Building in hats

Building in hats

Practical notes for your first base. None of this is enforced by the mod — it is just what the shape of the ground pushes you toward.

Start by looking, not building

Cells differ. Before committing to a spawn area, open the map and find a cluster of cells that sit well together — some neighbours share long edges, others meet at awkward points. A good starting cluster is worth walking for.

Think in cells, not in a bus

A main bus assumes you can run parallel lines indefinitely. You cannot. What works instead is treating each cell as a small factory with a job, and moving items between them.

That makes the awkward part the connections, which is where the mod puts the interesting decisions.

Crossing bands

• Underground belts and pipes tunnel under bands. This is the intended route and the main thing you will build.
• Rails are exempt and cross freely. Trains work normally — for anything at distance, rails are far less painful than belts.
• Power poles ignore the ground entirely. Power is never the problem.
• Bots fly over everything. Once you have logistics bots, a lot of the constraint softens — this is intended, and it arrives with normal progression.

What to blueprint

Blueprint the things that fit inside the largest square your settings allow (17×17 at the default). Those work everywhere:

• an assembler with its inserters and a short belt
• a splitter or balancer block
• a small power or radar block

Do not try to blueprint a whole cell. It will fit exactly one cell, and you have 884 other shapes to go.

Things that catch people out

• Mining drills need a clear 3×3. Ore under a band is not minable. Check before you plan a patch.
• Bands are walkable. They look like a wall and are not one. You can always get there.
• Reflected cells. About 1 in 8 cells is a mirror image, and no amount of rotation makes it match the others. This is a mathematical property of the tiling, not a bug — mirrored tiles are provably unavoidable.