Factorio Forums

I've just gotten into this game and I love how many different ways it can be played. It is so open ended. I was curious how long you guys stay on the starting "burner phase" though? I usually work up to about 8 burner miners and furnaces for iron, 2 miners for copper, 2 for stone, and 8 for coal until I feel that I have enough to move on to electricity. At the same time, I feel like this could be overkill.....

What do your opening setups look like?

MastaPegs wrote:I've just gotten into this game and I love how many different ways it can be played. It is so open ended. I was curious how long you guys stay on the starting "burner phase" though? I usually work up to about 8 burner miners and furnaces for iron, 2 miners for copper, 2 for stone, and 8 for coal until I feel that I have enough to move on to electricity. At the same time, I feel like this could be overkill.....

What do your opening setups look like?

I've taken more and more to rushing electricity simply because it makes it easy to start automating plate production (and feeding the output to storage). It's also necessary to automate production via assembling machines. I usually only build 1 burner miner for iron to go with the starting burner miner for coal, and then immediately start building the parts to electricity production (manually mine the 3 copper ore required for the offshore pump, and 9 more later for 2 electric miners). I also tend to manually mine stone early on for furnace and boiler production, once I have more regular demand for stone (because of wall production or what have you), then I get an electric miner on my stone source.

I rush so fast to get out of the burner phase, I think I end up spending longer in it simply because I refuse to make more burner anythings

4 Coal burners 4 Iron. 2 copper, 2 stone (one into bricks) and i refuse to build more. From here i build 1/14/10 power, 2 labs, 3 Assy making 2 red Sci fed by 2 chests. Then I build my initial iron and copper smelting and send them to bus where I build Green Circuits, Gears, and Steel, before building Red/Green science...

I think I'd like to try rushing out into electricity as fast as possible.... I hate ferrying coal around everywhere at the start of the game....... I just hate being short on supplies at the start too haha

I usaully have around 4 iron, 2 coal, 1 stone, 1 copper.

You really dont need much copper or stone at all before mass production. Aldo often there is trees on the ore or otherwise in the way, so tend to burn a couple hundred wood early on before the coal miners produce a good surplus.

Once have the copper for a pump and cables, I go straight for electric iron miners and at least 10 furnaces plus replace the stone with a few miners for bricks/walls.

Then its easy to build belts for coal and copper and ramp up the real production. Generally having the start area (the ring of small lakes) secured with walls and gun turrets, plus a few thousand ammo in under an hour.

Typically I have about 19 burner inserters:
6 coal, 9 iron, 2 copper, 2 stone

They are exclusively in direct-feed configurations (that is burner miners on iron/copper feed directly into a stone furnace, on coal they feed into each other, on stone into a chest), I do not use burner inserters or belts at all during this stage of the game and just a minimal power setup for 1 or 2 labs and perhaps a few assemblers fed by hand - usually 1x copper cable, 1x electronic circuit, 1x iron gears. No inserters, no chests. I just fill the input buffers and empty the output buffers by hand, ctrl-click generally.

The reason to use a lot of burners is they give faster ramp-up for less pollution, yes, yes, I know burner drills make more pollution than electric drills, but every iron and copper plate you smelt makes pollution and electric setups with belts and power poles and inserters require a tonne more iron and copper than burner direct feed setups. So in terms of getting the first few critical techs, a solid defense, and enough resources to make a 16 electric miner / 32 stone furnace type smelting setup, you tend to be much better off with burners. You stay under the radar for longer and can then ramp up production much more quickly and as a bonus the direct feed setups are more robust to being nommed on by biters because it lacks fragile parts like power poles, belts and inserters.

It's worth noting this is roughly inspired by AntiElitz's speed runs although he doesn't use hand-fed assemblers, which is probably largely the difference between peaceful mode and the fairly high enemy settings I tend to play on - the worse the biters, the longer you need to delay making big, fragile expensive setups, because you can't (or shouldn't) make those setups until you have the turrets to protect them.

BlakeMW wrote:Typically I have about 19 burner inserters:
6 coal, 9 iron, 2 copper, 2 stone

They are exclusively in direct-feed configurations (that is burner miners on iron/copper feed directly into a stone furnace, on coal they feed into each other, on stone into a chest), I do not use burner inserters or belts at all during this stage of the game and just a minimal power setup for 1 or 2 labs and perhaps a few assemblers fed by hand - usually 1x copper cable, 1x electronic circuit, 1x iron gears. No inserters, no chests. I just fill the input buffers and empty the output buffers by hand, ctrl-click generally.

The reason to use a lot of burners is they give faster ramp-up for less pollution, yes, yes, I know burner drills make more pollution than electric drills, but every iron and copper plate you smelt makes pollution and electric setups with belts and power poles and inserters require a tonne more iron and copper than burner direct feed setups. So in terms of getting the first few critical techs, a solid defense, and enough resources to make a 16 electric miner / 32 stone furnace type smelting setup, you tend to be much better off with burners. You stay under the radar for longer and can then ramp up production much more quickly and as a bonus the direct feed setups are more robust to being nommed on by biters because it lacks fragile parts like power poles, belts and inserters.

It's worth noting this is roughly inspired by AntiElitz's speed runs although he doesn't use hand-fed assemblers, which is probably largely the difference between peaceful mode and the fairly high enemy settings I tend to play on - the worse the biters, the longer you need to delay making big, fragile expensive setups, because you can't (or shouldn't) make those setups until you have the turrets to protect them.

I love this answer. I tried playing on peaceful mode and it takes out the challenge and sense of urgency. I want those biters to push me to my limits. I'm going to try a game right now and push turrets as my first research. From there, I'll defend as I continue research and build up my factory. A great belt set up is incredibly fragile to biter assault.......