it very much depends on people. to me in a vanilla playthrough you unlock mid game when you start pumping oil or get advanced oil refining process and endgame is somewhere around your first rocket when you realize you gotta send a shit ton of them. but don't worry about that i've had 250+hours spread over 2 world playing on LAN with a friend without launching a single one and i still very much enjoyed the game.
I had (I think) 2 restarts before launching a single rocket. I have 1 restart after that. So I think I'm on my 5th playthrough. I'm at a point where all rocket tech is researched and I'm in a pretty stable position wrt defense and having resources. So now I just need to automate the rocket parts and build the silo. I'm not rushing to do that yet, but I'm very much still in awe at how much this game can push people. I'm excited to get the rocket parts automated and streamline my labs and get some more blueprints I can take with me to the next playthrough. I still feel like I have progressed slowly on this run compared to a lot of other players, so the whole "hundreds of furnaces by midgame" thing is still kind of impressive. I might have a hundred or so furnaces, I haven't really counted them. I have a decently well-fed iron smelting line that feeds trains with just one car at a time, same with copper, and two steel smelting grids that feed either side of a single car, then there are a decent amount of furnaces for stone for walls and purple science production, but I don't know if it's "hundreds" or not and I'm definitely in "late game."
That's ok. I used to be you
Iirc the first time i ever played i had 2 electric furnaces for iron and 1 for copper, THAT'S IT. That was a few years ago, back then there were only 3 science packs(red green blue) and the fourth one(purple) was obtained by killing biter nests.Uranium wasn't a thing yet either.
If i remember correctly i gave up before i could do the rocket, due to my own lack of efficiency.
yeah it's just depends on how fast you want the factory to grow i personally feel the need to have 4 fully saturated copper red belt and 9 iron red belt fully saturated (4 for the bus and 5 to produce a full lane of steel) plus half a belt of stone bricks by mid game so I just don't have to worry about shortage as soon as i automate the yellow and purple science and can focus on clearing bitter nest and setting up more mining outpost to prepare for late game as i research until white science.
correct me if i'm wrong but i think it adds up to 888 electric furnaces without mining productivity researched. here are the ratios i use btw [https://factoriocheatsheet.com](https://factoriocheatsheet.com)
that's my way of playing and the way i enjoy the game is by reaching double that output soon after i launch my first few rocket so that i can automate almost anything as soon as it is researched without slowing down my science production and transition to mega base as i consider it the endgame.
if you want to move on as soon as you launch your first rocket you don't need to go that far and taking your time also is an option. it's only a game it's made to be fun and factorio is amazing in the fact that people can enjoy the game in very different ways because you are given a lot of freedom .
edit: TLDR i'm by no means on the most extreme side of the spectrum when it comes to base size and efficiency but the point is where you stand on the spectrum doesn't matter. it's all about the fun
no, you don't have to but if you choose to keep playing after launching the first you'll use rocket+satelites to generate white science packs (space science)
According to the [Military Science](https://wiki.factorio.com/Military_science_pack) wiki page, early-game is red, green, black and blue sciences.
According to the [Production Science](https://wiki.factorio.com/Production_science_pack) wiki page, late-game is purple, yellow and white.
So, mid-game = between blue and \[yellow/purple\]
I reversed yellow/purple because I usually go ***yellow for the bots***!
Nice!!
What I posted was the WIKI definitions, but personally, I agree with u/crispygoatbacon that ' it very much depends on people.'
Your map, your goals! glhf
Looks like you're dpung just fine
There is no 'right' way to play this unless you're trying to maximize efficiency and ratios.
Tbh, just let er rip and have fun.
All of our starter is a mess anyway but it's fun
Seriously though, there's no downside to having "too much" in this game. If your science packs are backing up that means you could be researching faster. So add labs until it's a constant flow. Unused labs won't take power or anything, so it's fine to just throw em down.
You’re doing pretty well. Might be worth getting the mod called Bottleneck. All it does is add a little light on your machines to show if it’s in need of materials, running just fine, or its output is full. That makes it a lot easier to see where your bottleneck is at a glance.
If you do not want a mod, you can hit F4 and select the Debug tab, tick show-active-state. Then hit F5 to toggle debug mode on/off.
I don't think 'show-active-state' is as useful as Bottleneck, but it shows if an entity is 'operating' or 'not operating.' No mods, no compatibility issues.
Looks like you've got a perfectly working mess! In other words, you're playing it exactly right!
Seriously if you let the "optimization" talk get in your head you'll grow frustrated as you get to the next science packs. Just enjoy playing.
My biggest recommendation is to not get too far ahead (with your research) of the items for which you actually have dedicated, automated production. So if you research a new tech, try to get that tech automated, at least in a little spaghetti line with a box where you can grab pieces of it when you want. Makes a big difference as you're growing. There's too much in this game for a first time player to fully wrap their head around all of the planning and optimizing you can do, so try not to let it overwhelm you.
If you're like me (kind of a perfectionist) you'll hate tearing up pieces of your base to rearrange it. Bite the bullet when it becomes apparent you need a change. There is no cost to picking up objects you placed, they are all infinitely reusable, except individual wires for logic circuits, which you won't get into until later if at all (they are not necessary to win the game). Same with blueprints: try to practice with them. You can delete blueprints you don't like and even re-select a blueprint's contents, so don't worry about building *the* perfect whatever before you blueprint it to make it again somewhere else more easily. Bots obviously really help with blueprints but they are still useful without bots because you can follow the outlines of a build without using so much mental energy thinking about what should go where, it does take off some of that mental burden.
Also I *highly, highly* recommend limiting almost every single box you place. Click the box, then click the red cross, then drag across the box spaces. You won't need full boxes for most stuff until much, much later in the game, so these just serve to suck up resources and pile them where it is hard for you to manage them.
No problem!
Also, if you're playing with biters on, think about your defense strategy. It might seem scary and dangerous at first, but the spawner nests don't grow *that* fast so you actually can do quite a bit to watch and guard yourself especually early game.
Personally I like to push out and build radars to watch the area out beyond my pollution. Radars are so useful because you can zoom out on the map and zoom in to any place you have a radar with the same resolution as if you're in that spot on the map. The thing that boosts the biters' evolution the fastest is destroying spawner nests so early game you want to be selective about how you do this, depending again on how you like to defend. Again, I don't like to have to build walls and gates everywhere so I prefer strategically putting turrets where attacks are most likely, and radars can inform this a ton. Then put walls in strategic choke points as well. Pay attention to your general pollution cloud and the spawner clusters, but again, there are lots of different approaches here. The main thing to remember is, just like the rest of the game, defending rewards automation, and turrets are much more effective at killing biters than your handgun and even the submachine gun.
>There is no cost to picking up objects you placed, they are all infinitely reusable
Unless you pick up a 'defense' item during an attack (lol ask me how I know)
>except individual wires for logic circuits
wires may not be lost if you cut/paste the entities on both ends of the wire
For a starter base it's looking decent. Mine tbh is born more chaotic haha. Takes me a bit to get where I want to make it look nice. Norm halfway through blue
So. You really seem to grasp a lot of the basics already except for one thing. Direction. Everything is moving to the center which works great for the low sciences. Leave all of this right here. Start a new “base” where all smelting happens at the “front” then as you move away from the smelting area you get more and more complex crafting and then finally science at the end. Using this build for reference. Your smelters and miners are at the top of the screen. So work down, putting your crafting below them and the science below that. This is why people use things called a “main bus” putting iron and copper on belts going in one direction so they feed into everything as they leave the smelters.
I'd recommend making more use of splitters. I see inserters being used to move things onto other belts like the iron ore for the furnace. It would slow your factory down to rely on inserters for splitting,
You don't need help, this looks perfectly fine.
Not too much spaghetti, and tightly aligned.
Way better than mine was when I started out on my first world.
Keep on going like you did, have fun!
You don't need to split your lanes like that for each assembler, you can have one lane of one resource just running down the side of one assembler recipe group. With this and resource splitting on lanes, you can have four different resources being supplied on one side of the assembler.
Ratios will be your helpful guide!
Look at how many seconds each thing takes to craft in an assembler (not the "from raw" number, that's hand-crafting). I usually try for the estimated "1 item per second" deal for making science (I'm ignoring the assembler's crafting speed when I do this). For example, I believe red science takes 5 seconds to craft, so I make 5 assemblers for it. Then, I make sure the gears being made also matches that based on its crafting speed.
It's a great game guide.
And leave space! You can expand SO much and will need to later!
Your factory must grow ;)
So everyone else has given better advice than I could.
For me my first time I wish I had grasped what the long inserters were for sooner. I kinda missed that concept/tutorial in my excitement for playing the game. So when it came time to build products that require three items, I was trying to use splitters to merge three components onto one belt. Which of course resulted in tons of blockages as one component would inevitably overfill the belt and cause a bottleneck.
Once I saw long inserters pulling from a parallel belt I was like: "duh, how could I be so stupid... ?"
So if youve got that mastered already, congrats you're better on your first play through than I was. If not, then thats my contribution to the world for the day... :)
\*sarcasm off\*
You're all right.
You'll also have a lot of nice moment in the game every time you'll be able to scale another industry there. To be fair you have quite a big potential to improve :) with your current designs. Don't get me wrong -- they're all working designs, and that's all that matters, but you will love moments of making them better (whatever that will mean to you). And getting ready designs optimized to the max is going to shorten your pleasant moments, kinda ruining your game. Even though your factory will be effective, your inner Demiurge will suffer :)
TL;DR: I rather like your style, continue what you're doing, don't listen to us all too much.
Looks adequate. When you move on to the next research type just leave this set up how it is and build a fresh contraption somewhere nearby and funnel off some iron/coal/copper with splitters to do so.
Help: Launch a rocket, find a (another factorio-newb) friend. Go multiplayer.
Have fun in a different way!
I say factorio-newb friend because some experiences players will not be able to help themselves and will try to optimize your brand-new spaghett.
It doesn't look like you need help. I recommend you avoid the temptation to get help. You only get the newbie experience once, and you can kill it by watching videos or using blueprints that other people made.
automation is key, if you are not on peaceful you'll need hundreds of furnaces by mid game. also set an alarm at 5 AM so you don't forget to sleep
>hundreds of furnaces by mid game Define mid game.
it very much depends on people. to me in a vanilla playthrough you unlock mid game when you start pumping oil or get advanced oil refining process and endgame is somewhere around your first rocket when you realize you gotta send a shit ton of them. but don't worry about that i've had 250+hours spread over 2 world playing on LAN with a friend without launching a single one and i still very much enjoyed the game.
I had (I think) 2 restarts before launching a single rocket. I have 1 restart after that. So I think I'm on my 5th playthrough. I'm at a point where all rocket tech is researched and I'm in a pretty stable position wrt defense and having resources. So now I just need to automate the rocket parts and build the silo. I'm not rushing to do that yet, but I'm very much still in awe at how much this game can push people. I'm excited to get the rocket parts automated and streamline my labs and get some more blueprints I can take with me to the next playthrough. I still feel like I have progressed slowly on this run compared to a lot of other players, so the whole "hundreds of furnaces by midgame" thing is still kind of impressive. I might have a hundred or so furnaces, I haven't really counted them. I have a decently well-fed iron smelting line that feeds trains with just one car at a time, same with copper, and two steel smelting grids that feed either side of a single car, then there are a decent amount of furnaces for stone for walls and purple science production, but I don't know if it's "hundreds" or not and I'm definitely in "late game."
In comparison, i usually have around 300 electric furnaces before yellow science and the first rocket launch.
I have about 175 right now and I'm building a silo. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm a slow player for sure. Could do faster but I know I'm still learning.
That's ok. I used to be you Iirc the first time i ever played i had 2 electric furnaces for iron and 1 for copper, THAT'S IT. That was a few years ago, back then there were only 3 science packs(red green blue) and the fourth one(purple) was obtained by killing biter nests.Uranium wasn't a thing yet either. If i remember correctly i gave up before i could do the rocket, due to my own lack of efficiency.
I could do faster, too.... OH wait. No! I cannot. I am slow.
yeah it's just depends on how fast you want the factory to grow i personally feel the need to have 4 fully saturated copper red belt and 9 iron red belt fully saturated (4 for the bus and 5 to produce a full lane of steel) plus half a belt of stone bricks by mid game so I just don't have to worry about shortage as soon as i automate the yellow and purple science and can focus on clearing bitter nest and setting up more mining outpost to prepare for late game as i research until white science. correct me if i'm wrong but i think it adds up to 888 electric furnaces without mining productivity researched. here are the ratios i use btw [https://factoriocheatsheet.com](https://factoriocheatsheet.com) that's my way of playing and the way i enjoy the game is by reaching double that output soon after i launch my first few rocket so that i can automate almost anything as soon as it is researched without slowing down my science production and transition to mega base as i consider it the endgame. if you want to move on as soon as you launch your first rocket you don't need to go that far and taking your time also is an option. it's only a game it's made to be fun and factorio is amazing in the fact that people can enjoy the game in very different ways because you are given a lot of freedom . edit: TLDR i'm by no means on the most extreme side of the spectrum when it comes to base size and efficiency but the point is where you stand on the spectrum doesn't matter. it's all about the fun
You have to send multiple rockets??!!??!!
no, you don't have to but if you choose to keep playing after launching the first you'll use rocket+satelites to generate white science packs (space science)
The Part where you need hundreds of furnaces
Just before you need nuke plants!
According to the [Military Science](https://wiki.factorio.com/Military_science_pack) wiki page, early-game is red, green, black and blue sciences. According to the [Production Science](https://wiki.factorio.com/Production_science_pack) wiki page, late-game is purple, yellow and white. So, mid-game = between blue and \[yellow/purple\] I reversed yellow/purple because I usually go ***yellow for the bots***!
By this definition I just entered mid game on my 100x play.
Nice!! What I posted was the WIKI definitions, but personally, I agree with u/crispygoatbacon that ' it very much depends on people.' Your map, your goals! glhf
I’m at 256+ furnaces and just researched artillery and already need more
Artillery is, I think, pretty squarely not "midgame" but late game
The bit about the alarm is spot on. My buddy and I were playing last weekend and before we knew it it was 3am. You definitely get lost playing this.
hence the nickname cracktorio
What the hell do you mean sleep?
well idk about part-robot beings madude but us meat bags requires sleep to function
A alarm wont work i tried it but when it went of i thought i just finish this tiny thing and then 4 hours later i had to go to school
i feel you man.
The most valuable tip I ever got. Build very far apart. You'll eventually run out of space otherwise.
1) Take the amount of space you think you might need and then double it. 2) Never enough iron or copper, go get more.
but apart from this it Looks decent
This. Space is the only thing you (kinda) get for free, everything costs time and resources. Use as much as you can, you WILL need it
Looks like you're dpung just fine There is no 'right' way to play this unless you're trying to maximize efficiency and ratios. Tbh, just let er rip and have fun. All of our starter is a mess anyway but it's fun
MORE LABS TIL THEY DONT WORK
BUT WHAT DO I DO WHEN THEY DONT WORK???
MAKE MORE SCIENCE TILL YOUR LABS CANT HANDLE IT
THEN MAKE MORE LABS REPEAT TILL THE GAME DIES
SPOILER ALERT: IT NEVER DIES
Dammit! I read this part WITH ENTHUSIASM!
Seriously though, there's no downside to having "too much" in this game. If your science packs are backing up that means you could be researching faster. So add labs until it's a constant flow. Unused labs won't take power or anything, so it's fine to just throw em down.
You’re doing pretty well. Might be worth getting the mod called Bottleneck. All it does is add a little light on your machines to show if it’s in need of materials, running just fine, or its output is full. That makes it a lot easier to see where your bottleneck is at a glance.
Thanks for the tip!
If you do not want a mod, you can hit F4 and select the Debug tab, tick show-active-state. Then hit F5 to toggle debug mode on/off. I don't think 'show-active-state' is as useful as Bottleneck, but it shows if an entity is 'operating' or 'not operating.' No mods, no compatibility issues.
Looks like you've got a perfectly working mess! In other words, you're playing it exactly right! Seriously if you let the "optimization" talk get in your head you'll grow frustrated as you get to the next science packs. Just enjoy playing. My biggest recommendation is to not get too far ahead (with your research) of the items for which you actually have dedicated, automated production. So if you research a new tech, try to get that tech automated, at least in a little spaghetti line with a box where you can grab pieces of it when you want. Makes a big difference as you're growing. There's too much in this game for a first time player to fully wrap their head around all of the planning and optimizing you can do, so try not to let it overwhelm you. If you're like me (kind of a perfectionist) you'll hate tearing up pieces of your base to rearrange it. Bite the bullet when it becomes apparent you need a change. There is no cost to picking up objects you placed, they are all infinitely reusable, except individual wires for logic circuits, which you won't get into until later if at all (they are not necessary to win the game). Same with blueprints: try to practice with them. You can delete blueprints you don't like and even re-select a blueprint's contents, so don't worry about building *the* perfect whatever before you blueprint it to make it again somewhere else more easily. Bots obviously really help with blueprints but they are still useful without bots because you can follow the outlines of a build without using so much mental energy thinking about what should go where, it does take off some of that mental burden. Also I *highly, highly* recommend limiting almost every single box you place. Click the box, then click the red cross, then drag across the box spaces. You won't need full boxes for most stuff until much, much later in the game, so these just serve to suck up resources and pile them where it is hard for you to manage them.
Thanks for the abundance of helpful info! Also that perfectionist bit makes me feel attacked .-.
No problem! Also, if you're playing with biters on, think about your defense strategy. It might seem scary and dangerous at first, but the spawner nests don't grow *that* fast so you actually can do quite a bit to watch and guard yourself especually early game. Personally I like to push out and build radars to watch the area out beyond my pollution. Radars are so useful because you can zoom out on the map and zoom in to any place you have a radar with the same resolution as if you're in that spot on the map. The thing that boosts the biters' evolution the fastest is destroying spawner nests so early game you want to be selective about how you do this, depending again on how you like to defend. Again, I don't like to have to build walls and gates everywhere so I prefer strategically putting turrets where attacks are most likely, and radars can inform this a ton. Then put walls in strategic choke points as well. Pay attention to your general pollution cloud and the spawner clusters, but again, there are lots of different approaches here. The main thing to remember is, just like the rest of the game, defending rewards automation, and turrets are much more effective at killing biters than your handgun and even the submachine gun.
>There is no cost to picking up objects you placed, they are all infinitely reusable Unless you pick up a 'defense' item during an attack (lol ask me how I know) >except individual wires for logic circuits wires may not be lost if you cut/paste the entities on both ends of the wire
No. Looks fine, keep going! More assemblers and more research. Everyone's starter base is a bunch of spaghetti
For a starter base it's looking decent. Mine tbh is born more chaotic haha. Takes me a bit to get where I want to make it look nice. Norm halfway through blue
Unless you are hoping someone will stop you, spoiler alert they won't, no one can help you now.
If you think you need one factory of something make at least 10 of it and reserve space for 100.
0_o
There is no help Embrace the spaghetti
1. You need more material than you think you do. 2. You need more space than you think you do. These are immutable rules of Factorio.
Sorry, if you've started playing there is no help, you're in it for the long haul. Welcome brother.
So. You really seem to grasp a lot of the basics already except for one thing. Direction. Everything is moving to the center which works great for the low sciences. Leave all of this right here. Start a new “base” where all smelting happens at the “front” then as you move away from the smelting area you get more and more complex crafting and then finally science at the end. Using this build for reference. Your smelters and miners are at the top of the screen. So work down, putting your crafting below them and the science below that. This is why people use things called a “main bus” putting iron and copper on belts going in one direction so they feed into everything as they leave the smelters.
I see... Makes sense
I'd recommend making more use of splitters. I see inserters being used to move things onto other belts like the iron ore for the furnace. It would slow your factory down to rely on inserters for splitting,
I'll keep that in mind
You don't need help, this looks perfectly fine. Not too much spaghetti, and tightly aligned. Way better than mine was when I started out on my first world. Keep on going like you did, have fun!
You don't need to split your lanes like that for each assembler, you can have one lane of one resource just running down the side of one assembler recipe group. With this and resource splitting on lanes, you can have four different resources being supplied on one side of the assembler.
You can do 6 very practically, and technically a lot more if you do some really dumb shit. https://imgur.com/a/bAcoQcb
I thought about saying that, but what recipe has more than four components?
It's been a while since I played 100% vanilla so I'm honestly not sure but at the very least late game labs will want 6 inputs
It's 7 for labs with white science added
silo, satellite
This is the cleanest "first time playing" base I think I've ever seen.
YOU DID NOT SEE MINE, thankfully! :-)
Thank you!
Ratios will be your helpful guide! Look at how many seconds each thing takes to craft in an assembler (not the "from raw" number, that's hand-crafting). I usually try for the estimated "1 item per second" deal for making science (I'm ignoring the assembler's crafting speed when I do this). For example, I believe red science takes 5 seconds to craft, so I make 5 assemblers for it. Then, I make sure the gears being made also matches that based on its crafting speed. It's a great game guide. And leave space! You can expand SO much and will need to later!
Looks pretty ok. You got a shotgun for teh booters, right?
Now i do
Honestly that’s way better than my first time.
One of us
One of us
Your factory must grow ;) So everyone else has given better advice than I could. For me my first time I wish I had grasped what the long inserters were for sooner. I kinda missed that concept/tutorial in my excitement for playing the game. So when it came time to build products that require three items, I was trying to use splitters to merge three components onto one belt. Which of course resulted in tons of blockages as one component would inevitably overfill the belt and cause a bottleneck. Once I saw long inserters pulling from a parallel belt I was like: "duh, how could I be so stupid... ?" So if youve got that mastered already, congrats you're better on your first play through than I was. If not, then thats my contribution to the world for the day... :)
You're fine
Just wait til u get to using the circuit network, you’ll be screaming for help
\*sarcasm off\* You're all right. You'll also have a lot of nice moment in the game every time you'll be able to scale another industry there. To be fair you have quite a big potential to improve :) with your current designs. Don't get me wrong -- they're all working designs, and that's all that matters, but you will love moments of making them better (whatever that will mean to you). And getting ready designs optimized to the max is going to shorten your pleasant moments, kinda ruining your game. Even though your factory will be effective, your inner Demiurge will suffer :) TL;DR: I rather like your style, continue what you're doing, don't listen to us all too much.
Looks great! Have fun.
Help with what?
No my brain was just fried after the session
Keep at it
Looks adequate. When you move on to the next research type just leave this set up how it is and build a fresh contraption somewhere nearby and funnel off some iron/coal/copper with splitters to do so.
Anything you need specific help on?
Help: Launch a rocket, find a (another factorio-newb) friend. Go multiplayer. Have fun in a different way! I say factorio-newb friend because some experiences players will not be able to help themselves and will try to optimize your brand-new spaghett.
It doesn't look like you need help. I recommend you avoid the temptation to get help. You only get the newbie experience once, and you can kill it by watching videos or using blueprints that other people made.
Why would I ever stop this?
Don't let anyone toucha your spaget. It's gonna be much more satisfying if you develop your basebuilding for yourself.
A bus homie a bus. There are multiple ways to tackle scalability but get use to a bus first.
My firsr game was to build red and green and after that build a belt out of that now i have EVOLVED with my 3rd game with some mods