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Factorio just came out on Steam with an early access alpha build, but it's very stable, feature complete and optimized. The game can be a bit overwhelming without doing some research. The game wikis are less helpful in my opinion than just watching some tutorial and gameplay videos. Some helpful Youtubers/Twitch streamers I've found:


ColonelWill
Youtube
Twitch

Arumba
Youtube
Twitch

Steejo
Youtube
Twitch

I've started trying to buss everything down the middle of the factory, including mass producing early materials until production saturates a lane like copper wire, iron gears, circuits and walkways. You don't have to fidget with ratios or keep splitting off iron/copper to do local production until those lanes aren't enough to keep up, then just make some more. I can keep adding green/red science assemblers and research labs as long as I have enough resources to keep up, I'm up to 30 or so labs right now.

I'm trying to do blue science and oil at the moment, but finding I'm wanting more lanes including for piping, so I think ideally this setup would work well with 4x iron, 4x copper, 4x pipes, 2x coal and 2x stone, a 4x stone walkway, 2-3 additional 4x4 lanes for assorted like plastic and at least 2 each of red and green circuit boards, and 2 spaces between each for underground walkways. That's like 42+ wide, which might be out of hand.

How are others doing it?

Also, anyone found a good smelting setup? I haven't really come across any I like, and I keep trying new things but haven't found something I'm happy with.

This is my smelting set up, which has kept my production even with my consumption so far. I am just getting ready to start producing blue science( have all the necessary parts, just need to configure the blue science production area) in this playthrough. One thing to keep in mind though is that I am playing w/ passive aliens, so I don't know how defensible it actually is.


About to really ramp up my copper production having just noticed that the purple circuits require 20 green and 2 red circuits.

This time I have left myself TONS of room so I can implement new technologies as I get to them. Would rather spread out and take up too much space as opposed to working myself into a bottleneck to the point that it's easier to just start over again rather than pick everything up and move it.

I figure it is easier to contract in this game than it is to expand, especially with passive aliens. Once I get to the point that I need to fight the aliens to get alien tech I figure I can make it more compact around the pollution producing areas and also have a ****load of turrets and an army of combat robots. Or if all else fails I can intstall the mod that removes the aliens altogether and replaces the artifacts w/ another resource

On my 6th play through and feel like I have finally perfected my red science and lab feed set up.

Personally I prefer this design for smelters. It offers longer smelting lines at full speed and you can place them in a series without messing up converyor belts if you put two metals close. Then again, it's pretty much the same with only one line of conveyor belts added, so meh.



I'll also repost my compact factory design so it's in the thread should someone be interested. It has only 2 mod items that can be easily replaced (fast long inserters and small circuit factories).

All smelters in a line to show what I mean.

Did you start out with Bob's Mods? I'm still getting my head around the base game after 50 hours :>

How do pipes work? All the oil threads I've read never mention throughput, like if all of your pipes are connected in a network, does the amount each shows represent an avg./sec that's flowing through the network? Like I have 15 or so oil jacks connected to a bunch of tanks that feed my refineries, if the crude line from a set of jacks isn't connected yet it says 10, but once I hook it in it goes down to like .5-1, and all of the light/heavy/petrol/etc. lines coming out sit between .5-1.5. Figuring out oil processing has definitely been the most annoying part of the game so far.

As far as I know, and I'm not 100% on this, pipes are little containers with an inventory size related to the pipe type (like a volume of 10 or 20). Connected pipes average out their inventory so if 1 has 10 and the other 0, after a few seconds both will have 5, but they also have a resitence so transfer speed lowers itself after a long stretch of pipes.

You can use small pumps to raise the pressure inside of pipes if you need to, like this: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6066

This game is amazing. I'm updating my base from a standard production bus design to bots like woah.

Launched my first rocket and got a message that it didn't have a satellite. Whoops.

Had to take a break from Factorio, as I was stuck in some sort of loop. 95% of my time was devoted to squeezing every last % of optimization out of my base and after that it was a tiny tech advancement. And what do you do with your new tech? YOU REDO THE WHOLE BASE! It was a vicious cycle of blueprint, construction robots and moving an entire base or upgrading from red to blue to green belts. And boy **** hit the fan with express inserters! SO MANY POSSIBILITIES!

Fun as hell, but it was also than the "one more turn" syndrome so I spent way more hours than needed. So here I am, taking a break haha.

The game does need more in the way of end game goals and content, I think I'm mostly done until they add some new stuff, but there's a Twitch streamer innomin8 that is attempting to get his factory to the point where it can launch a rocket continuously (I think he means a row of silos getting fed such that as soon as he hits launch on one he can continue down the row until the first one is ready to go again). He has a super OCD clean build and is constantly talking about his thought process and what his short and long term goals are, and having to expand the base to the point it can handle that kind of production is pretty interesting. I think he said he's doing a 24 hours stream this weekend where he'll finish the factory and see if it can keep up with the spreadsheet math he's done for launching. Probably incredibly dry and boring for most people but I figure if you're in to Factorio this kind of stuff is fascinating.

The game just feels solved once you figure out a production line and logistics bots. Then it's just a question how big you want to go.

If anybody does pick up this game I would suggest looking at other people's builds as little as possible. I think doing that really reduces the amount of time you can play it enjoyably.

Just started playing this today (hi weev), posting so you guys can laugh at my noob base, if you can even call it base there's not even walls



(working on getting coal out to the burners on the right)

Pretty good for your first day, green science and advanced assemblers. The rest of the game is figuring out how to take that spaghetti and put it in to some kind of reasonable order :P

I read somewhere that one end game goal is going to be building space factories, presumably for people that have super mega bases that can facilitate launching rockets continuously along with cargo that you'll use in space. Can't really imagine a 2D space construction game though.

Also probably not something they'd consider, but this would make an insane strategy game if the aliens could build factories and you were competing for some technological goal and had to fight for control of resources. As is, the Avatar scenario of pissing off the hippy natives with pollution isn't very compelling, the combat just seems like an additional tacked on logistical problem.

The red and green belt of SCIENCE is so pretty, researching stuff super fast now. From what I've read about this game, it seems like that expanding orange/red-ness in the minimap probably means I should be expecting a visit soon.

Nice base goofy!

Bitches don 't know about my 95 hours played.

I think buying this game would be really bad for many other aspects of my life...

YD: are those extra ores from bob's mods?

Some of them, yeah. There are some more terminals but they are not linked up yet, so they are not in the picture. I see gold, rutile (titanium), bauxite (aluminium) and gems. They also require special smelting, so they are not in the smelter line either

I really enjoy bob's mods and suggest it to everyone as soon as they want to spice things up, just leave out the electronics module because that thing is just bonkers and will drive you 100% crazy

I'm working on the supply campaign at the moment. Just failed on level 14, didn't build enough production to sustain.

Question about oil - I started off mining a lone oil patch in my base, and in general I haven't found more than a few oil tiles together in one place, and it really didn't take all that long (relatively) before the flow was reduced to 0.1/s out of the well and I'm sitting wondering how I'm supposed to ever get a constant supply of oil production. I have immediate access to two more patches, but after that I'll have to start going way out into the wild to do it. Is that what's supposed to happen?

Did you get advanced oil processing and crack heavy oil in to light and light into petroleum? If your refineries have nowhere to send even one of the three products, like a storage tank or a processing plant, your jacks will stop pumping. I've found 6-8 jacks from around 100-150% oil wells will take me through most of the blue research, you shouldn't need to go too far afield for that.

After that I'd look in to the oil tanker mod that lets store crude in a train tanker and offload with I believe a small pump in to your network. Otherwise you can try piping it a super long way (I think after a certain distance your throughput goes to crap) or storing it in barrels and shipping it by rail.

yeah, I haven't started cracking yet but I do have the tech. I built storage tanks for heavy/light and that one tile only filled them up like 2/3 of the way.