At an extremely high cost of course. Would love to have them organised into rows, my map is now insanely large as I'm running a whistle stop only factory, where all factories [other than small base items] are all made by the big factories.

If not I guess I could reduce the min spawn distance from 180 down to 60-80 or something but would look super cluttered

What do you mean "high cost"? What is at a high cost?

This sounds like a pretty niche request, so I'm not sure it is worth adding another option as I already have a lot. But the actual change isn't too hard. If you open up the control.lua and change the line:

 center = {x=center.x - 1 + math.random(-3,4)*2, y=center.y - 1 + math.random(-3,4)*2}

to

-- center = {x=center.x - 1 + math.random(-3,4)*2, y=center.y - 1 + math.random(-3,4)*2}

Then every building will spawn in the exact same spot in each of the 32x32 chunks that it tries to spawn in. Still wouldn't be a perfect grid because it still avoids spawning on water, cliff, ore (ore spawning prevention may be an option you can disable, I don't remember) and it doesn't attempt to spawn one in every chunk.

Oh by high cost I meant expensive to craft. Would feel too cheaty if the recipe was cheap VS its benefit.

Someone made a mod edit that lets you craft them: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/big-factories

However for some reason they broke the recipe crafting for the big factories, which is vital to get around the 60 craft per second limit. No point having a huge factory if its outputing no more than vanilla assemblers, its why this mod I really like.

Thanks for the code suggestion. Will give it a try :)

Check out Schall's Machine Scaling mod, it has just what you're looking for I think

Check out Schall's Machine Scaling mod, it has just what you're looking for I think

This mod looks great but is missing the great feature of big recipes. Is it possible to use whistlestop without the spawning etc and just the big recipes?

Did you try https://mods.factorio.com/mod/big-factories? I haven't tried it yet, but I think that is what it is supposed to be. I told people for a while I'd get around to doing it and never did it, so someone else beat me to the punch.

Did you try https://mods.factorio.com/mod/big-factories? I haven't tried it yet, but I think that is what it is supposed to be. I told people for a while I'd get around to doing it and never did it, so someone else beat me to the punch.

It is just the opposite of what I am looking for. This mod is missing the big recipes, which is annoying, because you hit the hard limit of 1 item per tick very fast.
Schall's Machine Scaling is nice, but missing the recipe thing, but it sounds like he wants to add it, just to impatient :-D

Both Schall's AND big factories are missing the recipe thing? That is a core part of making big machines work! Maybe I do need to make my own version at some point. I even had a clever name picked out: Big UPS Friendly Factories (or BUFF for short).

Schall's for sure and I have not installed big factories but checked the source code and there are no big recipes either.

Yup this is the ONLY mod for large UPS saving factories THAT ALSO have the large recipes required to make it UPS saving.

No point having a beast factory if it's hard capped to vanilla recipe output tick rates.
Hoping for a crafting option but certainly not expecting it as I can imagine it's a LOT of work to mod/code in.

Will increase the spawn rate for now :)

A crafting option is really easy to implement as the whole entity is already defined. You either need to duplicate it somehow to have a non destructable version for construction which you can deconstruct again or just make the spawned one deconstructable (this would even allow building them without a recipe at all)

Alright, checkout version 0.3.0. You can now enable an option that allows you to deconstruct and then build the factories from the mined items. No recipe, so you still need to find them in the wild.

Oh my GOD!

Thankyou so much! Going to try this out RIGHT NOW :D

<3