Smooth Sailing Player Guide

[Hacohe]

I'v been playing factorio for a while now and have learned a few things to beating the game consistently, but, the issue is that there are many game modes and changes to the mechanics to the game that don't really make things more difficult, just longer to finish if you don't know what you're doing. If you have biters in the game, the longer it takes you to set up a defense, the harder it will be to progress. Here is a guide to what you should do when you start playing the game and what you should look out for.

Smooth Sailing Guide

This game has a few factors that when presented in the manner I will present them, greatly simplify the game overall. Factors in the game are resources, electricity, processing, production, research, and defense. Some may argue that there are more factors than that, but, those people aren't trying to make a guide tailored for players who want to play the game smoothly from start to finish, without ever getting tripped up on what they should be doing next.

Resources

This is the first priority in the game. Resources are the bread and butter of everything that you will do in the game. You can't really do much without resources unless you have solar energy, which doesn't come till later in the game, but, even then you still have to have resources. When you consider the resources you will need in this game in order to pull off the entirety of the game without any problems, you will need to know what you will be producing.

Processing

This involves turning items into other items via a process such as using coal to heat a furnace and make iron ore into iron plates. Processing makes resources usable for specific functions and most resources will be processed at the beginning, in some way, except for rock and coal. Processing is more of a preparation for production, and thus, processed resources are a resource in their own right. The question is, how much of what processed resource will you need to begin production? I will go over this soon.

Production

Here, you take the resources you've processed and begin producing. What do you produce? Well, you obviously need to research more before you can even think of building a rocket, so you will want to produce research materials obviously. There is one problem with this. You don't just need to produce a small number of research materials, you need to produce a very large number which cost a very large amount of many processed resources overall that can drain the entire base you made very quickly. Because of this, you have to make processing much larger than just a single station for smelting ore. Doing this will take a long time in and of itself, so, the smart thing to do is to begin production lines which involve assemblers, of the resources you will be needing to increase processing and production over all. I will go over this soon.

Electricity

Everything in the game near the end, will in some way require electricity. It's very similar to processing, in that it processes something into electricity, but, unlike processing, electricity is more of a maximum limitation on how much you can actually make inside of your factory. This means that if you built a lot of processing and production lines, you will end up not being able to use them because you will run out of electricity. In the grand scheme of things, it's always good to be aware of how much electricity you will need to make everything work. I will go over this soon.

Research

This is quite simple. There is a research tree you can look at that will show you what you can research next. There is research labs which you put science potions into that allow the lab to begin producing the technology you need. Just like production, the more labs you build means the more quickly research will get done. Some research later in the game is very time consuming, but, time can be shortened if you research research efficiency.

Defense

As you play the game, somewhere around beginning to do production and beginning to do green science, biters will likely begin attacking you and destroying everything you have very fast. If you didn't build any protection, they will destroy everything they can. This stuff, some of it, is very difficult to rebuild because if they destroy chest you were using to save some items in, they will destroy all of those items at the same time and some factories are expensive or crucial to how you are operating. Building a defense early on is necessary. It doesn't cost much to research turret technology and use the basic starting ammunition as a product in order to keep the turrets fully stocked in the case of a monster assault. The only issue with this obviously is that you will be dry on some resources much more quickly. Expanding your territory also requires security in order to do so, as well. Depending on the settings of the game, you will likely have to expand eventually. How you do so may be tricky.

Recipe for Success

To begin with, know how much you would have to process and how fast you would have to process it, in order to win the game. This doesn't mean memorizing all the formulas, as I'm speaking more of resources before they could be considered a product that has unique utility. The game will produce from a production line you created until the chest or lines are full with what you made, unless you limit the chest you used. It's best to use chest in the production of things such as conveyor belts, assemblers, and inserters, as these things are more useful to you when you can just pick them up out of a chest. Knowing the limitations of them is also very important, because if you decide to just place down an iron chest and leave it, the assembly line will produce until the iron chest is full, meaning that you will have wasted a lot of resources you probably won't be using or need at the moment. Very important. Limit your chest based on the product.

Starting off, you need to know how to get the beast known as your factory, up an running. To begin with, place your burning drill on iron and manually mine coal to use to feed the drill, which feeds into a smelter. This will get iron smelting up and running, which is very useful early on. You should get two drills and face them toward each other on the coal so you don't have to keep wasting your time mining coal. Make sure you made a pick axe for mining the coal to begin with, and mine some trees while you're at it. Don't use the trees as fuel unless you want to save a small number of minutes on your over all run. Next, place a drill on the rocks and have it feeding into a single chest. The best investments to make at this point of the game, since you just started, is about twelve coal mining burner drills making a loop, five drills and smelters on irons, five drills and smelters on copper, and maybe two drills on the rocks. This is more than what must people decide they want to start the game doing.

Now for power geneartion. You are making a start up station, not the actually base, yet, so don't put too much work into this as you may be dismantling it all later. Power generation for starting off will require one pump, one boiler, and one steam engine. Have one research lab as well and pre make many electric poles. You want to manually feed the boiler at this point and start doing red science manually by crafting in your hand, about forty. You want to research automation, logistics, and turrets. You shouldn't be getting attacked by biters yet if you got your things together. After this is made, a good thing to do is create a modular array of boilers with steam engines behind them and water going through the boilers. At this point, you will make electric drills and conveyor belts with inserters to automatically put coal inside of the boilers in order to power the factory. You will want to eventually upgrade this again one more time later one, but, not right now. Make sure as of right now, you set up a turret or two in order to guard the twenty steam engines attached to the ten boilers, which you should have.

Now for the annoying part. So you need to set up processing stations for the raw materials, that will be automated, but, you need enough space in order to make sure you will be able to process new materials as well. In order for the factory to work as fast as it can from beginning to end, it will require ninety six smelters for iron, same for copper, twenty four for rocks to bricks, and this is just for the first resources. Make sure when you make the bus, you DO include raw coal, and iron ore on their own two track system of splitters. Iron and copper can be on a four track because they are used for the most stuff. Keep tracks at minimum, three spaces apart between resource types. Be sure to give brick a two line bus. Now you will also need to worry about steel eventually, so, be sure to make forty eight more smelters for iron and forty eight more smelters for the steel those will create, and give steel a two line bus. Other things that will end up getting a bus and be processed, will include green circuits, plastic, red circuits, and blue circuits.

To make factories easier to make, it's a good idea to begin working on producing assemblers via assemblers, as well as inserters, tracks, splitters, underground tracks, and things in general that you will be using. Make everything modular and be sure to limit the chest to about five slots of tracks, inserters, and other popular items, while only one slot for things like assemblers. If you don't, you can kill all of the resources you have, goodbye. Also be sure to keep at this point, at least four turrets near every major station such as smelters, as you will be getting a lot of company. Invest in walls and stuff as well. A good way to slow down attacks is to kill off surrounding camps.

For research, you will want to make a modular factory that will produce at least one science per second no matter what lab it is. The issue of course is if the resource isn't on a bus, it has to be made on site. Small things like gears and copper coils should always be made on site. You should only need three lines coming in, six at most if you merge the resources on each side of a single line, to design a modular factory to build what you need. On line obviously goes out of the production line and heads toward research labs. For labs, be sure to have four lines total. One should have red and green science, with red on one side and green on the other. The other should be black and blue. These two lines should be side by side for the inserters to grab. Red inserters are really helpful, so remember them. The other two lines should be side by side going the perpendicular to the first two lines, being grabbed from the other side of the labs. One should be purple science and yellow science, while the last one is for white science. Remember to make everything modular.

I won't include oil in this guide because it's fairly simple, but, remember to keep things modular and that you will likely need every resource for something, especially petroleum and heavy oil.

How Much of What?

To know exactly how much to build of each thing, you have to ask yourself how fast you want everything to go. The final research end game is approximately one thousand of each science and takes sixty seconds for each science to be used. If you array labs two dimensional ten by ten, this will take a total of ten minutes to complete the science, assuming you produce one hundred of each science a minute, which won't be happening exactly, as you will likely have began getting dry on resources, needing trains, and things of that nature. Science is most likely going to be the biggest consumer of resources. You shouldn't bother investing into things like solar, accumulators, and lasers, unless you really need to defend a location because you ran out of so many resources that you know you won't be able to keep making ammunition forever and killing off camps. Once science is finished, the final labs you need are to produce for the rocket ship itself to take off, which nets you one thousand white science that can be used for infinite research end game. As long as you produce enough to always have enough to build one more factory at a time or set up one more station at a time, you are good in terms of production lines. As long as you produce two of each science per a second unless it's white science, you should essentially be good to go in terms of actually progressing in the game.

The more you invest into preparing, the less time spent on finishing the game. The less time you spend into preparing, the more time spent finishing the game. If you spend more time preparing, it eventually becomes inefficient time wise, as the balance is that preparing makes things more efficient, thus one second invested into preparing is like one minute trying to finish the game. If you give bare minimum, you get bare minimum. Just because everything is automated doesn't mean you don't do any work.

Final Notes

If you want to actually beat the game, don't waste time on drones unless they are combat drones. Don't waste your time on nuclear energy unless you want to piss off the biters or are playing player versus players. Don't invest into solar energy unless you expect coal to run out. The amount of coal spent into making the solar panels takes a while to make back in terms of power generation and consumption, but, the space solar energy takes up is more than the space an ammunition factory takes up. Stay clear of leechers in muliplayer who think they can have what they want just because it's a public server. These people aren't practical and aren't efficient, nor human, nor do they deserve the respect of one or recognition.

[Hellatze]

Put this on steam guide.

And this guide cant beat modded games.