them with your early mall.

Just don’t overdo it. Don’t build more than a single building for each recipe, it will be enough for quite some time. However, have fun fitting all the inserters around those small assembling machines – you might need more inserters than you think.

Early Mall

In vanilla and other overhaul mods, now would be the time to start building a proper mall. Not so in PyMods. While technically possible it’s not really feasible. There are so many buildings that require so many different resources, and some buildings are quite expensive. Would you really want to have a stack of those lying around in a chest if you only need a handful in your next few hundred hours?

However, this is not as bad as it might sound. You probably have noticed that most of your handcrafting time is spent on the same basic ingredients – small parts. Start with those. Continue with automating air-core inductors, you’ll also research a better recipe for these very early. Automate pipes, belts and inserters. Put some copper cables into a chest, you’ll need a few directly for buildings. You can automate steam engines, tinned cables or power poles, but that’s not strictly necessary. Just make sure to set small chest limits while resources are scarce. Increase the limit on demand.

Your early mall will be that small. However, I suggest adding a chest near your mall for every resource which is commonly used in buildings (e.g. iron, copper, steel, glass, tin, aluminum, lead) – with an appropriate limit and fed from belts. Otherwise you’ll run around your entire factory and pick up random items from belts. You’ll see that it’s easier said than done in the long run. Buildings require quite a few different resources.

Or you just play the way you like to. All of this was just a suggestion in case you don’t know what to do.

Hidden Candy

Let me point out a few technologies that are not so obvious:

Steel axe: The improved mining speed helps a lot when cutting down forests. Don’t forget to craft an armor, it increases the size of your inventory by a staggering amount. Better armor (with even more inventory bonus) will follow at later science packs.

Concrete: Look at those juicy tiles which allow you to run through your factory like Speedy Gonzales. Different tiles will follow at later science packs.

Automobilism: The car allows you to reach outposts easily and to destroy power poles, pipes and inserters that you no longer need. It has a huge trunk which allows you to bring tons of coal to your tin/lead/zinc outposts. Chest automation is a lot cheaper than running belts. You still need the mining fluids, luckily pipes are a bit cheaper than belts. I don’t recommend you using barrels (costing steel) to save on pipes (costing just iron).

Landfill: If you set up a trickle of landfill production very early you will have enough when you need it.

Interlude: Having a Plan

Feel free to skip this whole section if you want to experience the game for yourself. However, it’s easy to maneuver yourself into a dead end in PyMods, where it’s painful to get out of. This means that some kind of upfront planning can help. If you feel overwhelmed by the amount of details, feel free to come back later.

Scale – The short version

Forget what you have learned in vanilla or other mod packs! Don’t scale for a full belt of iron plates in the beginning. Don’t overbuild in general. My personal suggestion is to aim for 6 SPM (6 science packs per minute, that is 0.1 per second, a tiny tiny fraction of a yellow belt) of your “current” science pack and scale the previous science packs accordingly. You should also set a goal for your circuit production. 6 electronic circuits per minute (without interruptions because it was fully automated) were enough for me until I rebuilt everything on the train network. Except metal processing, some alien life forms, and a few other exceptions, 1 building per recipe is a good strategy in your first PyMods game – at least before you have trains.

Scale – The long version

Unlike in vanilla, your infrastructure is quite expensive. Some buildings require an amount of resources that is equivalent to a few hundred or even thousand science packs. Sometimes you’ll need resources (and entire recipe chains) for your infrastructure, which you don’t need for producing continuous science at that time. This makes it difficult to calculate your needs based on a SPM goal alone and just steal some of those resources for your mall.

There are so many recipe chains you need to set up, that your science easily keeps up with you building the factory – at least for the first 100 hours, probably even long after that. Most of your resources will not go into science for a very long time, but instead into growing your factory.

If you have to wait for resources repeatedly when building your factory, you should consider upscaling these resources. Don’t scale up preemptively, you’ll waste resources you could spend for faster progress instead. You’ll waste your time building the wrong things. And you’ll waste precious space. Yes, space is unlimited, but the distances get longer, meaning more time is wasted running around.

If you build too big you also need more resources for the expensive buildings, which means you need to build even bigger. Later on you will research more efficient recipes which makes your infrastructure obsolete and you have to rebuild everything, wasting more time on removing your behemoth of a factory.

But behold the traps of trace amounts of many items. If you produce 0.1 per second of an item and you put it on both sides of a 100-tile belt (which is rather short), that belt will buffer over 2 hours of production – both a blessing and a curse.

Planning ahead

You have reached the point in the game where the factory tends to grow in all directions and if you don’t pay attention you’ll end up with a nice bowl of spaghetti that is difficult to expand.

You should have a good idea of how you want to play the game. I won’t tell you how to play the game, but if you “just start” and see how it goes, you might find yourself in a corner very soon.

Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. In my first game (before PyAE), I knew that a main bus would become very big for Py, so I decided to build spaghetti with lots of space in between – or so I thought. Then I realized that even spaghetti becomes very big for Py, too much for me to handle. So I restarted to make a bus – can’t be too bad, right? Then I realized that the bus is really big for Py, not only very broad, but also a lot longer than I thought. It would also not fit nicely into my planned rail grid and transitioning to that would be hell. So I restarted to retry spaghetti, but this time with more organization. I stamped down some rails blocks (3×4 chunks) at the very beginning and dedicated each block to a coherent set of resources, with lots of belts and pipes in between them. However, I did not build over the planned rails and stations, which made my transition to trains very smooth. I just needed to build the train infrastructure and remove the spaghetti afterwards. All the buildings just stayed where they are. Here is a picture of my planning a few years ago:

Having a plan really helped me this time around and the factory grew nicely.

I would never advise anyone to follow this plan. First of all, too many things have changed with the release of PyAE. There are so many new things to do before trains, like tar processing, circuits and antimony/intermetallics. Furthermore, I found out that the city blocks were a bit too small for my taste. So instead I built an enormous bus in my first PyAE game until I transitioned to trains just after reaching logistic science packs. Destructing the bus was hell. In my next game I came back to the first approach. When expanding I already took the future rail grid into account, but I still had a huge spaghetti starter base. That was transitioned towards a botmall in an oversized rail block later.

So, whatever you do, I recommend you have a plan – even if the plan is to build the most beautiful spaghetti and never transition to trains. Otherwise you might be stuck in a restart loop, just like I was.

Unfortunately it’s easier said than done, to come up with a plan that suits your preferred playstyle, especially when you have zero experience with PyMods. Of course you can just start, and bite the bullet, making slow progress along the way. After all, slow progress is better than restarting. If you have no plan at all you might want to allow yourself some spoilers by watching other people play. The Py streamers I have watched each have a very unique playstyle and factory design. Get some inspiration by looking at their factories, 50-100 hours in. Do not copy blindly, though. Most are no newcomers to PyMods and tend to build bigger than suggested.

Designing Your Factory

Very likely you will transition to trains at some point. This means your design only needs to suffice until your transition onto the rail network. Feel free to skip ahead to the section about trains if you want to plan for your future. But back to the early game – you have the same options you have in vanilla and other overhaul mods:

Spaghetti

This is probably the most fun to play. General factorio advice still applies. Keep more space between builds than you need, then double it. The amount of belt and pipe spaghetti you need to lay down is immense, you’ll very likely underestimate it right now. The larger underground belts do help a bit.

Main Bus

This is the most straightforward way to play. If you haven’t seen a Py bus yet, you’ll probably underestimate its size. The required amount of belts needs a lot of resources, and it takes very long to tear it down again.

Here is some advice specific to PyMods:

Some items are only used once or twice. There is no need to bring them along the entire length of your bus, it’s enough to bring them just until their last use.
Many items are only used in trace quantities. Don’t put them onto both lanes. Consider sharing belts only if you are certain that you won’t need more before you transition to trains.
Consider building on both sides of the bus to shorten it. If you do, add new belts on the outer sides as you go. Additionally leave enough room for ~20 extra belts that you can feed in from the beginning or mix in some spaghetti.
Don’t build in that “4 belts, 2 space” pattern like you did in vanilla. Instead be creative. You don’t need any space between your belts at all. Learn to love the long underground belts.

Hand-Feeding

It is totally feasible to feed some builds by hand, especially if you plan to transition to trains as early as possible. Best choices for early hand-feeding are your first batch of electronic circuits, the final steps for trains, cDNA and cottongut breeding. But you can hand-feed as much as you like. Just consider that it’s easy to keep watch over a single or a handful of chests and refill when empty. It will become more painful the more you add. If important parts of your factory are standing still for a long time because you forgot to hand-feed, you have probably overdone it.

If you know what you are going to hand-feed in the future, I suggest you add limited chests at the production site of those items. This is a cheap solution that saves you a lot of time running around, picking up items from belts.

Mix

Why not have everything at the same time? You can have dedicated builds to smelt the ores into metals and to process coal/tar. Feed those processed materials into a bus. Remember, how in vanilla most players produce copper cables inside the build for green circuits or red circuits instead of belting them? Extend that thought to more complex recipe chains. If you use the default main bus layout to build electronic circuits, that part alone easily covers a few hundred tiles (which you need to walk along every time). Instead you can build it very compact in 30 tiles width or less. It won’t be expandable, but if you don’t overbuild your factory it will be enough until you transition to trains. Again, cDNA is another example where it makes sense to deviate from the default main bus layout. You only need a handful of cDNA until very much later in the game. There is no need for it to be on the bus.

Transport Drones

I’ve seen a few players using the Transport Drones mod, which allows you to build a many-to-many delivery network, just like trains, but a lot earlier. Those factories normally look unnaturally clean for Py and kind of trivialize the challenge to properly route the large amount of different items and fluids that PyMods introduce. I haven’t tried it, but those players seemed to have a lot of fun. Feel free to try it, but you should know that you’ll miss some of the challenges. Also I have heard that the drones do not scale ideally into the late game and you’re still forced to transition to trains at some point.

Automation Science: Towards Electronic Circuits

Priorities

There really isn’t any best order for your progression, but your decisions will have consequences that you have to accept.

Go for automated wood if you want to minimize your woodcutting trips – or maybe you already cut down so many trees that this is no priority to you.

Go for ash disposal if you don’t want to amass chests full of ash everywhere in your factory – or don’t dispose of ash at all. The high stack size does help if you want to be lazy.

Go for moondrops so you don’t have to wait for them later. Or do them late because you don’t need a single one before reaching circuits.

Go for better iron processing to reduce that iron bottleneck – or use the simple recipe for a long time because it’s just so simple.

Coal Processing

This very early technology allows you to convert raw coal into coke, tar and coal gas. You’ll need the coal gas for mining aluminum. Tar processing is a complex chain on its own. Don’t think you’re doing this to upgrade your solid fuel. For every 1MJ of raw coal you only get back 0.3MJ of coke. Most of the energy is transferred into the fluids, while the coke will be used very soon as ingredients in other recipes. Don’t use coke for its fuel value in mining drills, furnaces or boilers – that’s a waste when raw coal is so easy to come by. By the way, you should convert the iron oxide into some extra iron plates. There is no other use for iron oxide for a very long time.

Early Power

You will need to scale up your power generation. Steel processing gives access to early wind turbines. They are not the most powerful and require fish which is kind of limited at the beginning – the nearest lake might be far away. I still recommend building a few and supplementing with power from steam, it saves you quite a bit of coal (and ash you don’t need to get rid of). Remember to keep enough fish for later to make them breed.

Kerogen

The kerogen processing technology gives you access to converting kerogen into shale oil. This allows you to get rid of your kerogen surplus before it stresses your storage capabilities. Shale oil and its products become a lot more useful with the next tech after electronic circuits. Feel free to get rid of your kerogen, you’ll still have enough when you need it. Or you just put it into boilers for now.

Ash

Start to get rid of your ash as early as possible. The solid separator costs a lot of steel. Make use of it by building it early and letting it run for a long time. When you start early enough a single building will give you enough lead and zinc for a trickle of electronic circuits before setting up those outposts. It will not be enough to skip these outposts completely, though.

Tar processing

Most importantly: Have fun with the pipes.

There is no unambiguous separation into main product and byproducts. Early on you will be mainly interested in the creosote. When you start mining zinc you’ll need lots of aromatics. A lot later you will use the anthracene oil for rubber and produce organic solvent from naphtalene oil and carbolic oil.

There is no way for you to generate all fluids in the amount you need them at all times. I suggest deciding on your main product at any given time, and voiding an excess of all other fluids. Early on this means voiding most of the output. Of course you can also fill tanks with a small buffer.

This whole process is very hungry for steam. Even using the coke from pitch does not satisfy the steam requirements. Later on (some time into the Py science pack) you can burn excess fluids to generate more steam than is needed.

However, you are not required to burn the coke for steam. You can use the coke for steel and other recipes while generating steam by burning raw coal. This might even be easier than trying to prioritize steam coming from coke over additional steam coming from raw coal. Do what you think is best and will deadlock the least.

Glass

Some players struggle to power their glassworks which require a liquid fuel. Tar and coal gas are the earliest liquid fuels available. However they don’t have a high fuel value and it’s not trivial to balance them. After circuits you’ll gain access to underflow valves and overflow valves which allow you to control the flow of fluids. Before that you must make ends meet.

The most simple (and least automated) solution to power your glassworks is to add large tanks (lots of pipes are the best you get at that point) for both fluids and swap between them manually.

Alternatively you can use a tailings pond for storing an enormous amount of tar. However, you will need a pump to get it out again, and if you make the tailings pond overflow it will disgrace your factory – not to mention that it’s huge. With tar stored away you can use the coal gas exclusively to power your glassworks.

Another simple solution is to build two sets of glassworks, one for each liquid fuel. The buildings are not that expensive. The usage of liquid fuels will balance itself automatically.

Of course you could also try to use excess fluids from tar processing. However this makes things even more complicated, not easier. I recommend not to waste time with it.

Better Liquid Fuels

If you wait a bit before you start processing quartz into glass, more options open up. If you want to start with coal gas and tar, you still should upgrade to one of these at the first possible moment, they are just better.

You can process coke into acetylene, which provides a decent fuel value and doesn’t produce any usable byproducts. Slaked lime has no use until very much later, you should put all of it into a sinkhole and never think about it again. My personal favorite.

You can process excess coal gas into syngas. The required technology is after electronic circuits, but you don’t actually need those. When you do this you end up with more precious tar, and the syngas you get out has more than twice the fuel value as the coal gas you put in. Win-Win.

You can use shale oil from voiding kerogen in the early game, but later on you probably want to process that into further different products.

You can also use all those fluids from processing tar and shale oil, some of which you don’t have any other use for yet. Personally I’m not a fan of that. Before valves it’s almost impossible to balance, and even after valves it’s a nightmare. After intermetallics you can convert these liquids into steam in oil burners, which allow you to process tar and kerogen without any external steam. However, it is feasible to cover all your liquid fuel needs by using gasoline.

Abusing Fluid Mechanics

If you run your coal gas to your mining drills and continue with pipes (not other buildings) after them, the coal gas will flow into the mining drills and only come out the other side if it’s too much for mining. This makes it possible to overflow into a gas vent or route excess coal gas to your glassworks. The same works for steam engines, though venting steam might not be your best option when you need so much of it.

Glassworks have two pipe connections for the liquid fuel, and it’s even a pass-through connection. This allows you to build the two required glassworks directly next to each other and still have two pipe connections in total for the fuel. Pass one fuel from one side, pass the other fuel from the other side. If the game prevents you from connecting pipes with two different fluids, temporarily rotate an underground pipe to trick the game. This setup normally doesn’t get stuck because the fluidboxes of the glasswork buildings are “below ground” just like the previous trick with the mining drills.

When fluid is in a pipe next to a building, the building will grab most of it before it flows further. Build a single long pipe with buildings in a specific order (in contrast to a star-shaped fluid network) to help prioritizing usage of a fluid.

You can abuse gas vents and sinkholes as tanks. For example, you can store tar in a gas vent. If you did this by accident and your whole factory slowly crawls to a halt, you will swear and replace it immediately with a sinkhole, because obviously, who would ever void tar in a gas vent? However, if you did this on purpose, there might come a time when you simply rotate your gas vent and pump out that sweet tar. This way you have some kind of buffer without using real tanks. However, if it’s full it will also block that part of your factory, instead of voiding the liquid – and it does need manual care. The more thrilling/crazy alternative is to buffer in the correct void building.

Alien Life

When you place a building to produce seaweed, moss, sap, moondrop or logs, it is “disabled by script” until you put at least one module of the correct type into it. The normal situation is that you have a special/complex/expensive way to make the first one (or first few) of a species, then you let it breed using an easier and less expensive recipe chain. This process is very slow in the beginning and will become faster as you’ll get more and more modules. Finally your building is fully equipped with modules and can start the actual production.

You’ll find your first seaweed in your starting lake. The first moss comes (at a small chance) from mining those annoying rocks you always hit when driving around in your car. For your first sap tree you need to collect 15 sap from mining trees (also just a very small chance) and process them. The first tree you can simply craft once you have all the ingredients. The first moondrop is produced by a more complex recipe using petri dishes. In comparison to later species it’s still very cheap. You’ll learn a few lessons in the process of creating life, which you can use for later:

If you want to save on resources you should calculate exactly how often you need to craft the expensive recipe. You can trade more resource usage for a faster upscaling.

For some species a single craft is not enough to start breeding. You should calculate your minimal needs before starting the whole process.

It’s easy enough to hand feed the special first recipe. You won’t need it after some time and every automation will be wasted effort soon.

Ore processing chains

You gain access to an improved iron processing chain very early. When upgrading ore processing chains the first part very often stays the same, but additional steps are added near the end. Therefore I recommend building your ore processing builds for a specific amount of input. When you gain access to better recipes, just add the additional steps at the end for improved output without adjustments to the ore mining, the production of the mining fluid, or the start of the processing chain.

Iron might be the only ore worth mining a full yellow belt early on, this will produce 1.875 plates per second before the upgrade and 3 plates per second afterwards. Consider mining a second belt only if you use all of it, or to feed steel.

Also, somewhere around this time your starter iron ore patch might run out. Start mining an additional iron patch immediately. Without iron your factory will stop growing. There is no reason to wait, unless you can safely reach the Py science pack and research electric miners. This saves you from transporting coal/ash to/from your ore patch.

The first additional metals (tin, aluminum, lead and zinc) don’t bring anything new or exciting. Don’t try to mine a full yellow belt of ore (or even plates), the mining fluids aren’t cheap. Everything else is kind of standard.

Circuits, Finally

The building costs are cruel. You need to set up a part of the build to be able to craft the last building. And it’s not cheap, either.

You can hand feed parts of the build for your first circuits, which makes sense if you bring piles of tin, lead or zinc by car from far away outposts. Personally, I’d suggest automating at least partially so that you can drop resources into one dedicated chest each, and circuits will be produced.

This will be one of your most complex builds early on. Do you feel that sense of achievement after producing your first electronic circuits? As a reward you gain access to splitters. And valves for better pipe control. And radars. Use them wisely. They are costly.

Interlude: to Void or Not to Void

If PyMods is too easy for you, you can restrict yourself to not voiding anything (or play PyHardMode) – this involves gas vents and sinkholes, as well as the burner you’ll get soon. Instead of voiding you will prioritize byproducts in your factory or get rid of them using less efficient recipes. However, I do not recommend this for your first game – the game is already difficult enough as is. PyHardMode introduces some extra recipes to allow progression without voiding or huge storage areas. Those recipes are not present in normal PyMods, so you need to decide on exceptions you allow yourself, like the slaked lime from making acetylene.

In my personal opinion it’s much more sensible to use voiding as a tool to make sure that your factory will run continuously. Use a combination of overflow valve (which you just gained access to) and gas vent or sinkhole to get rid of excess fluids easily. Of course you can get fancy using a bunch of underflow and overflow valves as well as wired pumps to prioritize your entire fluid production. You might have fun doing so.

I know, I know, it always hurts to destroy stuff you have worked so hard for. But sometimes it’s just easier to throw it away and produce again where it’s needed, instead of transporting it across your entire factory. It also simplifies your planning. For my head it’s easy to understand when a specific part of my factory produces up to 132/s tar and 151/s syngas and another part produces up to 67/s tar and 108/s coal gas. In contrast, when my factory produces up to 264/s tar and 302/s syngas and 216/s coal gas, but not all of that at the same time, and only if the coke and iron plates don’t back up, I just don’t know when I need to upgrade. I need to look at how my factory is working and decide based on the fluid level of tanks or other machines starving. Raw coal is just so cheap that I don’t care in this instance.

Sometimes it makes sense to set up a small buffer to counteract fluctuations in production or to have something available when you need it. But normally it’s not worth it to store “everything” until you need it. At the time you need it, the existing amount of stored byproducts is gone in a few hours and you need to build large-scale production anyway. If you feel better, store one tank or chest and void the rest.

Another aspect: If you do not void excess items and instead store them in chests, you will have a more difficult time transitioning to trains. Unless you leave your old factory untouched forever – but then you have effectively voided it as well.

Notable exceptions: Brains will become very valuable at the end of Py science pack 2 with vatbrain research. Don’t burn or compost them! Your byproduct lard from Auog slaughtering helps a bit and you might store it. When you sort your ash and end up with a lot of soot it’s a valid choice to start converting that to silver or gold and store for later – it’s a lot more compact than the soot and very valuable in the future.

Automation Science: Towards Py Science Pack

Duralumin

Your next milestone is duralumin, which (besides being used for buildings) gives you access to faster inserters – you probably already know from building your factory where you want to upgrade and where that would just be wasting resources. Now might be a good time to scale up aluminum production a bit – but not too much before gaining better recipes, as always.

Vrauks

After that you will experience the joy of vrauks. You will soon see that one building per recipe is not enough here. You also need to increase moss production to match its consumption.

Latex

With slaughtering vrauks for their formic acid it’s pretty straightforward to produce latex. But what to do with all the rest? Chitin is useless for a very long time. Meat and guts can be used soon when mining nexelit. Brains will become really valuable in the future and should go into a (huge) chest.

And then you basically have everything you need for producing your first Py science packs. Congratulations, you have reached the first “real” science pack. Automation science packs feel like a tutorial in comparison.

Caravans

There is a technology very late at automation science, that allows you to build caravans which transport items between special buildings and to program their movements – similar to trains. If you want to try out something new, give them a go. In my personal opinion it’s not worth the effort. The time you’ll invest into understanding how to use them (and what is blocking their route) is better put into normal progress. Also they aren’t exactly cheap and it’s difficult to calculate how many you are going to need. Depending on the state of your factory they might be a good choice for handling outposts that are very far away or for bringing resources to a place where you didn’t leave enough room for the required belts. They are affected by the speed bonus of tiles, just like your character.

Interlude: T.U.R.D.

By now you might have seen those very expensive technologies. You can find the full list of those and detailed information about their effects in the Py codex. After researching you can choose one of the available options. There are ways to reset your choice, but not before the chemical science pack, and only limited and at a steep price. So choose wisely.

In general there are no “best” and “worst” options, it all depends on your factory and your playstyle.

Some options reduce the “cost” of things, some options add alternative ways of making things, some options reduce the logistic effort to make things, some options add “free” speed or productivity, some options also have negative side effects. Some options are only relevant in a certain stage of the game.

Here are my personal thoughts about the early technology upgrades, skip if you don’t want to be spoiled:

Fast wood forestry upgrade: “Dry storage” improves the ratio of wood to fiber. To make fiber you’ll soon switch to kicalk, so the first part is nullified, but the improved ratio of fiber to raw fiber applies to fiber from kicalk as well. So it stays useful throughout the whole game. “Selective cutting heads” adds 5% extra wood production. You’re going to need a lot of wood for the whole game, but it’s also easy to make. Unless using loaders you probably can’t utilize the reduced crafting time, the amount of required inserters for wood output is crazy. Overall not a bad choice. “Internal burner” reduces ash consumption, but early on you have plenty of ash and later on it’s often not worth using the ash recipes, because ash is used for other products and you give up wood production without external inputs.

Moondrop upgrade: “Copper addition” might be the best option, but it forces you to bring copper ore to moondrop production. You basically give up on making moondrop on-site wherever it’s needed. “Moon light” gives you a completely different way to make methane. Methane from moondrop normally is a bit bulky to build, this cuts down the space requirement, but lamps aren’t cheap early on. “Carbon capture” might be the worst option by pure numbers. The energy cost of all moondrop greenhouses is increased forever, and in logistic science you can make carbon dioxide pretty cheap from biomass. However, adding a few moondrop greenhouses for carbon dioxide is extremely simple, and before the biomass recipe you’d otherwise need to bring coke wherever you need carbon dioxide. Definitely more useful in the early game.

Interlude: Full Automation

Factorio is all about automation. PyMods is no different. Automate everything! Feed all items and fluids into the proper buildings. Make sure that your production does not stop from blocked byproducts – including ash. Protect your power plants from brownouts. Include appropriately sized buffers. Build a mall to not waste time with handcrafting.

But that’s just half the truth. The other half is that you will gain access to better recipes which make some of your existing builds obsolete. No matter how perfect you have built your factory, you will want to demolish parts of it at some point. And don’t forget: Perfect is the enemy of good.

A quick and dirty build that allows you to progress quickly, is worth a lot. Why build that inserter-splitter abomination when you could just bee-line electronic circuits to build a real splitter? You’ll need only a limited amount of some products. Like your first vrauks. If you automate too much, you will be wasting time and resources that you could have spent in better ways.

In the end you have to decide for yourself, what parts are better automated, and what parts aren’t worth it. There is no wrong way to play PyMods. But as always, you have to accept the consequences of your decisions.

Py Science: Look at All Those Toys

You can research a lot of exciting technology. Just like before: research as you build, not faster. This makes it a bit easier to keep track of what you already have and what you still need to build. Here are some ideas for your next steps, in an order of your choice.

Automation Science

You might have noticed that the new technologies cost twice the amount of automation science packs, compared to Py science packs. If you want to continue researching at the same pace after reaching a new science pack, you need to upgrade production of all the previous science packs. Feel free to defer this step a bit if you have built up a large buffer.

Burner

The burner is perfect to get rid of excess items. It also gives you a very simple solution to your ash problem. You can’t use it to get rid of fuel, though. For that you need to use boilers, vent the steam and burn the ash. Or use it for power production and vent just the excess steam.

Electric Mining Drill

You can finally replace your burner mining drills. But be warned, they still need the same amount of energy per mined ore (double the speed, double the power cost). Unfortunately it is less efficient to convert fuel to power than to use fuel directly in the mining drill. Your power network will very likely struggle, so you need to upgrade it. Decide for yourself whether it’s worth upgrading existing outposts or to use your shiny ashless drills only for new outposts.

Gas Furnace

You need more stone furnaces but didn’t leave enough space? Take a look at the gas furnace. Same small footprint, 4x speed, no need for fuel/ash inserters, pass-through pipes for liquid fuel. They are supposed to be an in-place upgrade for exactly this scenario.

Geothermal Power

In the beginning it’s worth it to exploit every single resource of geothermal water you can find (probably not many, they are very scarce). It provides hassle-free energy without ash problems and the resource nodes are so rich that they basically last forever. The buildings aren’t even exceptionally expensive. It’s also very easy to add brownout protection.

Very likely though, you’ll still need to burn coal in boilers. The huge power upgrade comes a bit later. If you’ve followed my advice of not overbuilding, one or two geothermal power plants cover most or even all of your power needs for quite some time.

Improved Ore Processing

Produce more plates from the same amount of ore (and mining fluid) – why not?

Hot Air

Produce 50% more glassware by adding a bit of hot air. Sounds like a good deal. If you knew this before you might have built less vrauk paddocks. It doesn’t matter. Store excess latex in a chest, you’re going to need it soon for rubber.

Nexelit

You can produce your nexelit ore from tar quenching. This doesn’t look very efficient, but it gives you enough until logistic science when you will have lots of tailings from ore processing.

The other way is to mine it using cute little dinosaurs, the production is scripted so it might not appear in all planning tools. They eat the remains of your slaughtering, so they are basically free. If you have a nexelit ore patch nearby, give it a go. It’s not that difficult to figure out how they work, however the details can be tricky.

Consider using only a single type of food. The buildings have two ingredient slots, but it’s difficult to set up in a way that the creatures are always using the best available food.

Build tiles for faster walking speed on top of the ore patch. Not very thematic, but it does help.

Intermetallics

Your next big milestone is intermetallics, after doing the antimony chain. Go for it whenever you feel ready. Don’t overbuild it though, you need it “only” for growing the base (for now). You are rewarded with a multitude of new possibilities.

Upgrade your armor with your first intermetallics for an increased inventory.
Upgrade your iron and aluminum production.

Build oil burners where you have excess liquid fuel, but a need for more steam. You might even replace existing coal-fed boilers to reduce your ash problem.

Upgrade your burner assembling machines. The MK 2 burner is faster and accepts more fuel options (canistered liquid fuel), the automated factory is expensive, huge, and is your best reason to justify another power plant expansion.

You can also start to improve your vrauk modules. Like for your initial modules, you need to use an expensive recipe for your first pair of vrauk (which is very luck driven), afterwards they become easier to reproduce. However, they aren’t really needed until you need to upscale intensively or your hardware becomes a bottleneck.

Interlude: Train Requirements

First of all, it is possible to finish PyMods without a train network. I have seen pictures of a gigantic PyAL main bus all the way to the end. If you’re not building too big, one large bot network is another alternative. Bots are ideal for trace amounts of many items. Unfortunately PyMods also require huge amounts of other items.

I’m not sure whether it’s possible for those types of factories to finish PyAE. Later research in PyAE got a lot more expensive compared to PyAL times, so it might be possible that these approaches are no longer feasible.

Most players transition to trains at some point in the game, and for good reasons.

Once you have researched trains and have rebuilt your factory on the train network, you will be at a point that feels familiar – almost similar to vanilla or other overhaul mods. Sure, the recipe chains are a lot more complex, but in general you will have “small” dedicated sub factories, all interconnected by trains. But how do you get there?

Let’s open the tech tree and look around for all the stuff you normally need or want for your train network:

Rails, signals and stations: Easily available, but you’ll need lots of solder for rails. You gain access to better lead/tin/solder recipes at the beginning of the logistic science pack.
Trains and wagons: Available after intermetallics. They aren’t cheap though. And they require fish oil. I recommend you automate your fish, which requires a lot of research – the fish buildings themselves are easy, though.
Big electric poles along the rails: Needs niobium, which is the first milestone after the logistic science pack.
Medium electric poles for your stations: Available, but needs chromium which isn’t required for anything else that early. Of course you can use small electric poles, but they probably have too little range for your preferred station design.
Combinators for your stations: Available after batteries, which requires you to build the part of the tech tree that you researched for automated fish but didn’t need to build yet.
Lots of inserters: Easily available, but inserter speed is very limited. 12 yellow inserters move a bit less than a yellow belt. Fast inserters need niobium as well. However, if you followed my advice of not overbuilding there aren’t many resources that you need to transport in those quantities.
Chests/warehouses: Easily available.
Construction bots and personal roboport: Available after batteries.
Water: Pumpjacks for easy access to water are available early in the logistic science pack. Not really needed, but they come in handy.
Landfill: Easily available. Just set up a single machine very early and you’ll have enough when you need it – unless you decide to landfill entire oceans.
Cliff explosives: This will likely be the last item from this list that you’ll get. It requires quite an amount of logistic science packs for research. Producing them is rather simple, though.
Power: If you scale up during the train network transition your power demand will spike. Coal power plants look like the best solution, but those come very late at the Py1 science pack.
Mall: Likewise you’ll need lots of buildings when scaling up. Having a bot mall does help – long term there aren’t any real alternatives. But your current mall can probably serve you for another while. Logistic bots and requester chests are available after niobium.
Mods: Make sure to look up any requirements for the train mods you intend to use.

Rebuilding your entire factory on the train network can take as much time as you spent up to that point. Therefore you really need to think about the best time for it, because you won’t make much “real” progress in that phase. It’s really up to you when you do that transition. If you transition too early you won’t have access to your final infrastructure. If you transition too late the effort of transitioning is huge.

The ideal time depends a lot on the mods you use, your map, your current progress and your playstyle. So I can’t give you a neutral suggestion. You’ll have to weigh the pros and cons yourself.

My own first train was a single line of rails to connect my salt mine to my planned coal power plants, some time before my first logistic science pack. I did not build any kind of rail grid at that point. The locomotive and wagons were handcrafted. The stations were ugly. Doesn’t sound great, but the alternative was to run another long belt across the entire map – so close before trains.

I continued with my main bus until I had 6 logistic science packs per minute. Then I started my transition to trains, including upscaling. 50 hours later I had most stuff on trains and demolished most of my bus. In the meantime I was able to continue research, slowly but steady.

I will continue with some advice on how to reach logistic science packs and niobium, and follow with more chapters about trains. Skip ahead in case you start your transition to trains early.

Py Science: Mechanical Parts

Rubber

Think about what to do with the steam output. Vent it, convert it to electricity, or feed it to other machines. However, the steam is a bit cooler and not every recipe accepts it. You should do some investigation before passing that cold steam into your steam pipe monolith and your whole factory suddenly stops.

Apart from this, rubber doesn’t have many surprises. As always, don’t overbuild. You do need a good amount, however you’ll also get better recipes soon.

Beware of the new recipe for rubber stoppers. You can craft rubber stoppers from rubber, but right now that does not reduce the latex cost and instead only adds titanium and aromatics as ingredients. Wait until your first improved rubber recipe that will reduce latex cost, unless you want to get rid of your coal spaghetti belt right now.

cDNA

You’ll need plasmids for logistic science packs, the rest is enough to hand feed. You only need a very limited amount of it to produce the first modules of a few new species. Even your plasmid production might be just temporary if you decide to rebuild it next to your science production later.

Auogs

At first you only need manure from your auogs. But one of the last steps of logistic science packs requires you to slaughter them. Just set them up on the final scale to produce modules for your manure build.

Skip the auog food for now. It’s not really worth it at the beginning and just complicates your setup.

Batteries

Crafting batteries is a straightforward process. Replace the copper zinc batteries in simple circuit boards with the real batteries for a much better yield. You won’t need the copper zinc batteries for anything else in the future.

You now have access to construction bots and personal roboports. Your current armor should be large enough to hold 3 roboports and 1 generator. The roboports have a large internal buffer, you won’t need any other batteries in your armor (even if you can use the normal batteries in the armor).

The bots are a bit slow, but if you help by building large straight segments of belt or rail by hand, the bots will finish the rest quite fast.

You also have access to combinators now. Use them if required.

Fiberboards

Having enough auog manure around gives you access to an improved recipe for formica. If you find yourself in dire need of circuits, scale them up using this new recipe.

Mechanical Parts

Have fun routing belts with that huge amount of different ingredients. Or just hand feed to create the first mechanical parts needed by the next tier of buildings.

More Energy

With mechanical parts you gain access to a lot of new options for power generation. If your power network is sufficient for the moment, feel free to defer this upgrade.

All options have some pros and cons. Your best option for highly scalable power, that you will probably use for quite some time, is the coal power plant. The downside: You need tons of salt to fill the internal molten salt loop. And the buildings aren’t cheap.

With more power you can finally dare to use electric boilers that you researched along the way.

Py Science: Towards Logistic Science Pack

Ralesia

If you have succeeded in setting up auogs, this shouldn’t give you any trouble. Just make sure to have enough simple circuits boards available, making your first few ralesia isn’t cheap.

Cottonguts

The lab rats are the first species that works a bit differently. The building modules are separate from your main product. This means you need to set up some infrastructure to breed enough building modules. Hand feed the module production if you like to – once you have enough modules for your intended science production you won’t need more modules for a long time.

Logistic Science Packs

Crafting these involves many steps, but every single one is simple on its own. Your main input for animal samples will be coming from auogs. Find out which animal part is the bottleneck. Maybe you have a bit of it lying around in a chest somewhere to supplement. In theory you could also slaughter cottonguts, but these are too expensive for slaughtering, in my opinion.

Again you end up with a lot of unused body parts. Store the brains. Lard is also worth putting into a chest. Do with the rest whatever you prefer.

Interlude: Trains in PyMods

Before actually using trains it might be a good idea to think about the differences from vanilla. You don’t want to be surprised after several hundred hours and find out that you have to redesign all your existing stations, do you?

Trains are available in four levels. The first level is approximately what you know from vanilla, just with reduced stats, and no speed or acceleration boosts from better fuel. For example, the cargo wagon holds only 20 stacks of items. And of course, if you put in a fuel that produces ash, you have to deal with that.

Later locomotives are a lot faster, but need different fuel. The second one runs on the fuel canisters you already know from antimony drills. The last two use special batteries that you can recharge using special recipes.

Later wagons have higher capacity, although that might not be obvious. The second cargo wagon for example holds the same 20 stacks of items. However, the second and fourth wagons are smaller. Two small wagons have exactly the same length as one normal wagon.

You can stay at lower levels of locomotives forever, if you don’t want to change your fuel and don’t care about speed. You can also mix different locomotives and wagons, if you don’t want to design stations for the smaller wagons and don’t care about mismatched graphics. In these cases you can ignore some suggestions and thoughts.

There is one change from vanilla worth mentioning, that will affect your rail network. By now you are already aware that some recipes need a lot of different ingredients, but you haven’t seen the worst yet. Although it’s a bit early, look at how to make complex circuit boards (red circuits) and all its parts. It’s not unlikely that you’ll need 30-50 different ingredients, depending on how much you make on-site. Even when you use mods that allow multi-item requester stations, this is a large number. Maybe it’s too much traffic for a single station – or too many items to attach enough belts to your warehouse. And then there are fluids. Most players don’t want to deal with multi-fluid requester stations because of their tendency to jam. In case you decide to go that route I hope you know what you’re doing, and have also considered the smaller wagons that will be available later.

Regarding mods: I suggest having experience with whatever mods you’re planning to use. Experimenting with a train mod because it sounds fun or because you think it will fit your needs can be dangerous – you better do that on top of vanilla. If your plans don’t work out as intended, you’ll probably quit because it’s too much work to redo your whole train network. On the other hand, using the same set of mods over and over again might reduce your fun. It’s entirely your call.

With all this knowledge, maybe you want to scrap the plan for your future rail network and start from scratch.

Logistic Science: More Toys

Upgrades

There are so many upgrades, which come in handy for upscaling your factory. Iron and steel give a huge productivity boost. Tin, lead and solder help you expand your rail network. You just need to decide whether to upgrade before, during or after your transition to trains.

There is also technology that gives you improved recipes for logs, which you might want at some point.

Toolbelt

Who can say “no” to more inventory slots?

Mining Productivity

Would you ever say no?

Nitrogen

Gives you a less energy-intensive way to create oxygen. Oxygen is pretty important for all the new metal smelting.

Interlude: A Proper Mall

When do you want to build a proper mall? And what even is proper?

You are probably already aware of the sticks that Pyanodos has thrown between your legs.

The cute little assembling machines need fuel, but the automated factories are huge and need some intermetallics and fish oil.

Most buildings require a huge amount of different ingredients, so you either get creative with belt routing, introduce some delicious sushi or simply wait for logistic bots.

There are so many different buildings and some are so expensive that your mall will eat all your resources for many hours, just to craft a few of everything. You can get creative with circuits or scale up your production, but if you scale up before transitioning to trains you might have to do twice the work.

By the way: Check the mod settings, you can change the multiplier used for building ingredients when “copy-pasting” from assembler to requester chest. And don’t forget to limit your chests or output inserters.

The dimensions of your mall will be huge. Including higher level infrastructure you need literally hundreds of ingredients and a good amount of space for all the buildings.

You can integrate your mall into a single huge construction bot network, but the distances are huge and the bots are slow. Do you want to wait for the construction bots or build everything yourself? In the latter case you have to pick up all the buildings from their chests, which is tedious before logistic bots.

When and how you build your mall is up to you. I just want to emphasize: It does help to have one.

Logistic Science: Niobium and Beyond

Drill Heads

Set up a trickle of drill heads. Personally I prefer the recipe without chromium, but for the amount you’re going to need at the moment it doesn’t really matter. Store them in a chest and carry them to your niobium mine once everything is set up. Belting those drill heads is not worth the effort at the moment.

Nichrome

Set up a trickle of nichrome, you will need it later for logistic bots and cliff explosives.

Niobium

The niobium chain is long, but free of loops. Don’t overbuild. Neither do you need that much niobium, nor do you have that much salt available at the moment.

For refined syngas I suggest investing a few more science packs into an easier recipe, making refined syngas from methanol. This even provides you free acid gas – store all of it for your first cliff explosives. This allows you to defer regular sulfur mining a bit.

Victory

Not really, but having access to niobium pipes, big electric poles and fast inserters feels great. Finally you can also build a proper mall. Do you already know how far the shiny underground pipes reach?

Interlude: Trains in theory

In case you haven’t started thinking about trains yet, now might be a good time. Unless you have skipped some of the previous steps you have everything available for a “smooth” transition to a global rail network, it won’t get any better soon.

As always in factorio, there is no right or wrong. You just have to accept the consequences of your decisions. Unfortunately, if you make a mistake now you might not immediately recognize it, and it can be a pain to correct that mistake later. So you better give enough thought to this topic.

First things first – train size: Most players choose 1-1 or 1-2 trains. If you choose 1-1 just because you don’t want to balance wagon loading and unloading, think twice. When (and if) upgrading to the next level of trains, with those smaller wagons, you need to add a balancer. As you are probably already aware, there are some items and fluids in PyMods that you need in large quantities; 1-2 trains can help with that. There is rarely a need to go even higher, but that can alternatively be addressed by more trains and more stations. On the other hand there are items where 1-2 trains already seem too large. Of course you can use different train sizes for each item, but that makes it more difficult to create station blueprints. And since your signaling needs to consider your largest trains, it will not be the most efficient for your smaller trains (which will be in the majority). You can also use double-headed trains to make your stations smaller, but they come with their own set of disadvantages. If in doubt, just use simple 1-2 trains.

Similarly important – structure: Do you prefer a regular design or embrace the chaos – or something in between? I assume you know the pros and cons of those options and will instead elaborate on how they fit into the PyMods experience.

City blocks – no matter whether squares, bricks or hexagons – suffer from having homogenous size. If you go too small you will have a hard time fitting larger builds. If you go too large you will waste lots of space for smaller builds. Take a good look at your current iron, seaweed, vrauks and circuit production, imagine their space and station requirements after scaling up, and make sure that your blocks will be able to accommodate all of that. You need to support large chains with many different buildings and tons of input, as well as builds with high throughput of some items, as well as builds with a large number of huge buildings – and everything in between.

As a compromise between order and chaos consider combining multiple adjacent blocks into one large block on demand. You could also do the opposite and have huge blocks (I’ve seen up to 18×18 chunks) that you use for multiple sub factories on demand.

Another compromise between order and full chaos is to separate your factory into areas, each with a separate main bus. For example, have one area where all the ore processing happens, have one area where alien life can flourish, have one for chemistry, and so on.

In my opinion one of the most interesting decisions you will make in PyMods (and have already made several times before trains) is how to separate different parts of your factory. As an example, most players instinctively have all iron processing in one place. Ore goes in, plates go out. But there are so many nuances to it: Do you build all of it next to the ore patch or do you transport the iron ore over long distances? Do you cast your iron plates as part of your iron processing, or do you move molten iron to a central casting place? Do you build a separate factory for molten steel or do you steal some of your molten iron you already have? How will you get iron ore dust that you need for yellowcake later? Will you try to use byproducts like stone or gravel? Do you leave enough space to add more buildings later or do you create another iron processing factory somewhere else when you need more?

When making these decisions it is important to consider several factors and weigh them in your own personal way. How difficult is it to make some ingredients (number of steps, number of ingredients, required space for buildings)? How “dense” are items (the 1 copper plate makes 2 copper cables argument)? What throughput do you expect (both very low and very high throughput have their own issues)? In how many builds do you need an item? Are there other builds with similar input/output? Will you get better recipes (and when) and how does that impact your current situation?

Ideally your mod selection, map settings, playstyle and train network all fit nicely together.

Fueling trains: To some players, fueling trains is one of the more annoying aspects in vanilla. Do you bring the fuel to the trains or the trains to the fuel? Do you use bots to help you? In PyMods these questions are equally important, but the problem is even more complex due to large distances, slow bots at the beginning, different fuel types and possible jamming of empty fuel canisters or batteries. Even if you use mods to help you with it, you need to make sure that you can somehow upgrade to faster trains and that the loop for canisters/batteries does not jam. If you aren’t sure and don’t want to get stuck later, test it in editor mode.

The stations themselves: If you’re using train mods you probably already have your battle-tested station design, but they might need adjustments for the smaller wagons. If you’re using just the tools given to you by PyMods you will be mostly throughput-limited by inserter speed. Don’t hesitate to put inserters on both sides of a wagon if necessary, use two rows of long-handed inserters if you don’t have fast inserters yet, or simply put down multiple stations for the same item. Don’t forget to build stackers and enough trains, so that the important inserters are always busy, you’ll likely want them for high-throughput items anyway.

If you like a consistent spacing between your stations, consider the amount of stations you are going to need.

Buffers: Don’t forget that a train network has huge buffers built-in. The belt from the producer to the loading station, chests at the loading station, the train itself, maybe multiple trains sitting in stackers, chests at the unloading station and the belt to the consumer. Don’t overdo it, especially before you have scaled up important resources as well as for products which are only produced in small quantities.

Instead, focus on a steady flow of items – it might even make sense to limit your wagon capacity so that the train can alternate between multiple consumers properly. The factory can’t grow if the last 10 hours of production sit in the buffer of one consumer, but the other consumers get nothing for another 10 hours. If you end up starting trains manually before they are full, consider reducing the amount per train.

How to get started: It depends on what you have done so far and how you have planned your rail network. I have seen several strategies. Here are a few ideas that might help you come up with your own.

Leave your old factory running and start from scratch. You can finish quite a bit of research this way.

Encircle your old factory in rails to share resources with your new factory.

Massively scale up as you rebuild your factory on the train network, just move existing buildings, or some middle ground.

Start with basics (coal, iron, copper) and work towards science packs, or do the exact opposite. Maybe even start with new stuff to continue making progress and only rebuild what is necessary.

Deconstruct your old factory bit by bit, as you rebuild it on the rail network, perform one huge deconstruction later or just leave it forever.

Start with rebuilding all the materials needed for your mall and don’t care about science packs at the beginning.

End your main bus with your bot mall. Just putting all required materials into passive provider chests gives you enough for a smooth start. Make sure to leave enough space and add rail stations as resources become available on the train network.

Logistic Science: Next Steps

Set up your arqads as early as possible. You need a queen, which you have to craft from a recipe giving you only a 1% chance for a queen. Even though you will have 1 queen in 100 crafts on average, you only have a 95% chance of having at least 1 queen in 250 crafts. If you’re having bad luck don’t become desperate – it will happen eventually. There is a TURD option for making queens directly. The research for it is quite extensive and making the queen the intended way is probably faster than doing that research. Plus, of course, you’re missing out on the other options. By the way, beware of the 5x queen dying rate for “Intentional colony collapse”. If you select this before having a good number of queens you might end up having to start at zero again.

Apart from this just follow the tech tree. If you’ve made it thus far, you can also make it to the end. Victory is just a few hundred hours away.

You’ll encounter more (and often better) recipes to make the stuff you already know. You need to scale up considerably, sometimes to absurd levels. Having access to higher levels of plants and animals does help but is not required with a few exceptions. You also need to raise additional creatures along the way.

Towards Py science pack 2 you mainly need to produce a bunch of different animals, but there are many great upgrades in the optional parts of the tech tree.

Py Science 2: Finally Some Progress

The large milestones towards chemical science are stainless steel and complex circuit boards (red circuits). The second tier of mechanical parts is almost easy in comparison, but electronics MK 02 are kind of expensive.

Productivity Modules

With red circuits and the better mechanical parts you can also make productivity modules. Just like in vanilla (before the megabase phase) they are too expensive to use everywhere. So use them wisely to make more productivity modules, and for making more of the really expensive stuff.

Some crazy people despise productivity modules and play without them. Of course it’s possible, but be warned. The balancing considers productivity modules and there are some longer chains that lose a lot of efficiency without it. For example, you won’t get new processing chains for niobium and molybdenum with better technology, but instead they get better by using more and better productivity modules.

A rough estimation: Not using productivity modules increases the price of space science packs by 10x. Are you ready for a science multiplier that kicks in at the phase of the game that involves a lot of upscaling anyway?

Vat-Brains

Unfortunately the labs themselves lack module slots, so you can’t get free productivity. However, there is a much better way. You can beacon productivity modules to your labs. The beacons are called vat-brain biocomputers and they require special cartridges to work. The effects of multiple vat-brain buildings stack, so you can boost your research speed by a lot. Up to 16 vat-brains can affect a single lab, considering the size of buildings and beacon range.

The “issue” with vat-brains is the required amount of brains and silver. It’s still easier to scale up those instead of scaling up production of all science packs so far, but they ain’t cheap.

One could probably write a Ph.D. thesis about the optimal vat-brain build. I’ll leave the details for you to figure out yourself and restrain myself to say that a large pattern of labs and vat-brains yields the best efficiency, but you must switch it on/off with a power switch.

And don’t forget the lab research speed upgrades, they basically improve your vat-brain cartridge efficiency.

Better Trains

Yay, trains are expensive again. And they need different fuel. And the small wagons don’t match your stations. Have fun or skip them.

By the way, if you wait two more science packs you get access to rocket fuel, a very cheap fuel for your MK 02 trains with some stat bonus. And no canister looping.

Miscellaneous

You finally gain access to stack inserters, and to the inserter capacity bonus upgrade. Just try to ignore the cost and don’t think about what else you could have researched with all those science packs.

Did you ever want to run faster without cheating? Try out the energy drinks. Unfortunately they have some undesired side effects on humans.

Don’t forget to upgrade your armor. It more than doubles the equipment grid and again increases your inventory size.

Chemical Science: Improved Infrastructure

Feel free to double your brain and silver production for the better vat-brain cartridges. And don’t forget the lab research speed upgrades.

Finally you unlock most of the MK 02 buildings. They look quite expensive, but the number of module slots also increases with MK levels, so over time you should at least upgrade the buildings with productivity modules for even more productivity bonus. And some buildings (atomizer, basic oxygen furnace) accept more fuel options. This should help in reducing the coal mountain going in and the ash mountain going out.

The biggest milestone on your way to the next science pack are the great alien samples that you need to produce the first of even more alien species.

Congratulations, you’re over the hump regarding UPS. Beacons allow you to drastically reduce the amount of moving parts in your factory. You likely can’t continue spamming more buildings forever and must switch to beaconed builds to keep the UPS in a range that is acceptable for you. The beacons are quite strong but require a bit of power, and you can’t spam them indefinitely. Take a look at the Py codex for more information.

You want to become a superhero? Take a look at the symbioses technology. Immunity to train damage, considerably increased inventory and instant mining might sound compelling to you.

Py Science 3: More, More, More

Is there really more to say? Just follow the tech tree and keep going. Start reducing your science pack goals even more, 1-3 science per minute might be enough if you have a high enough productivity bonus from vat-brains.

You should also look ahead a bit. Deluxe workers food requires MK 04 of some plants and animals. Don’t start these at the very end unless you believe in having a streak of luck.

Your mightiest enemies are burnout and UPS. So keep it slow, make steady progress and keep upgrading. Once you have Py science pack 4 you’re basically done, the rest is waiting for the research to happen and trying to reduce the waiting time by fixing bottlenecks.

Interlude: Don’t Get Confused

PyMods have changed a lot, both with the release of PyAE, but also afterwards. There is a lot of outdated information out there, so it makes sense to clear things up.

The early game is slow and needs waiting / speedup. No, this was the case with PyAL, but PyAE is a lot more balanced. Py is still a slow modpack, but you don’t need to speedup the game anymore, there is always more than enough to work on.

The first science pack is more complex than launching a rocket in vanilla. In PyAL automation science required rubber stoppers and basic substrate, basically what the Py science pack 1 is now. This meant that you could not make any research progress up to that point, didn’t have assembling machines or wood production for quite a while, and a few other consequences. The progression of PyAE is a lot smoother, but the statement is still kind of true. Py science pack 1 is more complex than launching a rocket in vanilla.

RSO mod is recommended. No, this was a thing with PyAL when more ore types were configured to be in the starting area. Non-overlapping ores were basically impossible to get without RSO. The starting area should look a lot cleaner now, and you need to explore earlier, but you also get an early car. Quite the contrary: Nowadays the downsides of using RSO outweigh its benefits: Too little coal, resources are extremely far away, geothermal/salt/sulfur are too easy.

Burner assembling machines have an ingredient limit. Early versions of PyAE had a limit for the small assembling machines, making them infeasible for building a mall. The limit was increased once and then completely removed.

There is no way to reset your TURD choices. In early versions you could only reset choices near the end of the game (practically not existent), now you get access to your first TURD reselection in chemical science. Search for “reselect” in the tech tree.

Factorio – Ultimate Guide to Pyanodons Mods

PyMods Guide

TLDR

Before Starting the Game

The Start: Towards Automation Science Packs

Automation Science: The Basics

Interlude: Having a Plan

Automation Science: Towards Electronic Circuits

Interlude: to Void or Not to Void

Automation Science: Towards Py Science Pack

Interlude: T.U.R.D.

Interlude: Full Automation

Py Science: Look at All Those Toys

Interlude: Train Requirements

Py Science: Mechanical Parts

Py Science: Towards Logistic Science Pack

Interlude: Trains in PyMods

Logistic Science: More Toys

Interlude: A Proper Mall

Logistic Science: Niobium and Beyond

Interlude: Trains in theory

Logistic Science: Next Steps

Py Science 2: Finally Some Progress

Chemical Science: Improved Infrastructure

Py Science 3: More, More, More

Interlude: Don’t Get Confused

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PyMods Guide

TLDR

Before Starting the Game

The Start: Towards Automation Science Packs

Automation Science: The Basics

Interlude: Having a Plan

Automation Science: Towards Electronic Circuits

Interlude: to Void or Not to Void

Automation Science: Towards Py Science Pack

Interlude: T.U.R.D.

Interlude: Full Automation

Py Science: Look at All Those Toys

Interlude: Train Requirements

Py Science: Mechanical Parts

Py Science: Towards Logistic Science Pack

Interlude: Trains in PyMods

Logistic Science: More Toys

Interlude: A Proper Mall

Logistic Science: Niobium and Beyond

Interlude: Trains in theory

Logistic Science: Next Steps

Py Science 2: Finally Some Progress

Chemical Science: Improved Infrastructure

Py Science 3: More, More, More

Interlude: Don’t Get Confused

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