It's beginning to look like a Factory

Ahhh, I love the smell of pollution in the morning. My steam engines are up and running, my mines are extracting those useful ores, and the angry biters are unable to stop all of it. There is a surprising amount of smoke already, and the mines look quite dirty. I love it. Time to start producing things besides mere pollution.

The bare bones of our production strategy

Here's the first small mass production area. All this setup will produce is circuits. Copper is brought up, loaded into one of factories that turn it into copper wire. Then another inserter takes that, along with iron to produce, one circuit. The unevenness between the factories that annoys my OCD? Copper cable needs to be produced in a 3:2 relationship to circuits. Eventually the circuits will exist on their own line to be brought to other factory lines. Right now, all the circuits end up in a chest for easy pickup as I'll use circuits in many recipes that I make myself.

15 furnaces to a side. Outside row has ore, inside row has coal, innermost has the finished plates

 Reminder: Raw materials come from the east, that runs into my furnaces, that run west to be made into more finished products. This whole bit will be expanded as resource consumption expands, but right now is more than enough for our small amount of circuit construction.

One gear production factory can support 10 red beaker factories

Science!!! Our initial crash zone has one factory producing science beakers that requires manual insertion of resources in order to continue operating. Here we've got an initial few that will last as long as I keep the mines on. Of course, all that science is incredibly useless without labs to work on them.

The important college educated factories get the beach front

The biters are really getting worse. There's really not that many of them; I know the problem will grow tremendously before all is done, but I don't have the defenses I'd really like.  Iron armor would be amazing, as would a healthy amount of turrets. Make factories for turrets you say? Madness! Only through science will we defeat this menace. *cough* *Scribbles down on the to-do list*

This takes as much iron as 2 factories. Superstrength is amazing.

I do at least finish the technology to make a decent iron suit. Because I know that math is frustrating for some people, the short answer for what this suit does is reduce small biter damage to 30%. I should have triple the health against them, which is quite nice. Stronger biters will rip right through it, so I'll want to keep upgrading the armor in order to not die.

If you care about math at all, the percentage reduction is applied first. Biters do physical damage, so their damage is reduced by 20%. Then the left number is subtracted entirely. Small biters do 6 damage as a point of reference.

Many biters were harmed in the making of this photo

Here you can see what happens when I don't have enough turrets to fight off the biters. Two turrets were left alone to deal with a surprisingly large pack. They were quickly dismantled, letting the biters run roughshod over the surrounding machinery. Yes...more turrets are needed. And walls. Walls and turrets.