New Player - First Impressions.

[mikey45]

Hey everyone just wanted to introduce myself on the forums but also share my first impressions about the game, which I'm enjoying very much!

So when I first got the game I was very confused with what to do at first. I pulled up the wiki quick start guide and followed that until I felt comfortable to do things myself. The more I played the more I realized how much you could actually do within the game.It took me forever to figure out how to get research going though, after finding out I really felt dumb because it's really not that hard to figure out XD .I absolutely love this game and I can't wait to further improve my factory designs.

I love the community that factorio has, I usually don't use forums just cause it's not really something I do allot but I felt comfortable doing it with this one. I am confused however about something pertaining to how I learn the game. I was so tempted to look up designs for factory's but I hesitated because I didn't want to spoil the game for myself so I guess this can be phrased into a question (sorry if you get mad I asked here). Is there a limited amount of ways you can make a factory and am I spoiling the game for myself if I look designs up and use them? I hope that I could get your guys opinions on this and appreciate anyone who takes the time to do so .


And a side note I just realized my last post I made like a year ago is a sticky now XD.

[Hakusho]

If you have fear of spoiling yourself, i would recommend to tinker around yourself.
The amount of possibilities on how to do things is ... pretty high. I don't want to tell you too much, otherwise i might spoil things you don't want to hear.
For example lot of people have quite different setups to smelt their stuff and that is just one of the very first things you do in this game. And im always impressed by people showing screenshots with layouts i never had in mind.
And this goes on for like everything in this game.

[Jackalope_Gaming]

Yes, you could be spoiling yourself by looking up some designs. It's somewhat rare for a given design to be optimized and perfect, but they can and do exist.

Make sure to do a few hours of tinkering with whatever thing you really want to dive into before looking at online designs. If you find you're stuck at understanding something then it's alright to look at designs to get an idea of what's really going on but there are usually tutorials for those things like train signals. If you feel like you've goit a great handle on something then looking at other designs might be good to see how your stuff compares to what others are doing.

[Xterminator]

Yes, you could be spoiling yourself by looking up some designs. It's somewhat rare for a given design to be optimized and perfect, but they can and do exist.

Make sure to do a few hours of tinkering with whatever thing you really want to dive into before looking at online designs. If you find you're stuck at understanding something then it's alright to look at designs to get an idea of what's really going on but there are usually tutorials for those things like train signals. If you feel like you've goit a great handle on something then looking at other designs might be good to see how your stuff compares to what others are doing.

Pretty much exactly the advice I was going to give. Definitely play around with stuff on your own first, but don't be afraid to look stuff up if you get really stuck, cause it can sometimes just make something click in your brain to help you understand how something works.
As for different ways to make things work, I think there are a lot of different ways. Obviously some are far more efficient or optimized than others, but even if you just look at the most efficient ones there are multiple different ways to do stuff, which I think is what is so great about the game.