Factory Priority List

[Sigma88]

I came to the forum looking for some kind of priority list to follow, or at least to keep in mind, when playing factorio.

I didn't find any thread on the topic so if someone has some kind of list it would be helpful.

what I'm looking for is something like:

-mining coal/iron/copper/stone
-smeltin iron plates/copper plates/stone bricks/steel
-red science
-cogs
-copper wire
-circuits
-whatever...


this is just an example to give an idea.

I'm asking this because many times I started making something and then I realized there were something required that I did not have (not set up in the factory or sometimes not even researched), this happened mostly after having unlocked green science.

thank anyone in advance for the tips

[onebit]

Don't forget electricity to power the red science lab.

I'd place red science above bricks and steel so turrets can be made to defend the base.

[Xterminator]

I think is a bit difficult to give a good priority list of things to do, simply because quite a bit of it is just personal preference of each player, and their play style etc...
I can try give a general one (at least that I go off of), however I am a little confused by why you actually need it. :/ When you say sometimes you go to make something and realize you missing components for it and sometimes don't have the research done to complete it... This can easily be solved by just looking at the item requirements in the crafting menu (by hovering over the item), before you make. It shows everything you need for it, so then you just set those up one by one before you try to do the finished product. Seems pretty intuitive to me... O.o

Anyway here is a general priority list I follow just by habit at this point:
1. Burner miner on iron. Then 2 on coal, then stone, then copper.
2. Once I have the materialsfor 1-2 steam engines, switch to electricity ASAP.
3. Make Science lab. Craft like 40-60 red packs by hand, enough to research Automation, Logistics 1, and military usually.
4. Automate red science. Pretty self explanatory, as it only takes gears and copper.
5. Getting full automated smelting setup for iron/copper, and coal belted down to boilers for steam engines.
6. Researching stuff this whole time. Then once I have good smelting capacity, automate green science. Bit more complicated, but again, you can see all the materials required before hand. And there are lots of tutorials and good setups for it on YouTube etc..
7. Get oil going
8. Blue science. Then just kind of do whatever from that point on :p

Hope this helped mate.

[Sigma88]

I am a little confused by why you actually need it. :/ When you say sometimes you go to make something and realize you missing components for it and sometimes don't have the research done to complete it... This can easily be solved by just looking at the item requirements in the crafting menu (by hovering over the item), before you make. It shows everything you need for it, so then you just set those up one by one before you try to do the finished product. Seems pretty intuitive to me... O.o

Yeah, it is pretty straight forward at the beginning, and actually I didn't have any problems untill well after setting up green science.

The problem I had after green science was that green science unlocks a bunch of stuff and I went for the electric nodes because I wanted to switch to electric smelting, but then I discovered that some stuff required blue science, so I had to go back and check everything I needed for that.

and since I had no oil going that was quite a bit of stuff I was missing.

Of course I can just read every node from start to finish and make a tree for myself, but I just thought there would be already something like this online.

Plus I don't have much freetime so I look to get the most out of it

[MadZuri]

The main bus strategy is really great for new players to learn the game, imho. Really early game was already covered. After you have a handful of burner-miners and stone furnaces (for really quick and dirty, just loop a single coal line around them all then to the boilers, use burner inserters, miners feeding directly into furnances) then work on a mining and smelting pattern. Get to electric drills ASAP.

Start on main bus in following order: iron, copper, cogs, red science, transport belts, green circuits, inserters, green science. Stop, and get steel and oil going, while expanding power/resources. At this point, before you get advanced oil, but you still need a ton of petroleum gas, just turn the heavy and light oil into solid fuel. Get more green circuit production, then add chains for: fast -> smart inserters, water + petroleum gas -> sulfur + iron -> sulfuric acid + iron + copper -> batteries, more steel, coal + petroleum gas -> plastic + green circuits -> red circuits, then finish it off with blue science.

Don't skimp on defense during that. As soon as you get batteries, research and start plopping down laser turrets. There you go, early-midgame. I always produce copper cabling right where I need it, and usually with the cogs as well. To really get into the midgame, gonna need lubrication, engines, and start up the logistics networks. You should have advanced oil at this point, so get to cracking the oil instead of burning it for fuel. Start to switch over to solar, bots and blueprints really help. The most often used solar blueprint is a transformer in the middle, 3 accumulators in each direction forming a +, then filling in the corners with 2x2 solar panels. They need to be placed adjacent to each other to connect.

Give yourself plenty of room. I've never said to myself "I wish I had built that just a little more compact," it's always "I wish I had left myself more room." Hope this helps.

[Gregorovitch]

I came to the forum looking for some kind of priority list to follow, or at least to keep in mind, when playing factorio.

I didn't find any thread on the topic so if someone has some kind of list it would be helpful.

what I'm looking for is something like:

-mining coal/iron/copper/stone
-smeltin iron plates/copper plates/stone bricks/steel
-red science
-cogs
-copper wire
-circuits
-whatever...


this is just an example to give an idea.

I'm asking this because many times I started making something and then I realized there were something required that I did not have (not set up in the factory or sometimes not even researched), this happened mostly after having unlocked green science.

thank anyone in advance for the tips

It's difficult to advise on this because there are several reasonable approaches to many aspects of the game. The best advice I can give is that the game presents you with a series of fairly stiff challenges as it progresses each of which you are likely to royally screw up first time you try them but learn a lot from the experience. I recommend restarting and having another go as you work through these challenges as each repetition makes you better and better at each individual challenge. The big challenges as they appear in the game (roughly) are:

Getting off the ground with electricity, basic science, defensive capability, coal production and iron and copper smelting.
Oil processing.
Blue science packs
Railways and remote mining
Logistics system and robots
Offensive capability (power armour+accesorories and capsules)
Modules (a huge scaling up challenge at the end game)

A big decision is between local and central production. For example lot's of things need gear wheels so do you have a big gear wheel production centre or do you make them locally were they are needed? A good starting point is to go for a central bus for iron and copper plate and what's called a coal or fuel loop. Adding commonly required products like gears and green circuits to the central bus is certainly an option but in my experience it works best once you are more skilled and laying out your factories and have experience in handling complex belt systems - 6 or 8 main bus belts is harder to handle than two. It's largely a mater of personal preference and also the picture changes significantly when you get logistics robots up and running and then again when you need massive qualities of green and red circuits that are very difficult to make from a central bus set up from early game. In other words central bus pattern works exceptionally well early-mid game but less so after logisitcs robots and massive circuit production scaling.

Always make sure you keep on top of energy requirements. It is possible to resurrect a base that runs out of energy (which of course stops the coal miners too) but it is tricky and a major pain. I start with one water pump, 14 boilers and ten steam engines then double that to 2, 28 and 20 when consumption uses over half of it. That is usually enough to get me through to solar panels. For solar you need electricity substations, solar panels and accumulators. You also want to have construction robots going so you can copy a basic grid plan for panel and accumulator farms and have the robots build new sections in seconds. With that in place you won't have energy worries. It also significantly reduces, or caps rather, your coal requirements which is one less resource to worry about when you are tearing your hair out finding more oil, iron and copper.

Always priorotise finding a local stone patch and start filling boxes with walls as soon as you can. Walls take a long time to make, you need hundreds of them and if you don't have them ready when you need them you've had it - chomp, chomp, Aaaagghhhh......my beautiful base, Noooooooooo!

Related to this is a big decision on whether to go for a very compact and highly defended base to start with or to spread out using a lot of space to enable you to build modular expandable production lines, especially for things like green circuits and iron copper smelting. The key here is laser turrets which you can't get until you have oil processing going. The advantage of the small compact base is you can easily defend it with walls and standard turrets which can be supplied with ammunition via belts. The disadvantage is that expanding the base becomes a major pain since you have to redo the bullet supply network etc and you will almost always find it a nightmare to scale up production faculties packed into small spaces. The alternative is to rush laser turrets (and therefore oil processing) asap and take a much longer term view on where to establish permanent walls. Laser turrets enable you to quickly establish new well defended walls, protect remote outposts and destroy nearby biter nests using the "turret creep" method before you get capsules and decent armour (the latter being a much more difficult and a major PITA using standard turrets since you have to manually load them with bullets).

Basically from mid- to end-game there is a massive advantage to having lots of space and having *started* with lots of space, but you may find it easier to begin your first games by creating smaller compact bases well enough defended to allow you to learn the systems in relative peace and safely.

[Alekthefirst]

how i do it:
Start game by rushing early defence and research.
- upgrade only defence and research until i have recearched decently into blues
-> expand, kill shit
--> build huge mega base of pollution doom
---> get shit wrecked and rail networks all over the place
----> proceed to do as i please (which never includes placing down the darn rocked defence)

[Sigma88]

Thanks everybody for the help it was helpful