How to actually play factorio. Its been sitting I my library for eight years. I never got past the early game.
When the DLC released I swore I would only get it if I could actually beat the vanilla game and send the rocket to space. I commited the past two weeks to learning the game and growing the factory. How trains and signals work, how robots work, how to better design and space out production lines. And how to SHELL THOSE FUCKING BUGS BACK TO HELL. Nothing felt as good as when the bug attacks ramped up and I finally snapped and built a tank for the first time. Ooooh sweet sweet vengeance.
My experience is practically a carbon copy of yours, so I’ll just tack my reply here.
I just started using robots a few days ago after numerous game restarts since the DLC was released, so I am still a hair behind. Rocket launchers vs. biter nests are starting to get a hair difficult now, so tanks are on the menu for tomorrow.
The biggest issue I had was planning around the sheer scale of the base we need to build and how to design and manage busses for them.
Once I figured out how to plan the layouts for entire stacks of furnaces or assemblers, my base got sooo much more efficient. The exact opposite, but just as satisfying, is when I leaned to quickly automate random odds and ends with temporary assembler puzzles. (Early game red science is a perfect example of that.)
I guess the biggest lesson is attach a massive multiplier to everything. ie: Will 2 turrets fend off attacks from one direction? Cool, but put 6 turrets there instead instead of the 2 it takes now. 10 absolutely wouldn’t hurt either.
Hey @remotelove thanks for sharing your experience its good to know we aren’t alone in the struggle. I dont have any friends who play the game so is nice to talk about it with someone of similar experience level. Would you by chance be down for a multiplayer sesh?
Oh yeah, once you get the tank everything changes. Prepare to spend the next few hours enjoying your toy of war. It turns out the entire continent is your factory, it just needed some
pesticideadvanced diplomacy tactics.While learning the driving and firing timings explosive shells were easier and thus more effective. But once you master the controls and increase firing speed the regular shells are where its at.
*look for choke points and seal them off with walls and turrets or the bugs come back. natural cliff formations are impassable walls AFAIK.
*radars at every wall choke point and outpost. The more of your map can be actively seen and charted the better. Spread em out too.
*in your quest for endless red circuits you’ll probably find plastic to be your biggest production choke point. With your new continent cleared find a second oil field and a very large flat place preferably surrounded by trees for your new oil refining field.
*green module mk2 is op and should be stuffed into everything that consumes a ton of power or creates a lot of pollution. Hit alt while on your map to see the clouds of red pollution. Mining drills, electric furnaces, pump stacks, oil refineries. Usually two greens is enough to get max benefit. Removing all the bugs and walling off the entire continent is a huge endeavor, in the meantime making them almost passive is a great stopgap solutoo.
Do NOT add quality modules to the mines/electric furnaces feeding your main bus. It is poison for your factory, because you can’t just use any quality with any quality.
I’ve had half a dozen spots in my factory come to a halt because ~10 minutes of higher iron quality plates went onto my normal belt, and then clogged a bunch of assembly machines.
If you ever want to clear out a base and you don’t mind robots going crazy… Ctrl-X to cut a blueprint, then place it right back down where it was… the bots will pick up EVERYTHING and then put it down clean
Yeah, I briefly considered that, but I have about 30k belts. Sure, the minority of that is the iron plates belts, but the problem bubbled up through green circuits.
So I think it was easier/quicker to just take a quick look around to see where the poison went.
Sorters with output priority for higher quality to a provider chest is the way to go if you want to bootstrap quality onto your main production
That thought had crossed my mind, though there is an inherent problem in that if you don’t have recycling to deal with excess, you’ll still eventually get backed up with higher quality ingredients, or you’ll have to prioritize mines/elec furnaces based on existing need.
Logistic groups are awesome:
- Get your favorite defensive wall blueprint.
- Hold it while creating new logistic group. (See? I told you they are awesome!)
- Set multiplier such that it will maximize use of your inventory. (Eg. I can fit 100 of my wall + flamethrower units easily).
- Create extra group for bots, poison capsules, cliff explosives, landfills…
- Disable your normal groups and enable Trash Unrequested. (This will not trash your random blueprints in your inventory, so no you won’t need to look for them in the LN afterwards.)
- Wait for logistic robots to do their part.
This way you can get far more done in one go without tedious calculations and/or spidertrons (which come far later in the game). Once you are done, you can just disable the new groups and enable your normal groups.
Of course this also works with other repetitive standard unit blueprints such as train tracks, etc.
I haven’t got to spidertrons in Space Age yet but think this, esp. the Trash Unrequested option – is a game-changer for them.
Last time I played vanilla 1.x, I created a spidertron builder team (about 6 spidertrons, each specialized to something else like defense, trains, landfills, logistic, factories…). I spent good half an hour tuning the logistic requests, only to find out that practice their inventories get clogged really fast up with wood, stone and anything I would have them deconstruct (usually long parts of previous wall).
I suppose this problem would be gone now–just enable Trash Unrequested and you’re done.
- Gleba and Space both have infinite resources. Make use of it.
- Bring agricultural towers to Nauvis and start planting trees big style. It will eat up pollution like crazy.
- Underground belts don’t work through empty space and lava. Don’t know why I’m surprised.
- Replace every electric mining drill across the solar system with the big drills. It only depletes 50% of the field it works on, comes with its own productivity bonus, has more mod slots and can put stacks on belts later in the game.
Edit for bonus tip:
- As soon as you unlock foundries, switch to them. No reason to melt iron and copper the old way. The new process uses 50 ore and one caltice and gives 500 liquid iron or copper. So it’s fine to export calcite across the system. You can even cast stuff like pipes, steel etc directly. Even low density structures and concrete without all the intermediate steps. (I forgot to mention it has an in built 50% productivity bonus, which is bonkers)
So does volcanus.
Technically not but practically yes. You need calcite to convert lava and coal for oil products, but these are fairly low quantity and plentiful.
Wube is what every game developers should aim to be.
That its incredibly difficult to find time to play with a group of three with different professions
Trying to get quality intermediate resources at scale is a phenomenal waste of time, space, headache, and resources.
In every machine that allows it, use productivity. In every machine that doesn’t that isn’t your end product, use speed or efficiency. Only do quality on the last step.
Skim off the best quality you can make off the top, send everything else into recyclers with quality modules in them. They will upcycle all of the ingredients you need to be able to send them back through your crafting machines, where they’ll get a second upcycle opportunity. The law of large numbers will help guarantee that you’ll always have the ingredient balance you need to never back up, as long as you have some buffer storage to smooth out the fluctuations.
This is the conclusion after weeks of trying to design a factory on Fulgora that makes quality everything while wasting little as possible, and finding out that it’s just not a competitive strategy against only rolling on the last step. It would maybe work in an ultra late game mega factory that is not space or resource constrained, but until you get access to vast amounts of foundation to build wherever you want on any planet you want, my money says don’t bother.
Ditto to this, my current quality setup is like 2 chests, a crafter and a recycler. It’s just not worth it for the most part. Love my faster exoskeleton though.
I’ve had the opposite experience. I had a huge boost in legendary output once I started to go full quality on fulgura.
Quality in every assembler.
And yes recycle things that I don’t need.
It is a virtuous upcycle!
Have you considered rolling all your plates/lds/circuits on volcanus? Then your only space constraints is whether or not you can kill the worms. You will also never run out of ore(lava) and the productivity alongside the quality would boost your quality output alot.
- A space platform will not request items from a planet unless the request and the supply is enough to fill a rocket. The exception is items requested for building the platform itself.
- You cannot use the same platform to move an item from planet A to planet B while at yhe same time requesting to have this item onboard. For example, on Vulcanus I produce those big mining drills, which I want transported to Nauvis in large numbers. However, big mining drills is also part of the “Production” logistics group that I have set to be picked from Nauvis. The result is that the platform picks up all the drills it wants on Vulcanus but drops none of them down to Nauvis, even though the amount wanted on board is much much smaller. Disabling the production logistics group solved this, so that it doesn’t request the same item from Nauvis after dropping it off.
- A big field of land mines is an easy way of defeating the demolisher early on.
- You can throw excess stone in Vulcanus back into the lava sea
- If you’re running low on ice/water on Fulgora, you can create a dedicated space platform parked in orbit to produce and drop ice.
- Excess concrete on Fulgora is going to be needed on Aquilo. Br8ng as much as you can pack!
A space platform will not request items from a planet unless the request and the supply is enough to fill a rocket.
The “custom minimum payload” checkbox lets you override this. It lets you directly choose how full you consider a “minimum filled rocket” is for any of your requests. I tend to set this to 1 when I’m in a, “screw rocket efficiency, top me off to this exact number, damn the consequences” mood.
I’ve been using the checkbox but I wish it didn’t immediately launch the rocket when that number is hit. I want it to keep filling as long as the items are in the logistic network, launching when the rocket is really full if possible and only launching at the minimum if the logistics network is out.
Edit: I think the answer might be to have a dedicated silo for that item and load it with inserters. Will it get launched automatically when the platform arrives as long as more than the minimum is loaded? I’ll have to give it a try next time I have a chance.
Edit 2: Yup. That’s it. Make a dedicated rocket silo, don’t turn on automatic requests, fill it with the items using inserters while the platform is en route. When it gets there, the rocket will automatically launch with whatever you’ve put in there as long as it exceeds the minimum that you set. By the way, don’t try loading two different items into the rocket. You can only manually launch those.
Derp, I never noticed that one. Thank you!
That circuit networks can be useful for things other than just making CPUs and jukeboxes
That un-peaceful (violent?) mode is quite boring and tedious.
I normally never play with it, but started the Space Age runthrough with all default settings.
The default is unpeaceful? You’re saying you’d rather play without the local bugs?
That even though I have been on a sick leave for a week, I barely got off Nauvis.
But seriously, I didn’t expect the game to be that long. And I didn’t even get into many new things yet. Mostly just the refined old things. But those are already awesome by themselves.
Otherwise, the fact that cliff explosives come much later now means Nauvis gameplay is suddenly a lot more interesting. Before it was a quick run to robots and cliff explosives, and landfill and then the challenge posed by the terrain was overcome. Now I spent a lot more time working around landscape, which is actually very interesting, and lead to a lot of beautiful spaghetti.
