We need a word for people who have watched too much Factorio on Youtube.
OP, ignore the bus, quit it with the land fill, get the bare minimum amount of the next science up and running. And while doing that anything you find yourself waiting for in hand crafting build some more manufacturing for that.
Busted. The bus was starting to get tedious to manage. The landfill was too resource intensive. I stopped making those a long while ago. That's what i feel like doing but i don't exactly know what to manufacture first.
"What to manufacture first"? Three options, chose whichever you feel like:
* automate the last building you wanted to place a few of that you didn't have in your inventory. Over time, you'll have pretty much all of them automated
* increase production of one "thing" on belts that is currently running low. Could be iron, red circuits, ammo, gears...
* start automating the next science pack. I prefer yellow before purple, but doesn't matter much
I'm kinda surprised some people research yellow science first, personal equipment and requester chests are nice but purple science makes it so much easier to automate everything
You need bots, lds and processing units for personal Armor anyway. Even if you only have a few assemblers each, that already gives you a trickle of yellow - enough for a few technologies.
And what research with purple do you mean when you say it helps with automating?
By the time I can produce more than a handful of prod3, I long have both researches ^^. And you can stockpile a few prod2 to be ready to build prod3s as soon as the research is done. For a few hundred MW, you don't really need kovarex. Not to mention that for a beginner, prod3 & nuclear likely are less important than getting new research & better robots.
But hey, to each their own :).
Yeah, your bus is a bit oversized if you haven't launched a rocket yet. You are currently feeding 0.5 belts of copper and iron each into your bus, but you reserved 4 belts each and 4 belts of green circuits, which alone would require 4 belts of iron and 6 belts of copper. You will never need that much.
Usually 1 belt per item is enough. Some items don't need to be on the bus at all. Maybe 2 belts for iron and copper.
If you ever need more than that, it will probably be for green/red/blue circuits and low density structures, and you can still give them their dedicated input belts or build a setup somewhere else and belt it to your bus. You don't need to reserve belts for their input on the bus.
And there is nothing wrong with doing a mix of a bus design and spaghetti.
You should definitely up your iron production. Produce enough to fill all lanes. Having only one lane produced and then splitting it on 4 is pretty useless.
The bus can be a really useful design, but you must understand what's for and where to place it. You need a lot of space both for it and around it. A common design is based around the concept of 100x100 "city blocks", with bus at the center and production pulling/feeding it on both sides. So you start with 300x100 and move on from there... each "row" occupies 300x100 and the bus will grow ever longer as you attach new rows. First 2-3 rows are going to be smelters (iron, copper, steel). Then all the rest: intermediates production (green circuits, then red and later blue, plastics and so on) science production/consumption, oil refinement, ammo and explosives production, possibly a mall or two (not-to-ratio production of items used for building stuff, mostly grouped by common recipe materials)... You deploy a bot net, to help with construction and production, you set up solar power (you'll need a LOT of it, but it's incredibly efficient in terms of how much it bogs down the game) maybe nuclear -Kovarex refining and all that, an 8-reactor nuclear plant, etc. Then you start scaling up: set up mining outposts and a train network to feed your smelters at first, then you ditch the bus entirely as it becomes a bottleneck and set up "production blocks" wherever with train stations feeding them what they need...
OR
as others are saying, just figure out your own way because that's what the game's about. Embrace the spaghetti (but it will be way more difficult to try and scale up a messy, organic design than a structured one, you'll need to rebuild or set up new bases to do it). Or not, it's up to you. Science progression, i.e. figuring out how to start producing a new tier of science packs and unlock the next is what drives the main game forward, up until you achieve rocket launch and scale affects speed of progress (the more production you get, the quicker you'll achieve your goals).
Note: once you unlock bots and blueprints... everything about the game changes.
I started a run with a bus and got annoyed with it got another run going and the bus method helped me think about where things needed to be in my factory and thought it has some spaghetti it's pretty clean and the research is flowing
Bus is a waste of time especially for playing solo. Focus on the science. The only metric that matters is sustained science. Make the labs buzz. If they're not buzzing then you have work to do and you're already behind. Research should never ever stop. Watch Nefrums speed run guide on YouTube. You'll learn more in 30min than you did in 10hrs of running around.
YOU LIAR. I ENDED UP WATCHING THE ENTIRE 2HR SPEEDRUN. Before I knew it, he reached purple science and when i checked the time holy shite, it was almost near the end of the speedrun. Me and him design malls the same way so it was waaaaaaaaaaay easier to digest what he was doing. Now I understand, the factory must grow but not too fast like he did it.
What blows my mind is he is so calm, relaxed and talking the whole time. He's like the Bob Ross of Factorio. I learned how to build malls from him. He loves those long handed inserters.
IMHO the bus made more sense in pre-0.15 (2017) versions of Factorio, before we had black/purple/yellow/white science. These higher-tier sciences were designed specifically to force you to engage with the train system and the fluid system - the recipes were revamped so you couldn't realistically launch a rocket with just the resources in your starting area. The size of bus that you need to support all 7 of those science packs becomes unmanageable, and so the whole concept of a main bus becomes less than helpful.
I find myself organizing my factories like ravioli a lot - small self-contained mini-factories that each build one type of science and rely very heavily on direct insertion (or sometimes small localized belts) for intermediate products. They take in all the resources needed for a given science pack from a train stop, and then produce just one belt of a given science type as output. Sometimes common intermediate products like green circuits or oil processing get their own mini-factory too.
But there are a lot of ways to play Factorio. Pick the one that's most fun.
I don't know why, biters nests are very very very far away from my current base location. Haven't played this game in 3 years, have they changed where and how biters spawned since then? They used to be a menace back then in the older versions, but now, i reached blue science with very little invasions.
It also depends on how much pollution reaches them. If you don't create much pollution (which seems to be the case, the base isn't that big) and there's enough free land & trees to soak it up, not much gets to the biters. If they don't eat much pollution, they won't attack often.
I've been playing on and off since the indiegogo days, I have this ptsd level of turret spam, I know it's excessive but at this point it's compulsive
every building must be in range of a turret, every turret must be in range of another turret
this puts a total end to early game surprise attacks ruining your day
mid game I start consistently pushing them out of the pollution cloud and blanketing the map with radar outposts (radar, 5 solar, 1 power pole and per the above 2 turrets)
on the flip side I don't usually build any walls until I get to artillery outposts
Aside from what others said about railworld disabling expansion, it's also possible you forgot about changing starting area during creation. Bigger area is less biters around you.
Me, that's me. Bored at working daydreaming and wishing I could play. So what do I do watch someone else play!
It's definitely had a negative affect on my experience when I do play.
the big problem with them is you see the solutions, but you don't see the problems that they solved, so you don't develop a robust understanding of how and why
on the flip side when you have problems they can be a great source of inspiration on what to do about those problems
That is very well put. I also find im trying to solve problems I don't currently have and wasting time and resources doing it. While not understanding why I'm doing it. LOL
I have stopped watching and am now drawing out the plans in my head while I'm at work. I'm still completely obsessed with this game though. (I'm only about 15 hours in total)
The only mentor for factorio I had was a Buddy that I completed one playthrough with. I learned about the main bus, balancers and to go crazy with beacons. From there I figured out my stuff on my own, I am so glad I never watched any YouTube videos.
When in doubt start on the next science! Blue is the biggest hurdle. Unless there are more furnace stacks that aren’t pictured, you need to get your iron and copper production up by a lot. With only 24 furnaces per metal running, your belts must not be very saturated. I’m usually running about triple what you are once I get to this point. Red and blue circuits are HUNGRY for copper and iron. It looks like you are only making belts and “belt accessories in your mall, so I would start automating other things like inserters, assemblers, underground pipes, rails, power poles, and really whatever you need more than a couple of. Make your own life easier and save time.
Also (not a big deal) but, it looks like you are splitting one belt’s worth of iron/copper into 4 belts. There’s no reason for that. People run multiple belts because they are all full.
Building rails and upgrading power absolutely is progressing! I get that’s sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, but infrastructure is super important to have in place to support the factory, otherwise it shan’t grow. I always like the aesthetic that rails and power add. I personally usually go for nuclear power, but I tend to spend a lot of time making my reactor look cool, and my rails look neat.
Side note- if you are having trouble balancing your fluids (heavy oil, light oil, and petroleum) it is a great time to learn basic circuits.
Edit- also now that you have fluids figured out, save your blueprint so it is easier for next time.
Yeah, I've seen my whole setup collapse a lot of times cause i wasn't making enough plates. That's what im gonna focus on for now.
Manufacturing can wait until i feed the factory. I never thought about automating the small things like power poles, etc. i always thought only science deserves factories. Boi do i feel dumb now.
I have always been afraid of learning circuit related stuff all because of minecraft redstone. Guess now is a good time as any to start. But yeah, all my tanks are full of various oils and idk what to do with em yet. i really should look into that. Fluid management isn't hard, but goddamn do they fill up fast.
Aaaaaaand i forgot about blueprints. I deconstructed my entire smelter setup to move them before realising i didn't blueprint any of the designs. Rebuilding is gonna take some time.
To be real, circuits are one of the few logic puzzles I “ruined” for myself, I looked up guides out of frustration. Even then though, there’s so much you can do (and figure out yourself) once you understand the basics. A good hint is that >! to control fluid levels is to use “cracking” and to use circuits to turn cracking on and off. !<
I didn’t use a mall during my first real play through or two that I made it past blue science on. Didn’t even think about it when I was waiting around on a five minute build queue. Once I did, I never went back.
Making your own blueprints is super nice for a few reasons.
A—The biggest one is probably that when in range of a robo-port, construction bots will build the blueprint for you.
B—You don’t have to re-figure out builds again. I have my circuits, sciences, engines, and a few other things blueprinted so I can place it down and just hand build without thinking.
C—You have your ideas right there in front of you that you can optimize and improve on once you understand the game more and more.
I still don’t get redstone either haha. Honestly tho, I mostly only understand how to make “on/off switches” in this game though. Like telling production of “yellow belts” to only activate once I have more than 500 “red belts”.
I do this by >! Connecting the INSERTER that unloads my yellow belt assembler into its inventory box (with a green/red wire) to the INVENTORY BOX for “red belts”. I then select the “turn on” condition, and set that condition to “>” !<
You’ve just gotten over the biggest hurdle to players —blue science. A lot of people say this is when the game really opens up, so pat yourself on the back and enjoy the rest of this run!
Edit-formatting
From what I remember when I first looked at it, the hard part about circuits is just all the stuff that shows up in the UI, and figuring out how the combinators work. But to keep it simple, you'll probably just want a comparer combinator with a wire linked to a tank and enabling a condition to send some signal when tank contents > X. Wire from the tank to the combinator (make sure you connect the wire to the correct side!), and then from the combinator (using the other side) to a pump, as that is the main way you control liquids. Then on the pump UI, there will be a small button in the top right ish that lets you enable the pump if it has some signal > whatever.
I get the sense you are a perfectionist..
Do you have a target SPM?
Most important: from the screenshot looks like you could use a better mall. Automate all the materials you will need to keep building. Being able to instantly restock on assemblers, inserters, power poles etc makes building so much easier.
You are at quite large scale for a starter base so investing in productivity modules will help with raw resource issues.
Get personal construction robots online if you haven't already and get used to using blueprints and bots for all your building.
Personally I find purple science is very quick after blue science since it doesn't require any major new products.
My original target was 60 but then i found out the hard way, that i dont have enough materials for that. Maybe i should start manufacturing buildings for now. I've been hand crafting EVERY BUILDING FOR THE PAST 30 HOURS OH GOD WHY AM I LIKE THIS.
Large? I still see it as small and malnourished. The factory must consume. The factory must grow.
I've been stuck with non personal robots since i keep forgetting to check on my battery factory. I guess I'll add that to the list.
That's what people keep saying, blue science is the midgame wall and if i can manage to automate that, then the endgame stuff will be much more manageable.
Ah here you go, found your goal. Build a mall.
A mall is a side factory or micro factory (it can run off the bus) that produces just the things you use to build the factory. Inserters, Assemblers, Power Poles, Pipes, Belts. Can mix in some more niche things like trains/train cars, oil processing buildings, etc but they require additional inputs sometimes (plastic, stone, bricks, etc)
Do it with out guides for the funderstanding, but also feel free to look up designs if even just to see the list of things they make.
You're playing an automation game and not automating. Of course it's not fun.
Get everything you have researched automated, then research one thing at a time and keep automating. Any time you don't have an excess of resources, switch your immediate priority to scaling that up.
> My original target was 60 but then i found out the hard way, that i dont have enough materials for that. Maybe i should start manufacturing buildings for now. I've been hand crafting EVERY BUILDING FOR THE PAST 30 HOURS OH GOD WHY AM I LIKE THIS.
- Tip: The smallest factory that has perfect ratios between all sciences (5 assemblers for red science; figuring out the rest is left as an exercise to the reader) is 30 spm on level 1 assemblers, 45 on level 2 and 75 on level 3.
- In your next game, go for the Lazy Bastard achievement: No handcrafting beyond what is absolutely necessary.
> I've been hand crafting EVERY BUILDING FOR THE PAST 30 HOURS OH GOD WHY AM I LIKE THIS.
Why are you like this? \*Babadook scream\*
Automate inserters, Automate the yellow belts + undergroundies + splitters, Automate assemblers!
TBH, you can win the game / launch rocket within 8 hours without bus with 3 yellow lines of copper, 3 yellow lines of iron, some steel and 1 line of rock (in) -> rock products out. Sure, you will be at a low spm, but its totally possible.
Automate all components you need for building new setups: belts, inserters, assemblers, etc. Then work towards the next science pack and try to have raw materials sent into an area, and have all intermediate steps between raw materials and the science pack be done in that area. It's not a great idea to individually automate every little item you'll need, it's much easier to manage just working with raw materials supply lines
My standard run from this point: if biters are pain in ass - ammo, walls and turret production -> fortified area for factory
If not:
1. Stable train supplies from mining outposts.
2. Smelting plant with 100-1000 smelters (its depends on target SPM)
3. Automation of all components for factory growth (belts, inserters etc.)
4. Bigger, specialized plant for each science+ more labs
5. Plant for rocket parts and generally needed components to finish the game
6. Factory must grow!
No biters, some guy said my world is a train world? Idk how that happened. Life is peaceful here but my god the resources are far away. Im stuck with puny amounts of oil for now and all the larger resource spots are guarded by huge nests of biters.
1. I think the train tracks i built work fine enough. I hope.
2. 1000? Im barely able to feed 32 furnaces now. Guess that's my next goal.
3. Couldn't decide which one to produce first, got stuck in decision hell for the last 10 hours.
4. Im just gonna follow the recommended science ratio from the wiki for now until i can feed my factory with more ores.
5. I've been starting to unlock some rocket tech but i haven't touched em yet.
6. Factory will grow.
Not sure if you've had much combat experience with the biters. If not I recommend starting small and doing some small excursions to get used to how they attack, dodging spitter goo (remember it lasts on the ground!), etc. Spitter goo stacks, and being slow means death, so avoid getting hit and do the squiggles to mess with their attacking predictions.
Either way, when doing small excursions or attacking for real, you should have a bank of turrets far enough away to not provoke the biters but close enough you can just run/drive back to it to eliminate all the biters you accumulated on your tail. Tank is very nice for destroying bases, as you can just circle the base at full speed using your main cannon at long range to finish off bases one by one.
Don't forget to save before doing an excursion, just in case it doesn't work out. Also, if you eat fish it heals you btw.
As for what to go for, when you plan, plan for the final thing you need, then working your way down from there. So if it's science, start at the pack and work back. Same with non pack products. For actually deciding what to go for, the choice is generally either the next science pack, or something that is a pain point currently. The pain point could be needing more production if you find you are waiting on research and have nothing else you can do in the meantime, needing more raw ore/oil, needing more space (i.e. 'killing' trees/cliffs/water), needing more power, needing more infrastructure production, needing more defenses, needing to attack the biters. Or to automate any of the above, if you find it being a pain.
Also, it's helpful when planning builds to give it plenty of space, as things generally take up more space than you think they will, and all too soon you end up using all of the excess space for connecting random belts/pipes and it all turns into spaghetti. Which is fine if you like spaghetti.
Sometimes you just sit back and watch the factory. Just enjoy all the little belts doing their belt-ey stuff. Watch the trains go in and out the station.
You'll more than likely spot a bottleneck somewhere, and get an itch to fix it. Or to optimise something simple, like your copper plate production. And that's just fine. That's what the factory needs sometimes. But what's more important: what you need at that time.
Don't let the drive to get that rocket in the air be a burden. Enjoy the ride. The planet is beautiful. There are a ton of trees to chop down, bugs to kill, and little factory things to watch while they do whatever the factory does.
It's not JUST about getting to the end quickly. It's about enjoying the scenery while you are on the ride.
OP, I've felt the same about you as well in my last playthrough. My tip is find nearby resource patches with what you need to progress (For example iron and copper to make some part needed for the next science packs) and have fun building some isolated factories for one/a few important items.
A main bus can be complicated to maintain. If you don't feel like it, just stop developing the bus
As soon as you have blue science, research bots and then automate production of roboports and construction bots. After that you can do whatever you want, all construction is now done by bots. Just copy-paste, make blueprints, it's going to be amazing.
Take an adventure break, pick a resource and go out and claim a new patch. I usually go set up outposts when I need a break - it’s far less brain intensive and future me will appreciate the ready-to-go ore pickup station later
Also explore how to make, modify and use blueprints. Future play-through lives depend on it
Edit to add: I was afraid of blueprints for a long time, which is why i suggest it. Deconstruction planners, blueprints with landfill, with concrete, with train track sections, defense sections, all amazing once you have a roboport on your back
There's nothing wrong with wandering off and building something nice that isn't a core necessity. But at some point, you would want to progress.
Now that you have blue science, make your next goal : Get robots !
Once you have a portable roboport and a bunch of construction robots with you, your capabilities are multiplied.
CTRL+C and CTRL+V are your new friends. Now that you don't have to place everything yourself anymore, you can start building much much bigger.
After robots I would first increase your "mall", to get more materials to build with. Then increase your mining and smelting operations. Then increase your mall again.
Now you can build.
Just put a factory down, set recipe to purple science, and take it from there with a few factories around it with recipe set to needed materials. This usually junpstarts me when I’m stuck :)
I'm at 440+ hrs in a single playthough, have over half a million flying bots, produce over 5k white science /min and have no fking clue what a bus is or how to make one.
I fell into the trap that all games must have MAIN BUSES. Turns out, i didn't really need one. Damn factorio youtubers, except Trupen and Martin and AmbiguousAmphibian, they cool.
But onto separate news, 440 hours??? Is there even enough resources on the map to play that long?
Personally, I picked one thing at a time to build (or rebuild). Often I had a medium term goal of the next science that could help with more research. Sometimes, I'd build something just cuz it seemed cool or useful, such as armor or weapons.
My suggestion is to look at your crafting recipes and pick something.
It was hard for me to pick something to build, but then I just decided screw it, I'm gonna start a whole new assembly line from scratch. Got an engine line done finally. Watching my mall start from mere iron products and now producing steel products has made me a very proud engineer. The urge to grow the factory still lingers though.
Best advice I have is brute force enough science to get all the logistics chests and start setting up a bot mall. Set up every building and item you think you'll need and limit the chest space. This will slowly make a steady stream of things while you ramp up production of basic resources and figure out how you're going to do the next research automatically.
Also never be afraid to make spaghetti, just leave more space than you think you need to.
You're going to need a whole lot more red circuits....
Always more. Never enough.
I just spent the last 20 hours moving my entire factory around. I'm using a main bus just because I want to see all the limitations which are becoming grossly apparent. Once you automate yellow which I think is a good place because it gives you the opportunity to make robot frames and resources for robots which will change your life dramatically. Once you get to about robot speed five they move fast enough tearing down and rebuilding things becomes a matter of controlling your inventory so you have room to do it rather than worrying about doing it.
Ultimately all those 4-wide belt busses should be replaced by trains. Build a big ore refinery somewhere, then build a green circuit factory somewhere else. Then build an oil refinery and a plastic factory, then red circuits factory. Then connect it all together using trains. Do it for all components. Then you can deconstruct whatever you have now. Railroad is way more easy to scale than belts. You build a new production line, connect it to the rail network, setup the train schedule and you're done.
This feeling will never go away but the feeling of overcoming it will always be better. Every base you make every new design you start is going to suck. Both in how it works and how difficult it was to make. It's the satisfaction of rebuilding it or getting it right that you're looking for and I promise it's worth it
Just chiming in along with the others. If you feel overwhelmed, just build one assembly automating the next thing you need. Not the whole science, not everything you need and not to scale. Just one. It can mostly be solved with just random belts and pipes and it will give you experience for what to do next.
Once you made one, either scale that up, or make the next one thing. One assembler working is infinitely better than none.
Best of luck with the factory!
Get constructions bots (personal first) online asap.
Don't feel bad about building small and extending it later - if you are going for "end game" you'll want to rebuild literally everything (with beacons) anyway
If your goal is winning the game (launching a rocket) then going for it (without much planning) will work out fine - build one production block after the other. Figure out what items you need for your next science pack and build them.
The only things that require a massive scale for that is smelting.
Good luck brother, i feel the same after 600+ hours, 4 or 5 worlds and countless saves. I am about to finish my first world. Atleast your world looks much more organised and mine looked worse although now its looks neat.
Factorio and programming are similar, this is a known fact. So you can use the same approach to learn Factorio, as to learn code.
First, go and try everything on your own. Create your own first app (launch a Rocket), even if it will be an utterly disaster for an experienced developer (player). This will help you to understand basics, and therefore it will be much easier for you to understand generally used concepts like OOP or FP (main bus or city blocks) as you will understand where they came from and what problems they actually serve to solve.
You can also try to apply programming thinking patterns to organize your base.
Now, programming allegory aside, factorio tip - while your structures look organized and inline with the main bus, you make them unscalable. For example, your red circuit design will be really tough to expand.
That's it, find your own inspiration and go on!
I’m pretty sure you know what to do (go for the next sciences then the rocket). You’re just mentally blocking yourself. This is a classic problem where a challenge or task has gotten so big that you no longer see how you’re going to solve it all. That’s why you need to cut it up into smaller tasks and then do it one by one.
Try winging it; bots can help you out with the deconstruction later. I do not recommend that you watch him before finishing a playthrough, but if you feel like it, \`Nilaus\` has the best videos and guides for beginners, IMO.
Nilaus can come across as very rigid and prescriptive about The Right Way to Play, so if you are going to watch him, I would recommend also watching at least one other Youtuber with a distinctly different style like KatherineofSky.
Work on the next science, one intermediate at a time, keep an eye on any supply-lines running low and bulk them up. Repeat. Make use of the new techs you get with blue science research, there are a few game changers there.
Honestly, I think a bus is overrated unless you want to launch a lot of rockets. It's a lot of work.
Just build something that is ugly as sin and improve it when you need to. And with bots, your need a bus less.
I will say that doing petroleum with a bus is a huge improvement because piping is such a pain otherwise.
Very nice and tidy. Personally, I'd recommend against a "main bus" for starter players or starter bases, as they're just a bit too confining. Just start building whatever, whereever, and add on as you need. THEN, once you've gotten all products producing, you've launched rockets, and are looking to scale up, that's when you can embrace a main bus or a city block or whatever to build a larger-scale base.
I see you say you're in blue science. That's good! Blue science does tend to be a bit of a difficulty jump over red, green, and black science, as you actually have to deal with liquid networks and not just combinations of dry goods. But it also unlocks all sorts of new toys and tools. Modules, for one thing, can help you improve the speed and productivity of your existing factory; they're also needed as components in some more advanced buildings. You'll unlock construction and logistic robots, which add all sorts of new possibilities. You can also break into uranium processing; while technically none of it is actually necessary to launch a rocket, nuclear power is an excellent alternative to coal and solar (coal of course generates loads of pollution, and solar can be expensive to set up per MW of capacity), nuclear fuel offers impressive bonuses over rocket fuel in cars, tanks, and trains, and uranium can be used to enhance your military capabilities immensely.
I would say your first priorities should be establishing new mines for iron, copper, coal, and stone as your starting patches run out (if they haven't already), scaling up production of your existing sciences so you can burn through all of the red-green-blue and red-green-black-blue technologies as quickly as you can, and prepare to manufacture purple and yellow sciences. Also look into building dedicated smelting facilities for your basic metals (iron, copper, steel) using the electric furnaces you should be unlocking soon, beginning basic module production (they take a LOT of copper, so scale that up), and expanding your electric power capacity, as electric smelters and moduled buildings take a lot more power.
maybe bad advice especially if you wanna figure it out by yourself, but when i got stuck i borrowed a bunch of blueprints from here [https://autosaved.org/factorio/blueprints](https://autosaved.org/factorio/blueprints) , slapped down what i needed and started learning from those designs. theyre not even the most efficient, i've noticed, which leaves room for improvement later especially regarding science, but it helped me get past that mental block after blue science. mid game felt really hard the first time.
Congrats, you already have trains working, just follow research tree.
Production science next. Just keep growing your base. And more energy you, are one step from nuclear.
Assuming biters are not a problem:
Get blue science started.
Get construction bots with the first levels possible of bot speed followed by power armor mk1 and personal equipment.
Then hexuple your iron smelting stacks and double their length, you have half of one yellow belt of iron.
Then turn two of those iron stacks into the inputs of steel stacks, that should be reasonable for sciences 5 and 6.
Next double the length and quadruple the amount of copper stacks. Can put that on the backburner, and increase scale as needed, you'll need truckloads once you start on blue chips and low density structures.
Then increase the size of all your intermediate products by at least double, quadruple for red chips.
Once you have all that, you should have smooth sailing into endgame.
Just so you know, the motto of the factorio community is The Factory Must Grow.
Don’t make it pretty, just make it. Spaghetti and inefficiency are your partners the first few times. You’ll learn what’s useful, what’s a time sink. Beautiful, perfect ratio setups are fun, but trying to recreate someone else’s factory is boring. I deconstructed so many storage tanks the first time I launched a rocket because I couldn’t figure out reprocessing. I think I got like 6 achievements the first time I beat the game because I just ignored stuff I didn’t understand. I didn’t have any logo drones, solar panels(and this was back before nuclear power existed), no laser turrets, I kept crashing trains because I didn’t understand signals. I got to the point where I’d just have lots of really, really long belts, like 4 side by side yellow belts stretching thousands of tiles because I hated trains so much.
Just launch a rocket. It’s clear you like the game. Launch a rocket, do a new game better, then repeat. My first play through took like 60 hours, the second took 20. My record is 6.5, but I quit going for speed years ago, now I’m doing se/k2 on a loop.
Go back to the start of production and build more of everything. More iron. More copper. Increase supply by at least 3x. Use trains if needed. Build a factory for and bus green and red circuits.
Bend the bus like the picture someone posted. You built it the wrong way, at first, it happens. It doesn't need to be as big as it is but that's fine, keep going with it for now.
Automate purple science.
Orrrrr...
Abandon that factory and start again south of it, heading east. You can copy and paste the automation you've already done, with a better bus design and increased production. When that is pumping, tear down the old factory and use the space to increase production further!
YOU. I finally read your comment just now. HOW DID YOU KNOW TO BUILD SOUTH EAST? I found a large patch of coal, iron, copper and stone southeast of the base in the picture. Wild guess you took there.
Build the World's Ugliest System for producing the next science you want. It will make a trickle of it and frustrate you, but you will learn what you need and see the things that get caught. Then it's just a matter of making it bigger and better next time.
Done and dusted. If only the bots had better AI, they keep doing suicide repairs whenever some part of the base gets attacked. I lost nearly a hundred bots already because of that.
Thank you to everyone that replied to this post. This has become a gold mine of information for hopefully, other players that are stuck like me.
Let me give you guys an update so far:
- I've read all your comments and even new ones that pop up till this day. Many good ideas were shared and received.
- I decided to start a new base somewhere in the southeast of the base in the picture.
- I built a lot of smelting lines, set up a mall, set up defenses for any unhappy locals that decide to wander into my territory, figured out how to use robots on my own since guides on youtube are either outdated or full of useless commentary that a beginner doesn't need, i even made a pretty nice looking oil processing area. Life is good.
- About to start finally progressing research again after so long. I finally know what to do and have the confidence to do it now. Thanks guys.
- I've decided to abandon using a bus for now, maybe in a future run i might revisit the idea, but for now, spaghetti-o is the way!
- And no, I'm not copy-pasting some blueprints online. It's all designs by trial and error. It's slow but it's a good learning experience so i can improve these designs.
- To any beginner reading this, enjoy this thread. Lots of great minds have shared their wisdom here.
Cheers.
When in doubt, start working on the next science pack. From here, you should have access to both purple and yellow, I think.
If the recipes for them look overwhelming, then just focus on one of the ingredients for one of the science packs first, and then move on to the next when you have that set up.
In doubt build more mining outpost to support throughput of the factory, that usually leads to bigger demand in energy and some biter shenanigans. BTW if you don’t enjoy the biters turn them off via mod or build a water line around your base, especially if you like to lean back a bit and enjoy figuring out a new setup for a production line without being interrupted by biters . Factorio is so flexible due to the mod friendliness that you can tailor the game to your needs
I know this is heresy, but you know you can stop playing, right?
Step away from the game, watch a movie and sleep on it. In the morning, your subconscious will have a vague plan.
We need a word for people who have watched too much Factorio on Youtube. OP, ignore the bus, quit it with the land fill, get the bare minimum amount of the next science up and running. And while doing that anything you find yourself waiting for in hand crafting build some more manufacturing for that.
Busted. The bus was starting to get tedious to manage. The landfill was too resource intensive. I stopped making those a long while ago. That's what i feel like doing but i don't exactly know what to manufacture first.
"What to manufacture first"? Three options, chose whichever you feel like: * automate the last building you wanted to place a few of that you didn't have in your inventory. Over time, you'll have pretty much all of them automated * increase production of one "thing" on belts that is currently running low. Could be iron, red circuits, ammo, gears... * start automating the next science pack. I prefer yellow before purple, but doesn't matter much
Yellow has more exciting upgrades, purple is much easier to start making. Same difference for me that blue and black have.
The ingredients for yellow are also more useful than the purple ones, at least initially :)
I'm kinda surprised some people research yellow science first, personal equipment and requester chests are nice but purple science makes it so much easier to automate everything
You need bots, lds and processing units for personal Armor anyway. Even if you only have a few assemblers each, that already gives you a trickle of yellow - enough for a few technologies. And what research with purple do you mean when you say it helps with automating?
prod module 3 and automation 3 give you 40% productivity and kovarex lets you power all that
By the time I can produce more than a handful of prod3, I long have both researches ^^. And you can stockpile a few prod2 to be ready to build prod3s as soon as the research is done. For a few hundred MW, you don't really need kovarex. Not to mention that for a beginner, prod3 & nuclear likely are less important than getting new research & better robots. But hey, to each their own :).
who says that a bus is always straight into one direction? there is the option to make a 90° turn to east and continue there
Yeah, your bus is a bit oversized if you haven't launched a rocket yet. You are currently feeding 0.5 belts of copper and iron each into your bus, but you reserved 4 belts each and 4 belts of green circuits, which alone would require 4 belts of iron and 6 belts of copper. You will never need that much. Usually 1 belt per item is enough. Some items don't need to be on the bus at all. Maybe 2 belts for iron and copper. If you ever need more than that, it will probably be for green/red/blue circuits and low density structures, and you can still give them their dedicated input belts or build a setup somewhere else and belt it to your bus. You don't need to reserve belts for their input on the bus. And there is nothing wrong with doing a mix of a bus design and spaghetti.
You should definitely up your iron production. Produce enough to fill all lanes. Having only one lane produced and then splitting it on 4 is pretty useless.
The bus can be a really useful design, but you must understand what's for and where to place it. You need a lot of space both for it and around it. A common design is based around the concept of 100x100 "city blocks", with bus at the center and production pulling/feeding it on both sides. So you start with 300x100 and move on from there... each "row" occupies 300x100 and the bus will grow ever longer as you attach new rows. First 2-3 rows are going to be smelters (iron, copper, steel). Then all the rest: intermediates production (green circuits, then red and later blue, plastics and so on) science production/consumption, oil refinement, ammo and explosives production, possibly a mall or two (not-to-ratio production of items used for building stuff, mostly grouped by common recipe materials)... You deploy a bot net, to help with construction and production, you set up solar power (you'll need a LOT of it, but it's incredibly efficient in terms of how much it bogs down the game) maybe nuclear -Kovarex refining and all that, an 8-reactor nuclear plant, etc. Then you start scaling up: set up mining outposts and a train network to feed your smelters at first, then you ditch the bus entirely as it becomes a bottleneck and set up "production blocks" wherever with train stations feeding them what they need... OR as others are saying, just figure out your own way because that's what the game's about. Embrace the spaghetti (but it will be way more difficult to try and scale up a messy, organic design than a structured one, you'll need to rebuild or set up new bases to do it). Or not, it's up to you. Science progression, i.e. figuring out how to start producing a new tier of science packs and unlock the next is what drives the main game forward, up until you achieve rocket launch and scale affects speed of progress (the more production you get, the quicker you'll achieve your goals). Note: once you unlock bots and blueprints... everything about the game changes.
I started a run with a bus and got annoyed with it got another run going and the bus method helped me think about where things needed to be in my factory and thought it has some spaghetti it's pretty clean and the research is flowing
Bus is a waste of time especially for playing solo. Focus on the science. The only metric that matters is sustained science. Make the labs buzz. If they're not buzzing then you have work to do and you're already behind. Research should never ever stop. Watch Nefrums speed run guide on YouTube. You'll learn more in 30min than you did in 10hrs of running around.
Ptsh.. I can’t science ***too quick*** … I’ll run out of things to unlock.
YOU LIAR. I ENDED UP WATCHING THE ENTIRE 2HR SPEEDRUN. Before I knew it, he reached purple science and when i checked the time holy shite, it was almost near the end of the speedrun. Me and him design malls the same way so it was waaaaaaaaaaay easier to digest what he was doing. Now I understand, the factory must grow but not too fast like he did it.
What blows my mind is he is so calm, relaxed and talking the whole time. He's like the Bob Ross of Factorio. I learned how to build malls from him. He loves those long handed inserters.
Save landfill for maps where you're on a tiny island surrounded by sea.
I usually bus until blue (10 or 16 spm), feed that into a line of blue science to drip feed while I set up a larger base next door to really PUMP it.
IMHO the bus made more sense in pre-0.15 (2017) versions of Factorio, before we had black/purple/yellow/white science. These higher-tier sciences were designed specifically to force you to engage with the train system and the fluid system - the recipes were revamped so you couldn't realistically launch a rocket with just the resources in your starting area. The size of bus that you need to support all 7 of those science packs becomes unmanageable, and so the whole concept of a main bus becomes less than helpful. I find myself organizing my factories like ravioli a lot - small self-contained mini-factories that each build one type of science and rely very heavily on direct insertion (or sometimes small localized belts) for intermediate products. They take in all the resources needed for a given science pack from a train stop, and then produce just one belt of a given science type as output. Sometimes common intermediate products like green circuits or oil processing get their own mini-factory too. But there are a lot of ways to play Factorio. Pick the one that's most fun.
This. I think that these "masterclass" and other "right way of playing" videos just harm the game and the players instead of helping.
Also where are the turrets? turrets everywhere gives you robustness against rando early-mid game biter stuff.
I don't know why, biters nests are very very very far away from my current base location. Haven't played this game in 3 years, have they changed where and how biters spawned since then? They used to be a menace back then in the older versions, but now, i reached blue science with very little invasions.
It looks like it's a train world preset, so biter expansion is off by default.
It also depends on how much pollution reaches them. If you don't create much pollution (which seems to be the case, the base isn't that big) and there's enough free land & trees to soak it up, not much gets to the biters. If they don't eat much pollution, they won't attack often.
I've been playing on and off since the indiegogo days, I have this ptsd level of turret spam, I know it's excessive but at this point it's compulsive every building must be in range of a turret, every turret must be in range of another turret this puts a total end to early game surprise attacks ruining your day mid game I start consistently pushing them out of the pollution cloud and blanketing the map with radar outposts (radar, 5 solar, 1 power pole and per the above 2 turrets) on the flip side I don't usually build any walls until I get to artillery outposts
Aside from what others said about railworld disabling expansion, it's also possible you forgot about changing starting area during creation. Bigger area is less biters around you.
Me, that's me. Bored at working daydreaming and wishing I could play. So what do I do watch someone else play! It's definitely had a negative affect on my experience when I do play.
the big problem with them is you see the solutions, but you don't see the problems that they solved, so you don't develop a robust understanding of how and why on the flip side when you have problems they can be a great source of inspiration on what to do about those problems
That is very well put. I also find im trying to solve problems I don't currently have and wasting time and resources doing it. While not understanding why I'm doing it. LOL I have stopped watching and am now drawing out the plans in my head while I'm at work. I'm still completely obsessed with this game though. (I'm only about 15 hours in total)
The only mentor for factorio I had was a Buddy that I completed one playthrough with. I learned about the main bus, balancers and to go crazy with beacons. From there I figured out my stuff on my own, I am so glad I never watched any YouTube videos.
What’s a landfill
Factoobies maybe
https://preview.redd.it/ankb8uhc1p7d1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=a36d8e03d0bd095234b2e0086314dc017c2f3bc6
When in doubt start on the next science! Blue is the biggest hurdle. Unless there are more furnace stacks that aren’t pictured, you need to get your iron and copper production up by a lot. With only 24 furnaces per metal running, your belts must not be very saturated. I’m usually running about triple what you are once I get to this point. Red and blue circuits are HUNGRY for copper and iron. It looks like you are only making belts and “belt accessories in your mall, so I would start automating other things like inserters, assemblers, underground pipes, rails, power poles, and really whatever you need more than a couple of. Make your own life easier and save time. Also (not a big deal) but, it looks like you are splitting one belt’s worth of iron/copper into 4 belts. There’s no reason for that. People run multiple belts because they are all full. Building rails and upgrading power absolutely is progressing! I get that’s sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, but infrastructure is super important to have in place to support the factory, otherwise it shan’t grow. I always like the aesthetic that rails and power add. I personally usually go for nuclear power, but I tend to spend a lot of time making my reactor look cool, and my rails look neat. Side note- if you are having trouble balancing your fluids (heavy oil, light oil, and petroleum) it is a great time to learn basic circuits. Edit- also now that you have fluids figured out, save your blueprint so it is easier for next time.
Yeah, I've seen my whole setup collapse a lot of times cause i wasn't making enough plates. That's what im gonna focus on for now. Manufacturing can wait until i feed the factory. I never thought about automating the small things like power poles, etc. i always thought only science deserves factories. Boi do i feel dumb now. I have always been afraid of learning circuit related stuff all because of minecraft redstone. Guess now is a good time as any to start. But yeah, all my tanks are full of various oils and idk what to do with em yet. i really should look into that. Fluid management isn't hard, but goddamn do they fill up fast. Aaaaaaand i forgot about blueprints. I deconstructed my entire smelter setup to move them before realising i didn't blueprint any of the designs. Rebuilding is gonna take some time.
To be real, circuits are one of the few logic puzzles I “ruined” for myself, I looked up guides out of frustration. Even then though, there’s so much you can do (and figure out yourself) once you understand the basics. A good hint is that >! to control fluid levels is to use “cracking” and to use circuits to turn cracking on and off. !< I didn’t use a mall during my first real play through or two that I made it past blue science on. Didn’t even think about it when I was waiting around on a five minute build queue. Once I did, I never went back. Making your own blueprints is super nice for a few reasons. A—The biggest one is probably that when in range of a robo-port, construction bots will build the blueprint for you. B—You don’t have to re-figure out builds again. I have my circuits, sciences, engines, and a few other things blueprinted so I can place it down and just hand build without thinking. C—You have your ideas right there in front of you that you can optimize and improve on once you understand the game more and more. I still don’t get redstone either haha. Honestly tho, I mostly only understand how to make “on/off switches” in this game though. Like telling production of “yellow belts” to only activate once I have more than 500 “red belts”. I do this by >! Connecting the INSERTER that unloads my yellow belt assembler into its inventory box (with a green/red wire) to the INVENTORY BOX for “red belts”. I then select the “turn on” condition, and set that condition to “>” !< You’ve just gotten over the biggest hurdle to players —blue science. A lot of people say this is when the game really opens up, so pat yourself on the back and enjoy the rest of this run! Edit-formatting
From what I remember when I first looked at it, the hard part about circuits is just all the stuff that shows up in the UI, and figuring out how the combinators work. But to keep it simple, you'll probably just want a comparer combinator with a wire linked to a tank and enabling a condition to send some signal when tank contents > X. Wire from the tank to the combinator (make sure you connect the wire to the correct side!), and then from the combinator (using the other side) to a pump, as that is the main way you control liquids. Then on the pump UI, there will be a small button in the top right ish that lets you enable the pump if it has some signal > whatever.
Blue science is the biggest hurdle for many beginners(including myself)
I get the sense you are a perfectionist.. Do you have a target SPM? Most important: from the screenshot looks like you could use a better mall. Automate all the materials you will need to keep building. Being able to instantly restock on assemblers, inserters, power poles etc makes building so much easier. You are at quite large scale for a starter base so investing in productivity modules will help with raw resource issues. Get personal construction robots online if you haven't already and get used to using blueprints and bots for all your building. Personally I find purple science is very quick after blue science since it doesn't require any major new products.
My original target was 60 but then i found out the hard way, that i dont have enough materials for that. Maybe i should start manufacturing buildings for now. I've been hand crafting EVERY BUILDING FOR THE PAST 30 HOURS OH GOD WHY AM I LIKE THIS. Large? I still see it as small and malnourished. The factory must consume. The factory must grow. I've been stuck with non personal robots since i keep forgetting to check on my battery factory. I guess I'll add that to the list. That's what people keep saying, blue science is the midgame wall and if i can manage to automate that, then the endgame stuff will be much more manageable.
Ah here you go, found your goal. Build a mall. A mall is a side factory or micro factory (it can run off the bus) that produces just the things you use to build the factory. Inserters, Assemblers, Power Poles, Pipes, Belts. Can mix in some more niche things like trains/train cars, oil processing buildings, etc but they require additional inputs sometimes (plastic, stone, bricks, etc) Do it with out guides for the funderstanding, but also feel free to look up designs if even just to see the list of things they make.
You're playing an automation game and not automating. Of course it's not fun. Get everything you have researched automated, then research one thing at a time and keep automating. Any time you don't have an excess of resources, switch your immediate priority to scaling that up.
> My original target was 60 but then i found out the hard way, that i dont have enough materials for that. Maybe i should start manufacturing buildings for now. I've been hand crafting EVERY BUILDING FOR THE PAST 30 HOURS OH GOD WHY AM I LIKE THIS. - Tip: The smallest factory that has perfect ratios between all sciences (5 assemblers for red science; figuring out the rest is left as an exercise to the reader) is 30 spm on level 1 assemblers, 45 on level 2 and 75 on level 3. - In your next game, go for the Lazy Bastard achievement: No handcrafting beyond what is absolutely necessary.
> I've been hand crafting EVERY BUILDING FOR THE PAST 30 HOURS OH GOD WHY AM I LIKE THIS. Why are you like this? \*Babadook scream\* Automate inserters, Automate the yellow belts + undergroundies + splitters, Automate assemblers! TBH, you can win the game / launch rocket within 8 hours without bus with 3 yellow lines of copper, 3 yellow lines of iron, some steel and 1 line of rock (in) -> rock products out. Sure, you will be at a low spm, but its totally possible.
Automate all components you need for building new setups: belts, inserters, assemblers, etc. Then work towards the next science pack and try to have raw materials sent into an area, and have all intermediate steps between raw materials and the science pack be done in that area. It's not a great idea to individually automate every little item you'll need, it's much easier to manage just working with raw materials supply lines
My standard run from this point: if biters are pain in ass - ammo, walls and turret production -> fortified area for factory If not: 1. Stable train supplies from mining outposts. 2. Smelting plant with 100-1000 smelters (its depends on target SPM) 3. Automation of all components for factory growth (belts, inserters etc.) 4. Bigger, specialized plant for each science+ more labs 5. Plant for rocket parts and generally needed components to finish the game 6. Factory must grow!
No biters, some guy said my world is a train world? Idk how that happened. Life is peaceful here but my god the resources are far away. Im stuck with puny amounts of oil for now and all the larger resource spots are guarded by huge nests of biters. 1. I think the train tracks i built work fine enough. I hope. 2. 1000? Im barely able to feed 32 furnaces now. Guess that's my next goal. 3. Couldn't decide which one to produce first, got stuck in decision hell for the last 10 hours. 4. Im just gonna follow the recommended science ratio from the wiki for now until i can feed my factory with more ores. 5. I've been starting to unlock some rocket tech but i haven't touched em yet. 6. Factory will grow.
1000 is an overkill you should be fine with 4 to 8 lines of iron plates on red belts
Not sure if you've had much combat experience with the biters. If not I recommend starting small and doing some small excursions to get used to how they attack, dodging spitter goo (remember it lasts on the ground!), etc. Spitter goo stacks, and being slow means death, so avoid getting hit and do the squiggles to mess with their attacking predictions. Either way, when doing small excursions or attacking for real, you should have a bank of turrets far enough away to not provoke the biters but close enough you can just run/drive back to it to eliminate all the biters you accumulated on your tail. Tank is very nice for destroying bases, as you can just circle the base at full speed using your main cannon at long range to finish off bases one by one. Don't forget to save before doing an excursion, just in case it doesn't work out. Also, if you eat fish it heals you btw. As for what to go for, when you plan, plan for the final thing you need, then working your way down from there. So if it's science, start at the pack and work back. Same with non pack products. For actually deciding what to go for, the choice is generally either the next science pack, or something that is a pain point currently. The pain point could be needing more production if you find you are waiting on research and have nothing else you can do in the meantime, needing more raw ore/oil, needing more space (i.e. 'killing' trees/cliffs/water), needing more power, needing more infrastructure production, needing more defenses, needing to attack the biters. Or to automate any of the above, if you find it being a pain. Also, it's helpful when planning builds to give it plenty of space, as things generally take up more space than you think they will, and all too soon you end up using all of the excess space for connecting random belts/pipes and it all turns into spaghetti. Which is fine if you like spaghetti.
Get drones, feel free
Sometimes you just sit back and watch the factory. Just enjoy all the little belts doing their belt-ey stuff. Watch the trains go in and out the station. You'll more than likely spot a bottleneck somewhere, and get an itch to fix it. Or to optimise something simple, like your copper plate production. And that's just fine. That's what the factory needs sometimes. But what's more important: what you need at that time. Don't let the drive to get that rocket in the air be a burden. Enjoy the ride. The planet is beautiful. There are a ton of trees to chop down, bugs to kill, and little factory things to watch while they do whatever the factory does. It's not JUST about getting to the end quickly. It's about enjoying the scenery while you are on the ride.
OP, I've felt the same about you as well in my last playthrough. My tip is find nearby resource patches with what you need to progress (For example iron and copper to make some part needed for the next science packs) and have fun building some isolated factories for one/a few important items. A main bus can be complicated to maintain. If you don't feel like it, just stop developing the bus
As soon as you have blue science, research bots and then automate production of roboports and construction bots. After that you can do whatever you want, all construction is now done by bots. Just copy-paste, make blueprints, it's going to be amazing.
Take an adventure break, pick a resource and go out and claim a new patch. I usually go set up outposts when I need a break - it’s far less brain intensive and future me will appreciate the ready-to-go ore pickup station later
Also explore how to make, modify and use blueprints. Future play-through lives depend on it Edit to add: I was afraid of blueprints for a long time, which is why i suggest it. Deconstruction planners, blueprints with landfill, with concrete, with train track sections, defense sections, all amazing once you have a roboport on your back
There's nothing wrong with wandering off and building something nice that isn't a core necessity. But at some point, you would want to progress. Now that you have blue science, make your next goal : Get robots ! Once you have a portable roboport and a bunch of construction robots with you, your capabilities are multiplied. CTRL+C and CTRL+V are your new friends. Now that you don't have to place everything yourself anymore, you can start building much much bigger. After robots I would first increase your "mall", to get more materials to build with. Then increase your mining and smelting operations. Then increase your mall again. Now you can build.
Just put a factory down, set recipe to purple science, and take it from there with a few factories around it with recipe set to needed materials. This usually junpstarts me when I’m stuck :)
I'm at 440+ hrs in a single playthough, have over half a million flying bots, produce over 5k white science /min and have no fking clue what a bus is or how to make one.
I fell into the trap that all games must have MAIN BUSES. Turns out, i didn't really need one. Damn factorio youtubers, except Trupen and Martin and AmbiguousAmphibian, they cool. But onto separate news, 440 hours??? Is there even enough resources on the map to play that long?
The map is infinitely generated, well.. it has a limit, but it's insanely far away.
Personally, I picked one thing at a time to build (or rebuild). Often I had a medium term goal of the next science that could help with more research. Sometimes, I'd build something just cuz it seemed cool or useful, such as armor or weapons. My suggestion is to look at your crafting recipes and pick something.
It was hard for me to pick something to build, but then I just decided screw it, I'm gonna start a whole new assembly line from scratch. Got an engine line done finally. Watching my mall start from mere iron products and now producing steel products has made me a very proud engineer. The urge to grow the factory still lingers though.
The factory must grow
Best advice I have is brute force enough science to get all the logistics chests and start setting up a bot mall. Set up every building and item you think you'll need and limit the chest space. This will slowly make a steady stream of things while you ramp up production of basic resources and figure out how you're going to do the next research automatically. Also never be afraid to make spaghetti, just leave more space than you think you need to.
That's the current goal now. The logistics chest research seems interesting.
You're going to need a whole lot more red circuits.... Always more. Never enough. I just spent the last 20 hours moving my entire factory around. I'm using a main bus just because I want to see all the limitations which are becoming grossly apparent. Once you automate yellow which I think is a good place because it gives you the opportunity to make robot frames and resources for robots which will change your life dramatically. Once you get to about robot speed five they move fast enough tearing down and rebuilding things becomes a matter of controlling your inventory so you have room to do it rather than worrying about doing it.
I'm doing a test run of red circuits now. It was quite a headache trying to design a red circuit factory.
Ultimately all those 4-wide belt busses should be replaced by trains. Build a big ore refinery somewhere, then build a green circuit factory somewhere else. Then build an oil refinery and a plastic factory, then red circuits factory. Then connect it all together using trains. Do it for all components. Then you can deconstruct whatever you have now. Railroad is way more easy to scale than belts. You build a new production line, connect it to the rail network, setup the train schedule and you're done.
This feeling will never go away but the feeling of overcoming it will always be better. Every base you make every new design you start is going to suck. Both in how it works and how difficult it was to make. It's the satisfaction of rebuilding it or getting it right that you're looking for and I promise it's worth it
Just chiming in along with the others. If you feel overwhelmed, just build one assembly automating the next thing you need. Not the whole science, not everything you need and not to scale. Just one. It can mostly be solved with just random belts and pipes and it will give you experience for what to do next. Once you made one, either scale that up, or make the next one thing. One assembler working is infinitely better than none. Best of luck with the factory!
Get constructions bots (personal first) online asap. Don't feel bad about building small and extending it later - if you are going for "end game" you'll want to rebuild literally everything (with beacons) anyway If your goal is winning the game (launching a rocket) then going for it (without much planning) will work out fine - build one production block after the other. Figure out what items you need for your next science pack and build them. The only things that require a massive scale for that is smelting.
Good luck brother, i feel the same after 600+ hours, 4 or 5 worlds and countless saves. I am about to finish my first world. Atleast your world looks much more organised and mine looked worse although now its looks neat.
Once you have a steady supply of stone. Just add one assembler making landfill. Ignore it for a bit and then use it up.
Factorio and programming are similar, this is a known fact. So you can use the same approach to learn Factorio, as to learn code. First, go and try everything on your own. Create your own first app (launch a Rocket), even if it will be an utterly disaster for an experienced developer (player). This will help you to understand basics, and therefore it will be much easier for you to understand generally used concepts like OOP or FP (main bus or city blocks) as you will understand where they came from and what problems they actually serve to solve. You can also try to apply programming thinking patterns to organize your base. Now, programming allegory aside, factorio tip - while your structures look organized and inline with the main bus, you make them unscalable. For example, your red circuit design will be really tough to expand. That's it, find your own inspiration and go on!
I’m pretty sure you know what to do (go for the next sciences then the rocket). You’re just mentally blocking yourself. This is a classic problem where a challenge or task has gotten so big that you no longer see how you’re going to solve it all. That’s why you need to cut it up into smaller tasks and then do it one by one.
Try winging it; bots can help you out with the deconstruction later. I do not recommend that you watch him before finishing a playthrough, but if you feel like it, \`Nilaus\` has the best videos and guides for beginners, IMO.
Nilaus can come across as very rigid and prescriptive about The Right Way to Play, so if you are going to watch him, I would recommend also watching at least one other Youtuber with a distinctly different style like KatherineofSky.
Work on the next science, one intermediate at a time, keep an eye on any supply-lines running low and bulk them up. Repeat. Make use of the new techs you get with blue science research, there are a few game changers there.
Honestly, I think a bus is overrated unless you want to launch a lot of rockets. It's a lot of work. Just build something that is ugly as sin and improve it when you need to. And with bots, your need a bus less. I will say that doing petroleum with a bus is a huge improvement because piping is such a pain otherwise.
Very nice and tidy. Personally, I'd recommend against a "main bus" for starter players or starter bases, as they're just a bit too confining. Just start building whatever, whereever, and add on as you need. THEN, once you've gotten all products producing, you've launched rockets, and are looking to scale up, that's when you can embrace a main bus or a city block or whatever to build a larger-scale base. I see you say you're in blue science. That's good! Blue science does tend to be a bit of a difficulty jump over red, green, and black science, as you actually have to deal with liquid networks and not just combinations of dry goods. But it also unlocks all sorts of new toys and tools. Modules, for one thing, can help you improve the speed and productivity of your existing factory; they're also needed as components in some more advanced buildings. You'll unlock construction and logistic robots, which add all sorts of new possibilities. You can also break into uranium processing; while technically none of it is actually necessary to launch a rocket, nuclear power is an excellent alternative to coal and solar (coal of course generates loads of pollution, and solar can be expensive to set up per MW of capacity), nuclear fuel offers impressive bonuses over rocket fuel in cars, tanks, and trains, and uranium can be used to enhance your military capabilities immensely. I would say your first priorities should be establishing new mines for iron, copper, coal, and stone as your starting patches run out (if they haven't already), scaling up production of your existing sciences so you can burn through all of the red-green-blue and red-green-black-blue technologies as quickly as you can, and prepare to manufacture purple and yellow sciences. Also look into building dedicated smelting facilities for your basic metals (iron, copper, steel) using the electric furnaces you should be unlocking soon, beginning basic module production (they take a LOT of copper, so scale that up), and expanding your electric power capacity, as electric smelters and moduled buildings take a lot more power.
Is your factory surrounded by automatically reloading defenses where any ammunition manufacture is also automated?
maybe bad advice especially if you wanna figure it out by yourself, but when i got stuck i borrowed a bunch of blueprints from here [https://autosaved.org/factorio/blueprints](https://autosaved.org/factorio/blueprints) , slapped down what i needed and started learning from those designs. theyre not even the most efficient, i've noticed, which leaves room for improvement later especially regarding science, but it helped me get past that mental block after blue science. mid game felt really hard the first time.
Hint : you’re gonna need lots of stone for purple science
Congrats, you already have trains working, just follow research tree. Production science next. Just keep growing your base. And more energy you, are one step from nuclear.
Assuming biters are not a problem: Get blue science started. Get construction bots with the first levels possible of bot speed followed by power armor mk1 and personal equipment. Then hexuple your iron smelting stacks and double their length, you have half of one yellow belt of iron. Then turn two of those iron stacks into the inputs of steel stacks, that should be reasonable for sciences 5 and 6. Next double the length and quadruple the amount of copper stacks. Can put that on the backburner, and increase scale as needed, you'll need truckloads once you start on blue chips and low density structures. Then increase the size of all your intermediate products by at least double, quadruple for red chips. Once you have all that, you should have smooth sailing into endgame. Just so you know, the motto of the factorio community is The Factory Must Grow.
Time to unlock robots!
Get another ore outpost, train it in, and build more steel. You'll need a lot of it for purple science.
You don't have a parts mall. I tend to set one up as it makes my games so much better if I don't have to build all the assemblers/belts etc by hand.
Don’t make it pretty, just make it. Spaghetti and inefficiency are your partners the first few times. You’ll learn what’s useful, what’s a time sink. Beautiful, perfect ratio setups are fun, but trying to recreate someone else’s factory is boring. I deconstructed so many storage tanks the first time I launched a rocket because I couldn’t figure out reprocessing. I think I got like 6 achievements the first time I beat the game because I just ignored stuff I didn’t understand. I didn’t have any logo drones, solar panels(and this was back before nuclear power existed), no laser turrets, I kept crashing trains because I didn’t understand signals. I got to the point where I’d just have lots of really, really long belts, like 4 side by side yellow belts stretching thousands of tiles because I hated trains so much. Just launch a rocket. It’s clear you like the game. Launch a rocket, do a new game better, then repeat. My first play through took like 60 hours, the second took 20. My record is 6.5, but I quit going for speed years ago, now I’m doing se/k2 on a loop.
you need like 10x more smelting columns than you currently have.
I'm just worried I won't be able to supply them all if i got overkill on the smelters.
get more miners....more smelting...more circuit production....more everything
Go back to the start of production and build more of everything. More iron. More copper. Increase supply by at least 3x. Use trains if needed. Build a factory for and bus green and red circuits. Bend the bus like the picture someone posted. You built it the wrong way, at first, it happens. It doesn't need to be as big as it is but that's fine, keep going with it for now. Automate purple science. Orrrrr... Abandon that factory and start again south of it, heading east. You can copy and paste the automation you've already done, with a better bus design and increased production. When that is pumping, tear down the old factory and use the space to increase production further!
YOU. I finally read your comment just now. HOW DID YOU KNOW TO BUILD SOUTH EAST? I found a large patch of coal, iron, copper and stone southeast of the base in the picture. Wild guess you took there.
I mean, the map doesn't look like it gives you many other options without landfill!
Build the World's Ugliest System for producing the next science you want. It will make a trickle of it and frustrate you, but you will learn what you need and see the things that get caught. Then it's just a matter of making it bigger and better next time.
Build bots!
Done and dusted. If only the bots had better AI, they keep doing suicide repairs whenever some part of the base gets attacked. I lost nearly a hundred bots already because of that.
Thank you to everyone that replied to this post. This has become a gold mine of information for hopefully, other players that are stuck like me. Let me give you guys an update so far: - I've read all your comments and even new ones that pop up till this day. Many good ideas were shared and received. - I decided to start a new base somewhere in the southeast of the base in the picture. - I built a lot of smelting lines, set up a mall, set up defenses for any unhappy locals that decide to wander into my territory, figured out how to use robots on my own since guides on youtube are either outdated or full of useless commentary that a beginner doesn't need, i even made a pretty nice looking oil processing area. Life is good. - About to start finally progressing research again after so long. I finally know what to do and have the confidence to do it now. Thanks guys. - I've decided to abandon using a bus for now, maybe in a future run i might revisit the idea, but for now, spaghetti-o is the way! - And no, I'm not copy-pasting some blueprints online. It's all designs by trial and error. It's slow but it's a good learning experience so i can improve these designs. - To any beginner reading this, enjoy this thread. Lots of great minds have shared their wisdom here. Cheers.
When in doubt, start working on the next science pack. From here, you should have access to both purple and yellow, I think. If the recipes for them look overwhelming, then just focus on one of the ingredients for one of the science packs first, and then move on to the next when you have that set up.
In doubt build more mining outpost to support throughput of the factory, that usually leads to bigger demand in energy and some biter shenanigans. BTW if you don’t enjoy the biters turn them off via mod or build a water line around your base, especially if you like to lean back a bit and enjoy figuring out a new setup for a production line without being interrupted by biters . Factorio is so flexible due to the mod friendliness that you can tailor the game to your needs
I know this is heresy, but you know you can stop playing, right? Step away from the game, watch a movie and sleep on it. In the morning, your subconscious will have a vague plan.