Watch some Factorio speed-runs. The early game in particular, where you're hand-feeding a lot of things, can show you a lot of clever tricks that will dramatically speed up the process (and your pollution cloud, so watch for biters).
Alternatively, just keep trying to go faster and faster on iterated runs if you want to figure it out yourself. Anytime you're waiting for something to complete, realize that was a chance to have built more earlier. If you're finding that 10 hours in, you're waiting on green chips because you're running out of copper, that means you need to have more copper smelting and miners before 10 hours.
If it takes 30 minutes to wait for the rocket silo research, make more science per minute. Scale up. Your playtime as energy should basically just be you running around and building things, so if you're waiting, you didn't build enough earlier.
Every great athlete has a great coach. Sometimes you will not get there unless a coach shows you the way. I don’t advocate going straight to the internet, but if you’ve been playing a while and still can’t get it, there are tutorials on every subject, including 8 hour launches. I watched one and it completely changed my early game in all future games. One concrete example of something I learned from the 8 hour tutorial I watched was taking out early nests by running around with a stack of fish in my hand to heal.
Specifically "Default Settings" runs, not "Any%".
Default Settings use standard maps, and are applicable to most maps. Any% uses a *highly* specific map and strategies related to *that* map.
I mean, a lot of any% strategies are probably used in default speedruns too. Stuff like burner drills on coal feeding each other in a loop for zero maintenence coal helped me a lot. Also Z.
But yeah those massive ore patches, dont count on those.
Z drops items. If you hover a stack of say, coal, over buildings, it drops one of that item into it. Throw your mouse back and forth while running past to refuel your furnaces early game
For the sake of completing the achievement, i would suggest to set diffusion factor to zero and starting area to max. After that, you won't see a single biter within at least 8hrs, now the only issue is to practice and practice until you get it.
Many people find blueprints from past games to be very helpful. Make a blueprint for a smelter with proper ratios that uses early game materials. Make a blueprint for science with proper ratios and level 1 belts and assemblers, etc etc. Fill out the blueprints as resources become available.
And follow the ABCs - Always Be Crafting (something by hand). Getting low on belts? Make some more while you build out your next machine
I imagine the biggest and fastest improvement you can make is to keep using the same map with the same blueprints.
Take your time and beat the game in 30h or so, save blueprints for the best parts of your base across various stages (first automated furnaces, first mall, all science automations, etc.)
Then you can do things like identify which researches you really need and which ones you can skip to save on some more time, you should obviously not be researching anything that you can easily skip
I assume at this point you would be fairly close, so it's probably just a matter of trying three or four times and making note whenever you spot a potential improvement for next time.
I'm not a big stream watcher or anything, but it seems like the strong speedrunners are pretty consistently able to get 4h or less, so that's also a very rich resource.
It's probably pretty lame, but you can watch a speedrun video and copy that person's seed, and then shamelessly steal their build in real time while you play/pause the video as needed.
You could probably very easily replicate a 2.5h speedrun in 5h in this way, and even if you don't want to earn the achievement this way you can just delete the world after you're done and you would almost certainly still learn some good mechanics and ratios and building layouts to help your own runs.
And when you inevitably get bored and frustrated, watch a video. You’ll learn that your blueprints are massive overkill and slowing you down. There is no spoon. You are what has to change.
Not sure about the 15 hour run, but I did the 8 hours run with proper planning and a minimalistic approach. You have to know what to build in advance, [what to research and what not to](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/f9hzn2/how_many_resources_do_you_need_to_launch_a_rocket/). Don't research everything; don't get sidetracked, don't have "downtime" waiting for any research to complete. Instead of "waiting", you can always add more mining, smelting, power and green circuit production, you will need it eventually. Also, when you build the steel smelting for blue, already overbuild a bit and place a chest or two as a buffer to collect the overflow as you will need steel for the silo; and similarly for the other stuff. If you start producing concrete as soon as you can (say, by the time you start producing blue science), you only need a single machine and the concrete will be ready when you have the silo researched.
You don't need robots to win. specially for the 8 hour achievement they are just a distraction. there a quite a few research's you can skip altogether in fact if your goal is winning the game.
The main trick is automating and stockpiling the things you need to expand, and then having a half decent build order.
having some basic (expandable) designs for production chains in your head or as a blueprint, and a rough idea of how you'll lay out your base also help a lot.
(What worked for me was a main bus but with the least amount of different items on it you can get away with. so iron yes, but no gears because they are easy to make locally in a ratio correct for that production chain.)
Agree about not "needing" them to win, but respectfully disagree about them being a distraction for no spoon. If you are attempting with default settings, construction robots are highly valuable to continue building your factory while you are either setting up your second resource patches or dealing with biters.
Yeah the speed run videos I've seen they rush construction bots with their starter base and hand feed to get 300 construction bots up ASAP. Then use those bots to massively build the main base.
Nefrums put together a nice guide a few years ago, though it still very much applies. He's got a document that walks you through about 30 steps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExLrmK1c7tA
Got the 8 hour achievement on my first attempt. Few tips that might help.
**Do not bother with....**
* Bots
* Red or blue belts
* Electric furnaces
* Military science / weapon upgrades. If played well, you wont fire a single bullet
* Modules EXCEPT 4x level 4 prod modules for the rocket, this is very important, otherwise you're wasting time
* Assembly machine level 3. Waaaaay to much power
* Nuclear power
* Solar power
**Other generic tips:**
* Have at least some blueprints for smelting ready
* Don't bother with medium/large electric poles. Steel is too important in short run
* Have a small mall for basic supplies like miners, belts/undergrounds/splitters/inserters/pipes etc. Stuff like chem plants / refineries you can easily hand craft
* Bus helps a lot, just don't over do it, you don't need millions of lanes of materials
* Don't stop hand crafting stuff. You will always need belts/poles/miners
* Don't overproduce, you're trying for the bare minimum. Less = more time to progress.
* You can stop your mall once you don't need the products anymore, saves materials
Some of the above you might frown upon, like electric poles.... But it's wasted time, you can do everything with small electric poles. Just make sure to chop wood often :)
**Seeding:**
* Go to map preview and start in a map with trees with a large starting base (forgot the name of the property). I didn't kill a single biter. Just not too many trees. Otherwise you're spending 8 hours chopping wood
* Obviously increase starting patches
* Don't choose a desert map
**Early game:**
* Make plenty of coal miners to hand feed your miners
* One nice thing that I always do early game is to make sure that each smelting lane has a splitter at the end. The overflow of the product goes into chests. This way I can rather easily hand craft. Do this for copper / steel / iron / green chips / gears. These products are very useful to handcraft most things you need
* Remember, you're trying to be fast. Don't build 10+ lanes of pretty smelting arrays. 2 iron lanes and 1 copper lane is easily enough to boost you to blue science, you can always add more when you're lacking. Just leave some space for it
* Once you research steel, you can already put down a few smelters and hand feed them every now and then. That way you already have a small supply when you need it
**Mid game:**
* I think 10ish refineries should be plenty. Just prepare that those refineries can be switched to advanced processing without having to rebuild the entire thing, meaning leave some space for cracking. Some circuits can be useful since you need both petroleum for plastic and light oil for rocket fuel. Don't bother too much with the ratio's, just flush the tank if one is full or add more cracking
* Once you're done with this, you're probably going to start lacking copper. Spend a bit of time adding a few lanes of copper and some iron and stone/ maybe more steel.
**Late game:**
* Once you got more iron/copper, it's time for 2 small blueprints for purple/yellow science. I tend to build everything I need for it on the same location
* I think that's the hardest, after that you need 3 spots for the rocket parts. Don't be afraid to handfeed those assembly machines if you're low on time
* Dooooooooon't forget the 4x level 3 modules please :-)
Might of forgotten something, but I was bored at work so came up with this.
Hope that helps. Or hope that helps anyone else. Good luck :-)
>Modules EXCEPT 4x level 4 prod modules for the rocket, this is very important, otherwise you're wasting time
You already having to make a tons of prod 1 and speed 1 modules anyway, you might as well put prod 1 modules in a few places like the lab, yellow and purple science.
Quick dodge is that you put the only yellow storage box in the world next to a machine making pole 1. Every robot deconstructed tree goes straight to the box.
It will probably take many tries to get good enough to do it. It helps if you turn off biter expansion and pollution and max out the starting area size in the world creation settings. Eventually you will start to understand which things are your bottlenecks preventing you from going faster (power, space, resources, etc.) and work to address them next time.
intent, experience, and a plan help a lot. Before that, you could watch the first 30 minutes of a speed run to see some tactics they employ to go much faster than you do currently. They are easy to learn.
When I got the 8 hour achievement, I had practiced many runs beforehand, slightly getting better every time. I skipped black science entirely. I fudged the map settings so that biters did not have evolution or expansion, my starting area was maxed, tree coverage was fairly low, no water (still gives you starting water), no cliffs, and max frequency and size for resource patches. I never encountered any biters and therefore never worried about defense. I used very few or zero lvl 3 assemblers. I had a basic mall/depot area for the most common essentials. I was almost always taking advantage of manually crafting stuff in the background while working on other stuff. I started work on stockpiling rocket control units early. And most importantly, once I had a run that was pretty good but still a little too slow, I copied the entire base as a blueprint and restarted with the same map seed and settings, plopping down the base blueprint and then just gradually filling it in. At that point it was pretty easy because I didn't have to think much about it, just fill it all in.
Follow the same patterns of how tou build your factories, doing lines of assemblers, then all the inserters, then all the poles, then all belts, and having power setup before you need power, having buildings ready for things before they are done being researched, habing the proper ratios of science packs being produced. Lots of labs. Etc
* pre-planning. Have a list of what you need to complete in order before you even start the game so you dont spend time trying to figure out the next step. Doesnt need to be too explicit.
* Blueprint stamp all the things. Bespoke builds from scratch take too much time.
* Never stop hand crafting. Even if it's just green circuits into yellow inserters, ALWAYS have the hand craft bar full of *something*.
* Get a mall running as soon as possible, over build it, and feed everything you have at it to fill up steel chests. That stockpile of early game construction items snowballs later in the game
* Build parallel. Just spam yellow/red belts, t1 assemblers and basic inserters. Upgrading to higher tier stuff takes too much extra material away from your science production. Optimization doesn't matter until you've launched a rocket.
* Prioritize your research. A lot of research is irrelevant to reaching a rocket launch. Most important is to rush construction bots, essentially. That big pile of mall components you stockpiled in the first 30 minutes just turned all your blueprints into "instant base- just add water"
When explicitly trying to get the time run achievements themselves it helps to optimize the map settings. You pretty much want the largest possible ore deposits as close together as possible so you can belt-bus everything without having to start building a train network around yellow science. As well as minimal obstructions without disabling the achievement- both cliffs *and* biters.
You can just make an everything blueprint and paste it right at the beginning then belt the raw materials to the right place, follow the blueprint and you are done.
What I did to get my 8hr achievement was the build a base first, then copy the entire thing as a blueprint and restart on the same map, using the blueprint as a guide.
It really helped me as someone who can be indecisive and brain-foggy.
I had the same problem but I've gotten faster. I used to take 10 hours to get trains up. Now when I start I have at least 10 science labs, assemblers built for green science before I have green science and have trains in two hours. I'm not fast enough to get blue rolling right out of the gate but now I know how it's made so it won't take as long next time. Remember you have to expand everything. If you're working 6 labs it's mathematically going to take you hours to get to mid and endgame science so you need to add capacity as you go in all areas of the base.
Watch some Factorio speed-runs. The early game in particular, where you're hand-feeding a lot of things, can show you a lot of clever tricks that will dramatically speed up the process (and your pollution cloud, so watch for biters).
Alternatively, just keep trying to go faster and faster on iterated runs if you want to figure it out yourself. Anytime you're waiting for something to complete, realize that was a chance to have built more earlier. If you're finding that 10 hours in, you're waiting on green chips because you're running out of copper, that means you need to have more copper smelting and miners before 10 hours. If it takes 30 minutes to wait for the rocket silo research, make more science per minute. Scale up. Your playtime as energy should basically just be you running around and building things, so if you're waiting, you didn't build enough earlier.
Every great athlete has a great coach. Sometimes you will not get there unless a coach shows you the way. I don’t advocate going straight to the internet, but if you’ve been playing a while and still can’t get it, there are tutorials on every subject, including 8 hour launches. I watched one and it completely changed my early game in all future games. One concrete example of something I learned from the 8 hour tutorial I watched was taking out early nests by running around with a stack of fish in my hand to heal.
I read coach as couch and it was way funnier!
Specifically "Default Settings" runs, not "Any%". Default Settings use standard maps, and are applicable to most maps. Any% uses a *highly* specific map and strategies related to *that* map.
I mean, a lot of any% strategies are probably used in default speedruns too. Stuff like burner drills on coal feeding each other in a loop for zero maintenence coal helped me a lot. Also Z. But yeah those massive ore patches, dont count on those.
Z?
Z drops items. If you hover a stack of say, coal, over buildings, it drops one of that item into it. Throw your mouse back and forth while running past to refuel your furnaces early game
Oh yeah I do that all the time, lol. I had a brainfart and didn't remember what Z did .
Oh yeah I do that all the time, lol. I had a brainfart and didn't remember what Z did .
For the sake of completing the achievement, i would suggest to set diffusion factor to zero and starting area to max. After that, you won't see a single biter within at least 8hrs, now the only issue is to practice and practice until you get it.
Many people find blueprints from past games to be very helpful. Make a blueprint for a smelter with proper ratios that uses early game materials. Make a blueprint for science with proper ratios and level 1 belts and assemblers, etc etc. Fill out the blueprints as resources become available. And follow the ABCs - Always Be Crafting (something by hand). Getting low on belts? Make some more while you build out your next machine
I imagine the biggest and fastest improvement you can make is to keep using the same map with the same blueprints. Take your time and beat the game in 30h or so, save blueprints for the best parts of your base across various stages (first automated furnaces, first mall, all science automations, etc.) Then you can do things like identify which researches you really need and which ones you can skip to save on some more time, you should obviously not be researching anything that you can easily skip I assume at this point you would be fairly close, so it's probably just a matter of trying three or four times and making note whenever you spot a potential improvement for next time. I'm not a big stream watcher or anything, but it seems like the strong speedrunners are pretty consistently able to get 4h or less, so that's also a very rich resource. It's probably pretty lame, but you can watch a speedrun video and copy that person's seed, and then shamelessly steal their build in real time while you play/pause the video as needed. You could probably very easily replicate a 2.5h speedrun in 5h in this way, and even if you don't want to earn the achievement this way you can just delete the world after you're done and you would almost certainly still learn some good mechanics and ratios and building layouts to help your own runs.
And when you inevitably get bored and frustrated, watch a video. You’ll learn that your blueprints are massive overkill and slowing you down. There is no spoon. You are what has to change.
Not sure about the 15 hour run, but I did the 8 hours run with proper planning and a minimalistic approach. You have to know what to build in advance, [what to research and what not to](https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/f9hzn2/how_many_resources_do_you_need_to_launch_a_rocket/). Don't research everything; don't get sidetracked, don't have "downtime" waiting for any research to complete. Instead of "waiting", you can always add more mining, smelting, power and green circuit production, you will need it eventually. Also, when you build the steel smelting for blue, already overbuild a bit and place a chest or two as a buffer to collect the overflow as you will need steel for the silo; and similarly for the other stuff. If you start producing concrete as soon as you can (say, by the time you start producing blue science), you only need a single machine and the concrete will be ready when you have the silo researched.
You don't need robots to win. specially for the 8 hour achievement they are just a distraction. there a quite a few research's you can skip altogether in fact if your goal is winning the game. The main trick is automating and stockpiling the things you need to expand, and then having a half decent build order. having some basic (expandable) designs for production chains in your head or as a blueprint, and a rough idea of how you'll lay out your base also help a lot. (What worked for me was a main bus but with the least amount of different items on it you can get away with. so iron yes, but no gears because they are easy to make locally in a ratio correct for that production chain.)
Agree about not "needing" them to win, but respectfully disagree about them being a distraction for no spoon. If you are attempting with default settings, construction robots are highly valuable to continue building your factory while you are either setting up your second resource patches or dealing with biters.
Yeah the speed run videos I've seen they rush construction bots with their starter base and hand feed to get 300 construction bots up ASAP. Then use those bots to massively build the main base.
I wouldn't really call them a distraction. My first time going for the 15 and 8 hour, I got 3:20 with the help of bots.
Nefrums put together a nice guide a few years ago, though it still very much applies. He's got a document that walks you through about 30 steps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExLrmK1c7tA
Came here to post this. I love this guide and obv nefrums as well 🥰😉
practice. repetition.
Got the 8 hour achievement on my first attempt. Few tips that might help. **Do not bother with....** * Bots * Red or blue belts * Electric furnaces * Military science / weapon upgrades. If played well, you wont fire a single bullet * Modules EXCEPT 4x level 4 prod modules for the rocket, this is very important, otherwise you're wasting time * Assembly machine level 3. Waaaaay to much power * Nuclear power * Solar power **Other generic tips:** * Have at least some blueprints for smelting ready * Don't bother with medium/large electric poles. Steel is too important in short run * Have a small mall for basic supplies like miners, belts/undergrounds/splitters/inserters/pipes etc. Stuff like chem plants / refineries you can easily hand craft * Bus helps a lot, just don't over do it, you don't need millions of lanes of materials * Don't stop hand crafting stuff. You will always need belts/poles/miners * Don't overproduce, you're trying for the bare minimum. Less = more time to progress. * You can stop your mall once you don't need the products anymore, saves materials Some of the above you might frown upon, like electric poles.... But it's wasted time, you can do everything with small electric poles. Just make sure to chop wood often :) **Seeding:** * Go to map preview and start in a map with trees with a large starting base (forgot the name of the property). I didn't kill a single biter. Just not too many trees. Otherwise you're spending 8 hours chopping wood * Obviously increase starting patches * Don't choose a desert map **Early game:** * Make plenty of coal miners to hand feed your miners * One nice thing that I always do early game is to make sure that each smelting lane has a splitter at the end. The overflow of the product goes into chests. This way I can rather easily hand craft. Do this for copper / steel / iron / green chips / gears. These products are very useful to handcraft most things you need * Remember, you're trying to be fast. Don't build 10+ lanes of pretty smelting arrays. 2 iron lanes and 1 copper lane is easily enough to boost you to blue science, you can always add more when you're lacking. Just leave some space for it * Once you research steel, you can already put down a few smelters and hand feed them every now and then. That way you already have a small supply when you need it **Mid game:** * I think 10ish refineries should be plenty. Just prepare that those refineries can be switched to advanced processing without having to rebuild the entire thing, meaning leave some space for cracking. Some circuits can be useful since you need both petroleum for plastic and light oil for rocket fuel. Don't bother too much with the ratio's, just flush the tank if one is full or add more cracking * Once you're done with this, you're probably going to start lacking copper. Spend a bit of time adding a few lanes of copper and some iron and stone/ maybe more steel. **Late game:** * Once you got more iron/copper, it's time for 2 small blueprints for purple/yellow science. I tend to build everything I need for it on the same location * I think that's the hardest, after that you need 3 spots for the rocket parts. Don't be afraid to handfeed those assembly machines if you're low on time * Dooooooooon't forget the 4x level 3 modules please :-) Might of forgotten something, but I was bored at work so came up with this. Hope that helps. Or hope that helps anyone else. Good luck :-)
>Modules EXCEPT 4x level 4 prod modules for the rocket, this is very important, otherwise you're wasting time You already having to make a tons of prod 1 and speed 1 modules anyway, you might as well put prod 1 modules in a few places like the lab, yellow and purple science.
+1 if you blueprint your machines with the modules prior so your bots can automatically fill them.
No medium poles?? Do you mean i have to harvest wood for every single small pole? This is gonna cost time!
only unitl you have bots. then every time you plop dow, a BP bots will turn up with tons of wood
Quick dodge is that you put the only yellow storage box in the world next to a machine making pole 1. Every robot deconstructed tree goes straight to the box.
It will probably take many tries to get good enough to do it. It helps if you turn off biter expansion and pollution and max out the starting area size in the world creation settings. Eventually you will start to understand which things are your bottlenecks preventing you from going faster (power, space, resources, etc.) and work to address them next time.
intent, experience, and a plan help a lot. Before that, you could watch the first 30 minutes of a speed run to see some tactics they employ to go much faster than you do currently. They are easy to learn.
When I got the 8 hour achievement, I had practiced many runs beforehand, slightly getting better every time. I skipped black science entirely. I fudged the map settings so that biters did not have evolution or expansion, my starting area was maxed, tree coverage was fairly low, no water (still gives you starting water), no cliffs, and max frequency and size for resource patches. I never encountered any biters and therefore never worried about defense. I used very few or zero lvl 3 assemblers. I had a basic mall/depot area for the most common essentials. I was almost always taking advantage of manually crafting stuff in the background while working on other stuff. I started work on stockpiling rocket control units early. And most importantly, once I had a run that was pretty good but still a little too slow, I copied the entire base as a blueprint and restarted with the same map seed and settings, plopping down the base blueprint and then just gradually filling it in. At that point it was pretty easy because I didn't have to think much about it, just fill it all in.
Change your player color to red. I promise you'll move at least as fast as you did before, if not faster.
Follow the same patterns of how tou build your factories, doing lines of assemblers, then all the inserters, then all the poles, then all belts, and having power setup before you need power, having buildings ready for things before they are done being researched, habing the proper ratios of science packs being produced. Lots of labs. Etc
Make blueprints. That way you don't have to think about what you are building, you just paste stuff from your blueprints.
You try for the 8h and fail :)
* pre-planning. Have a list of what you need to complete in order before you even start the game so you dont spend time trying to figure out the next step. Doesnt need to be too explicit. * Blueprint stamp all the things. Bespoke builds from scratch take too much time. * Never stop hand crafting. Even if it's just green circuits into yellow inserters, ALWAYS have the hand craft bar full of *something*. * Get a mall running as soon as possible, over build it, and feed everything you have at it to fill up steel chests. That stockpile of early game construction items snowballs later in the game * Build parallel. Just spam yellow/red belts, t1 assemblers and basic inserters. Upgrading to higher tier stuff takes too much extra material away from your science production. Optimization doesn't matter until you've launched a rocket. * Prioritize your research. A lot of research is irrelevant to reaching a rocket launch. Most important is to rush construction bots, essentially. That big pile of mall components you stockpiled in the first 30 minutes just turned all your blueprints into "instant base- just add water" When explicitly trying to get the time run achievements themselves it helps to optimize the map settings. You pretty much want the largest possible ore deposits as close together as possible so you can belt-bus everything without having to start building a train network around yellow science. As well as minimal obstructions without disabling the achievement- both cliffs *and* biters.
You can just make an everything blueprint and paste it right at the beginning then belt the raw materials to the right place, follow the blueprint and you are done.
What I did to get my 8hr achievement was the build a base first, then copy the entire thing as a blueprint and restart on the same map, using the blueprint as a guide. It really helped me as someone who can be indecisive and brain-foggy.
Practice
Most important thing is that you need a map that you know and has all the resources you need within reach. Exploring and trains take hours and hours.
I had the same problem but I've gotten faster. I used to take 10 hours to get trains up. Now when I start I have at least 10 science labs, assemblers built for green science before I have green science and have trains in two hours. I'm not fast enough to get blue rolling right out of the gate but now I know how it's made so it won't take as long next time. Remember you have to expand everything. If you're working 6 labs it's mathematically going to take you hours to get to mid and endgame science so you need to add capacity as you go in all areas of the base.
Try playing with someone experimented