Josef (Self-expanding factory): Tutorial 1 - The Ring

This is the first of (maybe?) a few tutorial videos on how I to build a self-expanding factory. I hope I can prove that this is absolutely no witchcraft and anyone with a little bit of circuit experience can do it.


Disclaimer: This is by no means the only or the best way of doing stuff, but it's a fairly easy way. When it comes to the ring mechanism that's explained here, this will obviously increase the amount of things blueprinted at the same time from ring to ring. Performance-wise it would be much better doing a proper spiral, but this is just so much easier. And honestly, I've had this grow up to 29x29 cells without any problems. The power draw gets a bit large when a new ring gets built, other than that it's not a bother.



You can see a 34h timelapse of my first version here:    • Factorio: JOSEF (Self-expanding factory) -...  


The general idea is that I'm going to build a second, more advanced factory and make a video every now and then to explain the different parts of it, how things work, what to pay attention to, what went wrong (a lot will) and so on. I think I'll mostly be prebuilding things because this stuff takes a bit of time to figure out and it's going to be boring as hell to watch me figure it out.



I tried to keep this at a fairly basic level. For now I'm going through combinator settings one by one and explaining in great detail but that's probably going to change in future videos.
I'd appreciate if you let me know whether you're bored out of your mind, completely overwhelmed or anything in between.



I don't have great experience in making these kinds of videos (although I'd love to get into it a little bit) so any feedback would be greatly appreciated! (Yes, I know, the keyboard sounds are annoying. I'll try to fix that for the next one)
I'm planning on doing maybe 1-2 videos a week, if there's any interest for it.

Save files/Blueprints: https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...