Inspirational early game builds

[Syrchalis]

My latest game, combined with the latest Xterminator video has inspired me to make this thread.

What early game builds have inspired you? When have you thought "damn, why didn't I think of this?" Or when did you simply realize how helpful a small little build could be to make the early game less tedious? I'm not claiming that any of these are some amazing secret knowledge or anything, just something that might inspire some how to pimp their early game.

Please provide pictures. I can't force you to do so, but it would greatly help everyone if they could see what your post is about at a glance.

The Handcrafting Aid

The Handcrafting Aid
Burner Phase

This produces gears and green circuits. You just drop a few iron and copper plates in the chests and eventually return to pick up 50-100 gears and green circuits. It reduces the time to hand-craft a lot of things by a massive amount. Take for example assembly machines - usually you need to craft copper wire, green circuits and gears for a simple assembly machine 1 - but if you have these components it's merely a 0,5sec craft.

Quick and Lazy Science

Quick and Lazy Science
Burner Phase

One box to put copper and iron in (ratio 1:2) and get quick science out. Two assembly machines are usually enough for early game research. The more limiting factor is the time on some of the red science research (e.g. 30-60sec per progress) - just put down more labs in that case and a few inserters connecting them. It produces 1 science pack per 5 seconds, so for the early research (10sec per progress) you can only support two labs, but later you can easily support 6 (30sec).

You can combine the both above to great effect. With so many gears and green circuits at your disposal you can quickly handcraft 75 inserters and belts, put two more assembly machines down to make green science and get something like steel furnaces really early, before you even set up proper smelting. I for one went for medium power poles first which is 120 inserters and belts, because I really really hate the wooden ones. But I also did steel furnaces with this before I completed my smelting area and main bus.
Oh and grenades. If you hate trees as much as SyncViews does then you definitely want to rush those.

What do you have in nearly every game at some point to kickstart something? How do you make your life easier with small nifty builds that are not part of the normal game?

[Greybeard_LXI]

Not sure I'm interested in learning how to do pictures, but I move my red science to the middle of my belt until I'm ready to really start science.

My belt goes:
Gears
Iron Plate
Space for more iron plate
space for still more iron plate
Underground down
Underground up
Copper Plate.
Space for more copper plate


There is room between the iron plate and copper plate to fit a lab and an assembler making red packs. Just pick the gears and copper off the belt. I do need to put the iron plate underground to get room for the gear inserter.

Improvements I need to make include chaining the labs like in your example and moving the first line of copper to the "space for more copper" so I don't have to mess with undergrounding the Iron.

Yeah, I know pictures are easy, but I feel too lazy to learn today.

[Factorie]

My early games have always been lacking. I'll try some of this out

[eX_ploit]

I don't like handcrafting science packs especially since building a proper green science facility is so easy.
viewtopic.php?f=202&t=48852
just 18 assembling machines and 12 labs. This build has 2 rows of filter inserters in the middle, but you can use 1 row of normal inserters until later.

[Bauer]

My latest game, combined with the latest Xterminator video has inspired me to make this thread.

What early game builds have inspired you? When have you thought "damn, why didn't I think of this?" Or when did you simply realize how helpful a small little build could be to make the early game less tedious? I'm not claiming that any of these are some amazing secret knowledge or anything, just something that might inspire some how to pimp their early game.

Please provide pictures. I can't force you to do so, but it would greatly help everyone if they could see what your post is about at a glance.

The Handcrafting Aid

The Handcrafting Aid
Burner Phase

This produces gears and green circuits. You just drop a few iron and copper plates in the chests and eventually return to pick up 50-100 gears and green circuits. It reduces the time to hand-craft a lot of things by a massive amount. Take for example assembly machines - usually you need to craft copper wire, green circuits and gears for a simple assembly machine 1 - but if you have these components it's merely a 0,5sec craft.

I usually combine this with an assembly machine for pipes. With 2 or 3 players you will need 2 assembly machines for gears or, even better, an assembly machine for yellow belt.

I also prefer to take the plates (both kinds) from my early "bus", i.e. placing this setup between the first smelting setup and the (to be) red+green science factory.

[LotA]

Quick inserter setup

factorio a.jpg (76.82 KiB) Viewed 8099 times

[5thHorseman]

It's too big for a pic, but here's the blueprint for my starter mini bus. it's by no means perfect but it gets the job done early, once you have Assembly 2 and red inserters.

The 4 conveyors along the bottom take (in order) nothing, stone, iron, and copper. The bottommost box is for wood.

It boxes up all 3 yellow belts; yellow, blue, and red inserters; assembly machine 2s (and 1s if you want but I just use 2s all game); both pipes; iron tools; lights; repair packs; furnaces; and the 3 things needed for steam.

Code: Select all

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[featherwinglove]

Most of the early game strats I use in vanilla I learned from AntiElitz (the speed runner). That was the first time I saw burner drills on a coal patch feeding each other in a loop. I facepalmed so hard for not thinking of that before. The first three machines he sets up building gears, gears, and copper cables, the latter to help him crafting power poles and green circuits, the former for mining machines, steam engines, transport belts, labs, inserters, burner inserters for the power plant, and more assembly machines. The next several machines produce pipes (boilers, steam engines, UGPs, OSPs and eventually chemical plants and oil refineries), transport belts, green circuits, and red science. Once he has automation 2, he rips his handoff starter labs and sets up science level 2 with transport belts. Before then, he has three mining machines on a stone patch directly against a furnace machine for the eventual 200+ boilers (that's 0.14 and previous.) What I would consider the early game ends with his typically massive steel mill, which uses the UGB lane filter trick so the same belt bringing the coal to the front end furnaces can take the steel out.

Most important tip: you can pretty much ignore copper in the early game. Before he builds his electric copper mine, AntiElitz has a fully compressed yellow belt of iron going into his factory, where he's hand inserting copper from three burner drill/furnace sets into science and copper cable (still hand crafting green circuits at that point.) Immediately after building his copper mine and science level 2, he builds another fully compressed yellow belt iron mine, and then immediately builds his steel mill. The iron/copper production ratio to that point averages about 8:1. Then oil, red circuits, blue science, blue circuits, and rocket parts start chewing up larger quantities of copper. Each new section gets its own fully compressed red belt of iron, another of copper, but I'm not talking early game at this point.

[Syrchalis]

AntiElitz sure is a good speed runner, and I agree with the copper. In my current game I had set up nearly everything to start with the huge main bus, including iron smelting, before I had electric drills on copper. I had medium Power Poles (120 green science) and Advanced Smelting (steel furnaces, 75 green science) before I placed any electric miners on copper.

Before 0.15 copper was probably as important as iron, but now Iron is far more important, simply because everything uses so much Iron. Only Circuit production is a bit copper heavy, but otherwise everything is more around a 3:1 ratio when it comes to iron vs. copper.

For the normal player why would you make a copper cable machine but not a green circuit one? Copper cable is faster to produce because you get 2 per craft.

I don't like handcrafting science packs especially since building a proper green science facility is so easy.

I didn't handcraft them before either, but in my later playthroughs I did, simply because it allows you to get Grenades and Steel Furnaces before building your smelting array. Grenades help clearing large amounts of trees to make space for large smelting and Steel Furnaces well, obviously allow you to build your smelting twice as compact from the get-go. Stone Furnaces are really bad after all. I generally also rush medium powerpoles because I hate the small ones so much.

[featherwinglove]

For the normal player why would you make a copper cable machine but not a green circuit one? Copper cable is faster to produce because you get 2 per craft.

It's not a "but not" but a "before". Early game, you don't need a lot of green circuits in comparison to gears, and a lot of the cables get used up by wooden power poles. If you skip cables for green circuits, you wind up waiting for a lot of cables rather than a few green circuits. After AntiElitz crafts his 168 small power poles, that's it for the cable machine; it gets switched over to pipes (I know that's for 0.12, is it 0.14? Yup, I looked it up.) In the LB/NHC game, you're going to have green circuit and power pole lines.

[Valrandir]

I don't like handcrafting science packs especially since building a proper green science facility is so easy.
viewtopic.php?f=202&t=48852
just 18 assembling machines and 12 labs. This build has 2 rows of filter inserters in the middle, but you can use 1 row of normal inserters until later.

Very nice