Factorio Forums

Well, I have finished "Stage 1"(??) of my very first Factorio. I am defining this point as:
1) I launched a rocket
2) I built bunch of outposts (outside the blueprint) to smelt plates, build Red & Blue circuits
3) I've torn down and rebuilt some of my Spaghetti-railroad
4) I have about infinity things to do (rebuild my mall right, destroy and rebuild my rail, go find more ore, make my smelters better, etc.)

I deliberately avoided looking at too many videos / hints / blueprints / etc. so that I could play around and learn. About the only real thing I read about ahead of time was that I should have a man bus... this worked really well. I read about this thing called the Mall (no blueprints); it sounded neat. So I built my own. Then I watched a KoS stream... oh man, I had no idea what the mall should have been.

Read through the achievements, and liked the look of Lazy Bastard, so I did that. I admit that I followed a guide for what stuff to hand-craft, but it was based on 0.16, so I had to tweak it for 0.17. Managed to do it, though.

If anyone wants to look at this, and tell me how I "Should" have done it, please feel free! All comments & ideas welcome. (I do not expect everyone to agree with each other).

My first "mall":


Spaghetti Science:


Blueprint String:

This is a sandbox game. There is no right and wrong, just a bunch of ways that work.

Yours worked, so by definition it is good.

As mentioned above, if it works and you're having fun, you're doing it right

One thing to go for next would IMO be megabasing, usually defined as getting at least 1k SPM (science per minute consumed by labs). It forces you to think of designs and optimise out your spaghetti, as well as use beacons to their potential. In my first game, I spent roughly 60 or so hours getting to where you are right now, and then spent another 200 hours megabasing.

Looks way more organised than my first factory. There's a lot of room for improvement, but if this is your first factory then all my complaints would be nitpicks. You will go far if you keep working at it. If that is spaghetti then yours is uncooked because that looks mostly organised.

I cannot tell from the image if you are doing this already, but in case you are not:

Connecting the output chest of each assembler to the associated inserter with a circuit wire (red or green, either is suitable) is generally a better way to limit production than just limiting the inventory space of chests. It means you can set the system to produce exactly as many machines as you want, rather than producing a number of stacks of machines. For some, such as miners, it is useful to produce as many as you can. But other machines (particularly reactors) are used a lot less in factories, so setting up a circuit network condition can help to limit production much more than limiting to the nearest stack.