Factorio Forums

Factorio is a complex and in part because of it very fun game. I get it, and it is exactly the kind of game I like.

It also looks like even with the pure vanilla game you can choose to play a slow and steady approach or fast and twitchy fingers depending on what you like. Excellent, because I am more of the slow and steady type of player, and like to take my time thinking and experimenting before committing to an approach, and if possible even do that in the middle of a match.

But I'm a little confused as to the best path to follow in order to learn the game. At first it looked like the Campaigns were designed to be a tutorial, with some things being obvious and others not so clear, probably precisely for the purpose of teaching players to do some research. It was progressively more challenging and I eventually completed New Hope 2. By the time I got to New Hope 3 it became a bit frustrating, since you have to do certain things - fast - with zero time to think and learn the various things that you should do. This is where I started questioning whether the campaigns are a tutorial or whether they are supposed to be a guided challenge, with a storyline.

So, here comes my questions:

1) What is the best way to learn Factorio for a slow and steady guy like me? Is it really the Campaigns, doing a New Game (maybe even following some of the advice from the various video tutorials), or to do Scenarios?

2) Is there perhaps a list of things one should learn? I don't mean a step by step video tutorial (I've found several of those), but literally the major points, like: (a) Make a 1st step base to semi-manually produce basic stuff, (b) Build a proper starter base that automates research and the production of <insert the list of items here>, (c) Plan your early/mid game "real base", with a full fledge foundry for all minerals, maybe migrate from steam to electric power, all the types of research, and automatic production of <insert bigger list of items here>, (d) Begin railroads to get large amounts of ore to your base, and what are the necessary fortifications of those mining outposts, (e) Develop robot tech, (f) whatever comes next... by this point I'm quite hazy regading the next steps). And somewhere along all that... identify "how much" military development is needed at the various steps.

3) Totally unrelated, but kind of curious... how come I don't see a single completed achievement? I would have expected to have completed at least "Getting on track", "It stinks and they don't like it".

1. New Hope 3 and 4 are not very good tutorials. You won't miss much by skipping them.

2. You need to build gun turrets and ammo as soon as possible, and laser turrets when you have a steady supply of petroleum gas. The rest is up to you. But I recommend construction robots if you like to tear down your base and rebuild a lot.

3. You only earn achievements by playing "New game".

Thanks for the hints on how to best New Hope 3, DaveMcW.

But back to the main issue, at this stage of my learning (for example I have not yet leaned a thing about oil)...

Should I be even trying further campaign missions or be doing something else, like playing a New Game, and then *later* come back tot he Campaign?

Or is the best learning experience to stick it out through the Campaigns and try to insert my learning tasks as I do them, maybe by saving often and restarting/reloading once I learned a needed skill to get over a hump?

Oil is relatively easy, and covered in the last of the New Hope maps. If you have problems with the forelast mission, you can "skip" it by ignoring setting up a factory, and just attacking the biter base with the computer core from the south end, going around it left of it - there's extra supplies on the small biter base to the southwest. Turret crawl works best (setting up turrets and stagger them forward, using the RPG to take out biter bases in range) - but yea, New Hope 3 isn't the best kind of mission. Going baseless in a basebuilding game is counterintuitive.

Once you got oil down things become relaxed. Oil refining allows you to produce "solid fuel" which can supply your furnaces and boilers. A few laser turrets should keep the biters at bay. After you got your power needs and defenses sorted, the best advice I can give you is: Go wild. Try things. If something doesn't work, tear it down and try something else! Factorio is very forgiving in allowing you to fix misstakes in setting things up. Deconstructing something and rebuilding it elsewhere doesn't incur any cost, no buildings are destroyed. So you can experiment at leisure until you find something that works, and I highly recommend playing it that way.

The First Steps and New Hope "campaign" levels are basically a nice tutorial, but they are by no means the meat of the Factorio game. They are a good starting point since they do explain the basics of the game.

Would it make sense to take a 3-pronged approach while learning?

Specifically, play 3 games in parallel:

- A New Game with no biters, to experiment with layouts and create blueprints of things I like. I expect lots of trial, error, deconstruct and rebuild to happen here. That way I will not be wasting time in the other games, so that the bugs don’t evolve while I putz around.

- A New Game with normal settings, that will slowly become my first real world.

- The Campaign that I am playing, to both learn and continue the storyline, and get experience in intentionally aggressive behavior that I would likely not try out otherwise.

And once I am true or sufficiently advanced in my knowledge to not be a drag to others... add a 4th, a multiplayer game.


Does such an approach to learning make sense? Or am I being absurd?

I think if I played two games at the same time I would get confused. "Where is my blue science? I know I built it!....OOPS, it's in the other game."

I always like playing with as little biters as possible. My last game was set to few bases, peaceful, no expansion and evolution only affected by spawner kills.

The first rocket I launched was from a ribbon world (128 high? 256? About one screen) so I only had two approaches to defend from biters. I bumped up the richness of the metals to make up for the smaller map size. I had no need to use trains.

My second rocket was from a Lazy Bastard run. I think it was no more than 106 manual crafts, everything else made in machines. This was a good learning tool for automating stuff. I do not think it is necessarily the best plan for a first game.

These rockets were from 0.14 where you had to kill biters to get alien artifacts for research. 0.15 allows winning a game with no biters.

Skip the rest of the campaign.

The best way to learn is the way I learn anything best: Make LOTS of mistakes! (And make your own saves every once in a while.)

You can launch the rocket from the starter base. Many of the videos I have seen were from people making giant bases capable of launching a rocket every minute. Save that for a later game.

Robots are not required to win, but they can make it easier (or more frustrating). Same with railroads.

There is a thread someplace on this forum giving a description of a There Is No Spoon run. It gives a pretty good list of what to do first, especially the research. The 0.14 version I used could be a good start, but the 0.15 one is better. I have been taking a vacation from Factorio so I do not know if anyone wrote a 0.16 version yet,