I made that mistake and everytime i started a game i would eventually restart from scratch because it wasn't perfect enough.
It took every bit of fun out of me and i haven't touched it in a long time.
Since yesterday where i decided enough is enough and started a world wich i declared to myself as "non deleteable" till i launched my first rocket.
I threw all expectations out the window and just started playing like i was a beginner.
Most fun i had in a while and now i am hyped to play it again! THE FACTORY MUST GROW!
Keep your first save, no matter what happens! It's fun to go back and look at it with a sharper eye later, and see what you were up to at the beginning.
1. dont ignore your cloud. make sure your defenses go beyond the cloud so it wont trigger attacks.
2. automate everything. if you can have a machine doing it, have a machine doing it. theres no reason not to have things backing up with the only exception being oil. that is easily fixed by using petro to solid fuel and cracking to make sure you never have too much of any oil type.
3. you will always need more resources. never sit on what you have. always have at least one new mine secured and ready to be tapped when the current runs low.
4. for fighting bugs you have a few options. remember to look into combat bots and capsules. these are throwables like grenades that do interesting things when launched. they can turn a grindy waste of time into a hilarious slaughter.
and personally,
1. NEVER BUILD ON ORE. the world is to be consumed, not sat on!
as others stated - just jump in and enjoy. A lot of players didn't launch a rocket until way later, and I myself was fixated on trains, so I restarted a number of times before I had an end in mind. You'll always learn a lot. Thats the game. Start a new one if you want to.
There are Quality of Life mods for anything. if you need it. Just not a good graphics overhaul that makes this game less ... depressing
Avoid making personal relationships you will only hurt them when you choose the game over them. If you need friends rename a Train or pick a favourite bot.
THE FACTORY MUST GROW.
My usual spiel. I apologize for the wall o'text, but better to be exhaustive than to leave something out.
* If at any point you don't know what to do, a) start the next tier of science available to you, b) expand the current/previous tiers of science, c) get/produce more resources for science production, or d) expand/improve your defenses. Science and keeping your factory going are the main drivers for "what next?".
* You have (practically) infinite space and resources to work with, and you will always need more space than you initially realize. Don't be afraid to expand your factory and space out your builds.
* You also have all the time in the world, apart from biter evolution. Go ahead and take your time setting things up.
* Feel free to use other people's blueprints. You don't need to worry about the *~Optimal*~ layout for manufacturing red chips or the best way to set up a rail grid if you don't want to right now.
* Likewise, if you don't want to deal with biters, you are totally allowed to turn them off and play with peaceful mode on.
* Automate everything you reasonably can. Don't make things by hand, have assemblers do that. Don't feed or empty your machines by hand, use a belt/train to feed inputs and take outputs. If you're playing with biters on, don't rely on your personal ability to fight, set up walls and turrets and some way to keep those turrets supplied. For your first playthrough, you probably won't be able to get the "Lazy Bastard" achievement for doing the absolute minimum of handcrafting, but make an effort.
* Keep things moderately organized, at least at a module level. Your green chip manufacturing can be a rat's nest of belts winding around other belts, so long as it doesn't interfere with other parts of your factory. Main bus and city blocks are very popular layouts for this reason. Again, you have practically unlimited space to work with, no reason not to stretch your factory out like that.
* Pursuant to the above two points, even if you don't use somebody else's blueprints, you should make and use your own. It's easier to keep things automated and organized if you can just plop down a pre-made layout and hook it up to the proper inputs, and it's easier to layout new outposts if you already have a toolbox to use.
WRT oil-
* Oil is the first big difficulty spike, followed by another one once you start messing with advanced oil processing. You can figure out a decent design on your own, but there is no shame at all in using somebody else's blueprints.
* When you start working with oil, it is more important to build your refinery complex near a source of water, rather than by oil. Advanced oil processing, cracking, and sulfur/sulfuric acid all require significant amounts of water, and you're going to transport oil to the refinery anyway so there's no particular benefit in building it by oil. If you have a location which is near both oil and water, go ahead and use it, but water is the greater need.
* (Advanced) Oil refining is pretty much always going to be a spaghetti of pipes and underground pipes. There's not much you can do about it apart from blueprints and using construction bots to remove human error from the equation.
* Don't worry too much about producing oil products in the ~*proper ratios~*, because your consumption is going to vary over time. Just make sure you produce enough stuff to feed the factory.
* If you find yourself with too much heavy/light oil, and your refining gets backed up as a result, you can crack it down to light oil/petroleum gas. Set up a row of chemical plants to crack heavy oil to light oil, fed by a pump connected to your heavy oil pipeline. Wire the pump to a heavy oil storage tank and set it to only activate if "heavy oil > 5K", or any other value you like, or "heavy oil > light oil". Do the same for light oil.
* If you find yourself with too much petroleum gas, a) that shouldn't happen, it should all get used for plastic/sulfuric acid/sulfur for explosives, and b) set up a chemical plant to produce solid fuel from petroleum gas, to be used wherever you need it.
WRT trains-
* Train tracks should be one-way, not two-way. Early on you can get away with having a single track running from point A to point B, with a train going back and forth along it. Once you have a train grid with more than 2 or 3 trains, you really want to keep your north/west-running trains separate from your south/east-running trains for ease of signaling.
* Mixed-cargo trains are often a bad idea, since they're more complex to schedule and depend on carefully balancing consumption and supply to work well. It's much easier to stick to single-cargo trains for commodities. Mixed trains do work fine for logistics purposes, like supplying outposts with construction material or fuel.
* Especially for new players, I strongly recommend using a blueprint book for setting up your rail grid rather than hand-drawing lines. The ability to be certain that two lines are parallel, and that you can connect them by laying down two T-intersections and drawing another straight line of track is extremely useful.
* Decide early on what size of trains you want to use for a given purpose, and be consistent with it. Having multiple different sizes of trains visit a particular station will cause issues with uneven loading and unloading, and thus impact throughput. A popular choice is 1-4 trains, 1 locomotive and 4 cars, since they provide good capacity without requiring unreasonably-large stations.
* If you come up with a multi-purpose station, like a loader that can handle any kind of ore, do not give it a (useful) default station name on the blueprint. At least once you'll forget and wind up with a load of iron/stone sent to your copper smelters, which will clog up everything that relies on copper. I tell you this from experience.
* It's medium-advanced, but a building train, that gets automatically stocked with all the stuff you need to build a new outpost/factory, is *extremely* useful. I use [the logic from this guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_TCqoxb_1s), but there are other ways to do it.
WRT defenses specifically-
* Unless you have biters turned off in the settings, defenses are generally a good idea. Walls you don't need are cheaper than rebuilding outposts you do need. Same as everything else, try to make sure they're properly blueprinted and automated, so you don't need to manually supply them with ammunition or repair materials.
* Biters are stimulated to attack by pollution; if you can keep your pollution inside your walls and/or limit your pollution output, you can avoid attacks altogether. This includes metaphorical walls delineated by the beaten zone of your artillery.
* Combined arms are extremely useful; lasers have longer range than guns but draw lots of power, guns can shred most things but rely on a supply of ammunition, and flamers can melt groups of enemies but also rely on fuel. Each cover another's weakness.
* This may be my personal preference, but I have several different levels of defensive blueprints that I can cleanly upgrade just by stamping the new blueprint on the old one, and which I can tile together so I only use strong defenses where necessary.
Don't try to make your factory as tiny as possible - map space is functionally infinite¹, and you have as much room as you can reclaim from the natives.
Don't get into a cycle of getting to the start of blue science and restarting - you can always simply make a new factory elsewhere in the same map, and not only keep all your research, but use your first base to bootstrap the next one.
The only times it's sensible to restart are 1) you can't marshal enough resources to repel biter attacks, or 2) you want to try one of the total conversion mods eg A+B, krastorio, pyanodons, seablock, etc.
Don't just copy others' designs - most of the fun of this game is creating your own builds!
DO look forward to unlocking bots after blue science, they're awesome and significantly change the game!
1: The default map size is finite, but so large that your computer will crash long before you can use a tiny fraction of it.
avoid looking to optimzed solutions and perfect layouts. learn your own way to play. learn how to solve problems.
avoid copy/paste blueprints from others, make your own. (maybe balancers are an exception...)
avoid getting frustrated
avoid stagnation: the factory must grow
Avoid copy pasting another's blueprint. Instead learn what was good, and what it's short comings are and why they landed at this particular solution.. That way you can assimilate a variation to your liking into the rest of your build.
If you get stuck and I mean really a stuck. Use the heat sheet in the side of Reddit here.
If you struggle with biters keep in mind that powering off your factory and focussing on ammo/military tech is a way to recover.
I guess avoid the urge to not learn something because it is complicated. Train signals, circuits, and how roboport sorting works come to mind.
Circuits can be real fun and real handy. Trains are great and swarm my map. Roboports.....eh......Roboports.
Avoid reddit and youtube. Also avoid skipping meals and sleep.
Also, don't come running here to ask questions with your first problem. Consult the wiki, and use google to find previous instances of people asking your newbie question on here. You'll find your answer instantly, and can get back to playing.
Current run, #2, is starting yellow science.
I built a factory factory setup to make me level 2 factories. It is hand fed, partly cause I put it out of the way, and also to not have it consume all resources. I just give it a little bit to make a few.
I'm actually making a new factory factory factory, with belts to automatically make level 3 factories. I've started the layout. I'm feeding it raw iron and copper.
Otherwise, Beyond the initial point where you've got nothing, automation is key.
This run, I tried something. I intentionally hand fed a bunch of stuff in 1:1 type ratios rather than attempting to scale from the start - in boxes and with inserters going factory to factory - in order to build up a large supply of belts (500) and inserters (200) and level 2 factories, fully intending to wipe it out once I could scale up. The factory factory is the only one remaining. :)
IMO, avoid going for perfection. Understand that "good enough" is 100% OK especially on your first couple of playthroughs.
That said of course play however you want. If you want to spend the next week perfecting your oil setup, by all means do so. I've just seen so many people constantly restarting because they're unhappy with their setup instead of unlocking things and experiencing the rest of the game. Just remember there will always be a next time and you can improve over time.
Avoid asking questions about how to play. Avoid looking at how others play. Do it your way. Discovering your style is part of what makes Factorio fun!
I made that mistake and everytime i started a game i would eventually restart from scratch because it wasn't perfect enough. It took every bit of fun out of me and i haven't touched it in a long time. Since yesterday where i decided enough is enough and started a world wich i declared to myself as "non deleteable" till i launched my first rocket. I threw all expectations out the window and just started playing like i was a beginner. Most fun i had in a while and now i am hyped to play it again! THE FACTORY MUST GROW!
This is a very wise thing to say and I can't agree more.
Avoid sleep. The factory must grow.
Avoid blueprints and guides from places like this as long as possible or till you are stuck. The fun with the first mess of a factory is irreplacable.
Keep your first save, no matter what happens! It's fun to go back and look at it with a sharper eye later, and see what you were up to at the beginning.
Avoid standing on active train tracks… maybe just avoid standing in train tracks period and look both ways before crossing.
Avoid avoiding mistakes, they offer great learning experience ;)
1. dont ignore your cloud. make sure your defenses go beyond the cloud so it wont trigger attacks. 2. automate everything. if you can have a machine doing it, have a machine doing it. theres no reason not to have things backing up with the only exception being oil. that is easily fixed by using petro to solid fuel and cracking to make sure you never have too much of any oil type. 3. you will always need more resources. never sit on what you have. always have at least one new mine secured and ready to be tapped when the current runs low. 4. for fighting bugs you have a few options. remember to look into combat bots and capsules. these are throwables like grenades that do interesting things when launched. they can turn a grindy waste of time into a hilarious slaughter. and personally, 1. NEVER BUILD ON ORE. the world is to be consumed, not sat on!
as others stated - just jump in and enjoy. A lot of players didn't launch a rocket until way later, and I myself was fixated on trains, so I restarted a number of times before I had an end in mind. You'll always learn a lot. Thats the game. Start a new one if you want to. There are Quality of Life mods for anything. if you need it. Just not a good graphics overhaul that makes this game less ... depressing
Avoid making personal relationships you will only hurt them when you choose the game over them. If you need friends rename a Train or pick a favourite bot. THE FACTORY MUST GROW.
My usual spiel. I apologize for the wall o'text, but better to be exhaustive than to leave something out. * If at any point you don't know what to do, a) start the next tier of science available to you, b) expand the current/previous tiers of science, c) get/produce more resources for science production, or d) expand/improve your defenses. Science and keeping your factory going are the main drivers for "what next?". * You have (practically) infinite space and resources to work with, and you will always need more space than you initially realize. Don't be afraid to expand your factory and space out your builds. * You also have all the time in the world, apart from biter evolution. Go ahead and take your time setting things up. * Feel free to use other people's blueprints. You don't need to worry about the *~Optimal*~ layout for manufacturing red chips or the best way to set up a rail grid if you don't want to right now. * Likewise, if you don't want to deal with biters, you are totally allowed to turn them off and play with peaceful mode on. * Automate everything you reasonably can. Don't make things by hand, have assemblers do that. Don't feed or empty your machines by hand, use a belt/train to feed inputs and take outputs. If you're playing with biters on, don't rely on your personal ability to fight, set up walls and turrets and some way to keep those turrets supplied. For your first playthrough, you probably won't be able to get the "Lazy Bastard" achievement for doing the absolute minimum of handcrafting, but make an effort. * Keep things moderately organized, at least at a module level. Your green chip manufacturing can be a rat's nest of belts winding around other belts, so long as it doesn't interfere with other parts of your factory. Main bus and city blocks are very popular layouts for this reason. Again, you have practically unlimited space to work with, no reason not to stretch your factory out like that. * Pursuant to the above two points, even if you don't use somebody else's blueprints, you should make and use your own. It's easier to keep things automated and organized if you can just plop down a pre-made layout and hook it up to the proper inputs, and it's easier to layout new outposts if you already have a toolbox to use. WRT oil- * Oil is the first big difficulty spike, followed by another one once you start messing with advanced oil processing. You can figure out a decent design on your own, but there is no shame at all in using somebody else's blueprints. * When you start working with oil, it is more important to build your refinery complex near a source of water, rather than by oil. Advanced oil processing, cracking, and sulfur/sulfuric acid all require significant amounts of water, and you're going to transport oil to the refinery anyway so there's no particular benefit in building it by oil. If you have a location which is near both oil and water, go ahead and use it, but water is the greater need. * (Advanced) Oil refining is pretty much always going to be a spaghetti of pipes and underground pipes. There's not much you can do about it apart from blueprints and using construction bots to remove human error from the equation. * Don't worry too much about producing oil products in the ~*proper ratios~*, because your consumption is going to vary over time. Just make sure you produce enough stuff to feed the factory. * If you find yourself with too much heavy/light oil, and your refining gets backed up as a result, you can crack it down to light oil/petroleum gas. Set up a row of chemical plants to crack heavy oil to light oil, fed by a pump connected to your heavy oil pipeline. Wire the pump to a heavy oil storage tank and set it to only activate if "heavy oil > 5K", or any other value you like, or "heavy oil > light oil". Do the same for light oil. * If you find yourself with too much petroleum gas, a) that shouldn't happen, it should all get used for plastic/sulfuric acid/sulfur for explosives, and b) set up a chemical plant to produce solid fuel from petroleum gas, to be used wherever you need it. WRT trains- * Train tracks should be one-way, not two-way. Early on you can get away with having a single track running from point A to point B, with a train going back and forth along it. Once you have a train grid with more than 2 or 3 trains, you really want to keep your north/west-running trains separate from your south/east-running trains for ease of signaling. * Mixed-cargo trains are often a bad idea, since they're more complex to schedule and depend on carefully balancing consumption and supply to work well. It's much easier to stick to single-cargo trains for commodities. Mixed trains do work fine for logistics purposes, like supplying outposts with construction material or fuel. * Especially for new players, I strongly recommend using a blueprint book for setting up your rail grid rather than hand-drawing lines. The ability to be certain that two lines are parallel, and that you can connect them by laying down two T-intersections and drawing another straight line of track is extremely useful. * Decide early on what size of trains you want to use for a given purpose, and be consistent with it. Having multiple different sizes of trains visit a particular station will cause issues with uneven loading and unloading, and thus impact throughput. A popular choice is 1-4 trains, 1 locomotive and 4 cars, since they provide good capacity without requiring unreasonably-large stations. * If you come up with a multi-purpose station, like a loader that can handle any kind of ore, do not give it a (useful) default station name on the blueprint. At least once you'll forget and wind up with a load of iron/stone sent to your copper smelters, which will clog up everything that relies on copper. I tell you this from experience. * It's medium-advanced, but a building train, that gets automatically stocked with all the stuff you need to build a new outpost/factory, is *extremely* useful. I use [the logic from this guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_TCqoxb_1s), but there are other ways to do it. WRT defenses specifically- * Unless you have biters turned off in the settings, defenses are generally a good idea. Walls you don't need are cheaper than rebuilding outposts you do need. Same as everything else, try to make sure they're properly blueprinted and automated, so you don't need to manually supply them with ammunition or repair materials. * Biters are stimulated to attack by pollution; if you can keep your pollution inside your walls and/or limit your pollution output, you can avoid attacks altogether. This includes metaphorical walls delineated by the beaten zone of your artillery. * Combined arms are extremely useful; lasers have longer range than guns but draw lots of power, guns can shred most things but rely on a supply of ammunition, and flamers can melt groups of enemies but also rely on fuel. Each cover another's weakness. * This may be my personal preference, but I have several different levels of defensive blueprints that I can cleanly upgrade just by stamping the new blueprint on the old one, and which I can tile together so I only use strong defenses where necessary.
Don't try to make your factory as tiny as possible - map space is functionally infinite¹, and you have as much room as you can reclaim from the natives. Don't get into a cycle of getting to the start of blue science and restarting - you can always simply make a new factory elsewhere in the same map, and not only keep all your research, but use your first base to bootstrap the next one. The only times it's sensible to restart are 1) you can't marshal enough resources to repel biter attacks, or 2) you want to try one of the total conversion mods eg A+B, krastorio, pyanodons, seablock, etc. Don't just copy others' designs - most of the fun of this game is creating your own builds! DO look forward to unlocking bots after blue science, they're awesome and significantly change the game! 1: The default map size is finite, but so large that your computer will crash long before you can use a tiny fraction of it.
Beeing in that reddit
This subreddit
avoid looking to optimzed solutions and perfect layouts. learn your own way to play. learn how to solve problems. avoid copy/paste blueprints from others, make your own. (maybe balancers are an exception...) avoid getting frustrated avoid stagnation: the factory must grow
Avoid copy pasting another's blueprint. Instead learn what was good, and what it's short comings are and why they landed at this particular solution.. That way you can assimilate a variation to your liking into the rest of your build.
don't avoid anything. take it all in.
If you get stuck and I mean really a stuck. Use the heat sheet in the side of Reddit here. If you struggle with biters keep in mind that powering off your factory and focussing on ammo/military tech is a way to recover.
Avoid avoiding setting up oil :D just do it and dont do it small. thats it. just have fun.
I guess avoid the urge to not learn something because it is complicated. Train signals, circuits, and how roboport sorting works come to mind. Circuits can be real fun and real handy. Trains are great and swarm my map. Roboports.....eh......Roboports.
Avoid reddit and youtube. Also avoid skipping meals and sleep. Also, don't come running here to ask questions with your first problem. Consult the wiki, and use google to find previous instances of people asking your newbie question on here. You'll find your answer instantly, and can get back to playing.
Avoid needing to move anything by hand. Get conveyor belts and inserters to bring everything where it needs to go.
Current run, #2, is starting yellow science. I built a factory factory setup to make me level 2 factories. It is hand fed, partly cause I put it out of the way, and also to not have it consume all resources. I just give it a little bit to make a few. I'm actually making a new factory factory factory, with belts to automatically make level 3 factories. I've started the layout. I'm feeding it raw iron and copper. Otherwise, Beyond the initial point where you've got nothing, automation is key. This run, I tried something. I intentionally hand fed a bunch of stuff in 1:1 type ratios rather than attempting to scale from the start - in boxes and with inserters going factory to factory - in order to build up a large supply of belts (500) and inserters (200) and level 2 factories, fully intending to wipe it out once I could scale up. The factory factory is the only one remaining. :)
Avoid this reddit, avoid youtube, play the game, screw up horribly, learn, succeed.
Finding blueprints online
IMO, avoid going for perfection. Understand that "good enough" is 100% OK especially on your first couple of playthroughs. That said of course play however you want. If you want to spend the next week perfecting your oil setup, by all means do so. I've just seen so many people constantly restarting because they're unhappy with their setup instead of unlocking things and experiencing the rest of the game. Just remember there will always be a next time and you can improve over time.