Factorio Forums

Hey, the title explains it all! Basically, when I start a game, all the ores are spread out.
So what should I do? (also hey this is my first post hi guys yeah) (im here for nerdcubed he said you guys are nice) (please dont be mean to me D:)
a) conveyor belt all the ores into a bundle, then fuel the system, then do electricity
b) automate the coal, then fuel get mining for everything else, then automate that
c) i dont know what else to do help

Craft 10 science packs, and put them into a research lab.
Select Automation as your first tech.

Now use assembling machines to automate red science pack production.
You will run out of basic techs pretty quickly, so you need to craft green science packs too.

Far into the future you'll run out of green techs, and need to craft blue and purple science packs.

Welcome to the forums, and congrats on the purchase
There are a number of video tutorials and "Let's Play"s posted throughout the forum.
Generally though, the overall direction anyone decides to take when playing is up to them.
We can share our opinions, and troubleshoot problems, or even optimize specific sections of a factory, but each factory is pretty much unique, and heavily influenced by the exact conditions of the starting area of every new map.

That aside, a good idea is to get a burner drill on coal, then a few on iron, then one on copper, then get automation and work on getting electricity set up.

n9103 wrote:That aside, a good idea is to get a burner drill on coal, then a few on iron, then one on copper, then get automation and work on getting electricity set up.

And to illustrate your point, I always set my first burner drill up on iron and feed that straight into the furnace. I power both with some wood I've already collected while scouting the area. While the first plates are being smelted, I'll mine some stone so I can make my next drill to place on coal.

n9103 wrote:Welcome to the forums, and congrats on the purchase
There are a number of video tutorials and "Let's Play"s posted throughout the forum.
Generally though, the overall direction anyone decides to take when playing is up to them.
We can share our opinions, and troubleshoot problems, or even optimize specific sections of a factory, but each factory is pretty much unique, and heavily influenced by the exact conditions of the starting area of every new map.

That aside, a good idea is to get a burner drill on coal, then a few on iron, then one on copper, then get automation and work on getting electricity set up.

Thankyou! Is it normal for people to have factories that are far from resources? on all my worlds, I end up getting coal, iron and copper that are all far away and its annoying running between them.

Far away is very much a relative term in Factorio.
If you can see it when you zoom all the way out, it's not that far away.

Typical maps generally include coal, iron, and copper patches within 100-200 tiles of each other.
Feel free to restart if you get a map that doesn't have them at least that close.

Look up some let's plays or tutorials on factorio. They'll help you a great lot.

Heya im also pretty new to the game. If you are going to do the campaign you see a default layout.

It is just one of the many possibilites. You can always look at some early episodes of an lets play to see how those people do it.
there are a lot on youtube out there. ( posted just some below, there are way more then these 2 )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmaaene371Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRjDkMI ... V7m9xW-6YR

Hope it helps!

As others have said, there is some good stuff on YouTube. It is kind of hard to explain a good a setup really. Much easier to watch someone.
Either just search Factorio on YouTube, or some people I would suggest are Arumba, Aavak (though his play through is quite old, but the layout ideas are still perfectly viable.) As well as any of the local tubers here like Fish Sandwich, -root, Infectum13, Alex Jones (Fkod gaming), PharAway, or any of the others i am forgetting, or myself I did a few videos (my Yt is sonoribingudeddo).
Hope this helped!

A bit later on you can bring all your resource production to a central location with transport belts, which will be the basis of your factory. However before you've mined enough iron to actually build the belts, yes you will have to do a bit of running around, such is life. Learning all the keyboard/mouse shortcuts can make the early game much less tedious (Such as ctrl/shift clicking resource stacks, right clicking instead of left clicking recipes, Q, etc.).

Getting electricity up and going as soon as possible to replace your burner inserters and mining drills is a very good idea, as electric equivalents are both much more efficient and will cut down on the amount of time spent putting coal and wood into containers You can muck around sending belts of coal all over the place to feed every other piece of machinery you have, and burner inserters will feed themselves coal, but it's just less hassle to get electricity.

If you left the world generation settings on default there will be plenty of resources within a fairly close distance, so if you don't want to you don't have to use trains (which can be a bit complicated) to transport resources from your mines to your factory if you don't want to, transport belts work fine.


Also, once you get to starting on oil production (Which will be a good number of hours down the line, don't worry), make sure you have a fair bit of room, because no matter what you do the first time around it is going to be an ungodly mess of pipes

xnmo wrote:as electric equivalents are both much more efficient

Technically, they're less efficient resource-wise, but that's mostly unimportant, as the cons are outweighed by the pros.

https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... tart_Guide

I don't know how good/helpful this is, cause I'm not a newbie, some comments about it might help to improve it...

Boogieman14 wrote:And to illustrate your point, I always set my first burner drill up on iron and feed that straight into the furnace. I power both with some wood I've already collected while scouting the area. While the first plates are being smelted, I'll mine some stone so I can make my next drill to place on coal.

I used to do that too, Burner Drill directly connected to Stone Furnace, but later on I found that that actually slows down the Burner Drill, because it has to wait for the Stone Furnace. It's better to have the Burner Drill dump the Ore into a Chest, the Chest acting as a buffer, and then moving the Ore from the Chest to the Furnate either manually (I tend to do that very early game) or else using Burner Inserters.

Or am I mistaken in this? I haven't actually done any timing studies...

(Statements here are for .11.x version. May not apply to .10.x and earlier.)
you're mistaken. no worries, it's barely noticeable.
Furnace is ~.1s faster, so you might notice a blip of it not running if it doesn't have extra ore waiting.
Best solution, drop a couple of those ores you've manually mined into it. By the time those are gone, the drill and furnace should've been retrofitted for electricity.

On the other hand, putting the output into a box is far preferable than to have furnaces hooked up to coal miners.
Though all but the newest of players know that coal is used far slower, so that's a given.

n9103 wrote:(Statements here are for .11.x version. May not apply to .10.x and earlier.)
you're mistaken. no worries, it's barely noticeable.
Furnace is ~.1s faster, so you might notice a blip of it not running if it doesn't have extra ore waiting.
Best solution, drop a couple of those ores you've manually mined into it. By the time those are gone, the drill and furnace should've been retrofitted for electricity.

On the other hand, putting the output into a box is far preferable than to have furnaces hooked up to coal miners.
Though all but the newest of players know that coal is used far slower, so that's a given.

Yes, I did some informal testing/observation of the Miner Drill+Furnace thing (along with some more formal testing of other stuff) and found that yes, I was mistaken. It's a good setup, early game

But do you have any good, current figures on the yield of miners? As in exact figures for both Burner ones and electric ones? And for that matter on Furnace speeds? Or are Stone Furnaces just a straight up 1-per-second?

For what it's worth, the Resource Spawner Overhaul mod ensures you have a (sufficient but limited) patch of every resource in your starting area, so you're guaranteed to never have to go very far for resources until you've got vehicles and such.

It then proceeds to screw with you for the rest of the game making you play "Find the pixel"
I love how it restricted resources, but I absolutely hate how the patches outside the starting area now look.

Don't you just need to move out a bit further? There's some positively huge ore fields with RSO, but they're generally pretty far from the base. See http://www.boogieman.eu/FactorioMaps/Fa ... -20141111/ follow the train to the west, there's a massive (1.5mil) coal field and a decent sized iron ore field. Apart from that, there's also miniscule patches of ore all over the place, but those are mostly worthless and best ignored completely.

Yeah I don't know why those are enabled by default. They're supposedly there for emergencies, but...

I've gone a great deal farther out than that, and have only found one patch of iron that's comparable to the initial patches. otherwise just sprinkles. The fact that stone blends into any desert biome just makes things worse, since expansion is much harder when you can't build a rail line in more than one general direction at a time.