Second play through, first K2 and vaguely frustrated…

[Laggard66]

Second play through and I’m just frustrated at trying to get thing automated rather than moving material around by hand. I really really miss my flying robots. I’m a good ways into research but struggle how to put an efficient assembly chain together to make something like a red card.

First you need to mine copper, move it to an assembler to get wire made, then move that to another assembler. At the same time you need to be producing the other needed materials, then move that. You get the picture. So you end up with dozens of mines and conveyer belts simply to create one card.

So, how to do this more efficiently? Very frustrated.

Thanks

[1WheelDude]

use belts to automate thing. then research bots so automate become easy. then build bot and enjoy game. but first use belt. belt move thing while you think of other thing

[NineNine]

First you need to mine copper, move it to an assembler to get wire made, then move that to another assembler. At the same time you need to be producing the other needed materials, then move that. You get the picture. So you end up with dozens of mines and conveyer belts simply to create one card.

So, how to do this more efficiently? Very frustrated.

What you're describing is literally the core of the game. It gets significantly more complicated as you progress in the game, too. And then, if you play the Space Age add on, it gets much more complicated than that. If you're not enjoying the conveyor belts it takes to make red chips, then in all honesty, this game might not be for you (which is entirely fine. Not everybody enjoys every game!).

[Laggard66]

First you need to mine copper, move it to an assembler to get wire made, then move that to another assembler. At the same time you need to be producing the other needed materials, then move that. You get the picture. So you end up with dozens of mines and conveyer belts simply to create one card.

So, how to do this more efficiently? Very frustrated.

What you're describing is literally the core of the game. It gets significantly more complicated as you progress in the game, too. And then, if you play the Space Age add on, it gets much more complicated than that. If you're not enjoying the conveyor belts it takes to make red chips, then in all honesty, this game might not be for you (which is entirely fine. Not everybody enjoys every game!).

Well this is my second play through so the game is for me. Simply having trouble this time getting started and organized. I did spaghetti last time. Don’t want to do it again.

[Nilshar]

Oh you'll do spaghetti lot more than one time.. I'm 10k+ hours into the game and still end up doing spaghetti on occasion

[Kyralessa]

If you don't mind mods, there are plenty of mods that give you some form of construction bots right at the start of the game.

[Nosferatu]

Try to get the Lazy Bastard Achievement on your second run.
That will teach you to automate as much as possible as early as possible.

[Tertius]

That's the very beginning:
You need to mine ore, then move ore to smelter, then move plates to assembling machines.
Additionally you need to mine coal, then move coal to every machine for supply.

This means transport belts are very high on your priority list, and since you continuously grow your base, you should automate constructing them as priority as well. This way you automate supplying mining drills and furnaces with coal and don't need to manually refill everything. The first bottleneck to overcome is to get enough transport belts to move coal to items and plates to assembling machines. At the very start, it helps if you place a stone furnace directly at the output of each mining drill, so you directly get plates and don't need to move ore around. Later, as soon as you have enough belts, it's better to build dedicated smelting arrays.
And it helps if you choose a map seed that has all the starting area resource patches somewhat near to each other.

The suggestion to do the "lazy bastard" achievement is a very good one: it requires you to automate absolutely everything. The only things you're allowed to handcraft is when you create the very first machines that automate the very first items. You have to think about what has to be automated first, then next. This achievement is easy, just a bit of brainwork and discipline (you can remove your permission to hand craft after you hand crafted all that must be hand crafted to ease up the discipline part).

[NineNine]

First you need to mine copper, move it to an assembler to get wire made, then move that to another assembler. At the same time you need to be producing the other needed materials, then move that. You get the picture. So you end up with dozens of mines and conveyer belts simply to create one card.

So, how to do this more efficiently? Very frustrated.

What you're describing is literally the core of the game. It gets significantly more complicated as you progress in the game, too. And then, if you play the Space Age add on, it gets much more complicated than that. If you're not enjoying the conveyor belts it takes to make red chips, then in all honesty, this game might not be for you (which is entirely fine. Not everybody enjoys every game!).

Well this is my second play through so the game is for me. Simply having trouble this time getting started and organized. I did spaghetti last time. Don’t want to do it again.

You can take any approach you'd like, of course. But at the beginning of any game, you don't have the technology to do bots, of course, and all sorts of other things. And, as the game progresses, you unlock new technologies that make it more efficient to build things in entirely new ways (ie: stone furnace --> steel furnace --> electric furnace). So, unless you use mods, you can't really start the game building your factories the way they'll look at later in the game.

But, since you like bots so much, and you don't enjoy the beginning of the game, why not just continue to play your first game? The challenges don't stop when you launch a rocket. I'd argue that the most interesting challenges come much, much later than the first rocket launch. I've been playing the same game for about 6 months now, fox example. I first launched a rocket about 6 months ago, and I play almost every day, and I'm not close to bored. A lot of us play the same game for months or years and put thousands of hours into a single game. There's nothing forcing you to start a new game.

[Laggard66]

First you need to mine copper, move it to an assembler to get wire made, then move that to another assembler. At the same time you need to be producing the other needed materials, then move that. You get the picture. So you end up with dozens of mines and conveyer belts simply to create one card.

So, how to do this more efficiently? Very frustrated.

What you're describing is literally the core of the game. It gets significantly more complicated as you progress in the game, too. And then, if you play the Space Age add on, it gets much more complicated than that. If you're not enjoying the conveyor belts it takes to make red chips, then in all honesty, this game might not be for you (which is entirely fine. Not everybody enjoys every game!).

Well this is my second play through so the game is for me. Simply having trouble this time getting started and organized. I did spaghetti last time. Don’t want to do it again.

You can take any approach you'd like, of course. But at the beginning of any game, you don't have the technology to do bots, of course, and all sorts of other things. And, as the game progresses, you unlock new technologies that make it more efficient to build things in entirely new ways (ie: stone furnace --> steel furnace --> electric furnace). So, unless you use mods, you can't really start the game building your factories the way they'll look at later in the game.

But, since you like bots so much, and you don't enjoy the beginning of the game, why not just continue to play your first game? The challenges don't stop when you launch a rocket. I'd argue that the most interesting challenges come much, much later than the first rocket launch. I've been playing the same game for about 6 months now, fox example. I first launched a rocket about 6 months ago, and I play almost every day, and I'm not close to bored. A lot of us play the same game for months or years and put thousands of hours into a single game. There's nothing forcing you to start a new game.

This sorta gets to the crux of my question. Do I spend time at the beginning just minding and smelting insane amounts of material and related products?? Plates, gears, rods, etc. ?

And can you automate wood harvesting? I spend a lot of time traveling to and laboriously harvesting the stuff.

[NineNine]

First you need to mine copper, move it to an assembler to get wire made, then move that to another assembler. At the same time you need to be producing the other needed materials, then move that. You get the picture. So you end up with dozens of mines and conveyer belts simply to create one card.

So, how to do this more efficiently? Very frustrated.

What you're describing is literally the core of the game. It gets significantly more complicated as you progress in the game, too. And then, if you play the Space Age add on, it gets much more complicated than that. If you're not enjoying the conveyor belts it takes to make red chips, then in all honesty, this game might not be for you (which is entirely fine. Not everybody enjoys every game!).

Well this is my second play through so the game is for me. Simply having trouble this time getting started and organized. I did spaghetti last time. Don’t want to do it again.

You can take any approach you'd like, of course. But at the beginning of any game, you don't have the technology to do bots, of course, and all sorts of other things. And, as the game progresses, you unlock new technologies that make it more efficient to build things in entirely new ways (ie: stone furnace --> steel furnace --> electric furnace). So, unless you use mods, you can't really start the game building your factories the way they'll look at later in the game.

But, since you like bots so much, and you don't enjoy the beginning of the game, why not just continue to play your first game? The challenges don't stop when you launch a rocket. I'd argue that the most interesting challenges come much, much later than the first rocket launch. I've been playing the same game for about 6 months now, fox example. I first launched a rocket about 6 months ago, and I play almost every day, and I'm not close to bored. A lot of us play the same game for months or years and put thousands of hours into a single game. There's nothing forcing you to start a new game.

This sorta gets to the crux of my question. Do I spend time at the beginning just minding and smelting insane amounts of material and related products?? Plates, gears, rods, etc. ?

I mean, yeah. That's sort of what the game is. You build stuff. You have to build basic stuff to get to more advanced stuff. But, you don't really have to mind it. The whole point is to automate as much as you can (or as much as you'd like). But, until you get bots to build for you, yeah, you build stuff yourself, as the engineer.

Are you perhaps building stuff by hand? Is that maybe what you're doing? It sounds like you know how to use conveyor belts to move stuff, so it doesn't sound like you're building everything by hand. But yeah, that's what the game is. Assemblers make stuff, you use inserters to move the stuff they made onto conveyor belts. the conveyor belts move the stuff to other assemblers that build more stuff. That's the whole game!

There's really no "point" to the game other than to have fun with it. The whole rocket launch thing is just an arbitrary goal. People have different goals... to produce xx items per minute, or to get to a certain level of research, or to create some really fun or crazy or cool or interesting or stupid or ridiculous design. You can play the game however you'd like, but the crux of it is to build assemblers and furnaces and conveyor belts and trains, etc.

Personally, I'm just interesting in building my factory big enough that my computer stops working. (I did it once last year, and now I'm doing the same thing with the new Space Age add-on). After that, I might start a different game and put some sort of artificial limit on myself, or make some different goal for myself. Some people try to build factories with no trains. Some people build factories with only trains. Some people build factories with bots doing all of the work. Some people build factories with no bots. Some people build really crazy designs with the conveyor belts. Some people like to mess with the biters. Some people like to build really elaborate, complicated train networks. Some people build really crazy systems with the circuit networks. It's really whatever you want to do.

As far as wood goes... you generally don't need wood after you find some coal. Wood is just used at the very beginning of the game for the most basic (least efficient) fuel. Once you find some coal, you can plunk a miner down on the coal, and use belts to deliver coal to everywhere you need it, and forget wood, entirely. AND, more importantly, at the beginning, you generally want to leave as many trees standing as you can, because trees absorb pollution that comes from your factories. That pollution aggravates the biters, and causes them to come attack you.

[Laggard66]

What you're describing is literally the core of the game. It gets significantly more complicated as you progress in the game, too. And then, if you play the Space Age add on, it gets much more complicated than that. If you're not enjoying the conveyor belts it takes to make red chips, then in all honesty, this game might not be for you (which is entirely fine. Not everybody enjoys every game!).

Well this is my second play through so the game is for me. Simply having trouble this time getting started and organized. I did spaghetti last time. Don’t want to do it again.

You can take any approach you'd like, of course. But at the beginning of any game, you don't have the technology to do bots, of course, and all sorts of other things. And, as the game progresses, you unlock new technologies that make it more efficient to build things in entirely new ways (ie: stone furnace --> steel furnace --> electric furnace). So, unless you use mods, you can't really start the game building your factories the way they'll look at later in the game.

But, since you like bots so much, and you don't enjoy the beginning of the game, why not just continue to play your first game? The challenges don't stop when you launch a rocket. I'd argue that the most interesting challenges come much, much later than the first rocket launch. I've been playing the same game for about 6 months now, fox example. I first launched a rocket about 6 months ago, and I play almost every day, and I'm not close to bored. A lot of us play the same game for months or years and put thousands of hours into a single game. There's nothing forcing you to start a new game.

This sorta gets to the crux of my question. Do I spend time at the beginning just minding and smelting insane amounts of material and related products?? Plates, gears, rods, etc. ?

I mean, yeah. That's sort of what the game is. You build stuff. You have to build basic stuff to get to more advanced stuff. But, you don't really have to mind it. The whole point is to automate as much as you can (or as much as you'd like). But, until you get bots to build for you, yeah, you build stuff yourself, as the engineer.

Are you perhaps building stuff by hand? Is that maybe what you're doing? It sounds like you know how to use conveyor belts to move stuff, so it doesn't sound like you're building everything by hand. But yeah, that's what the game is. Assemblers make stuff, you use inserters to move the stuff they made onto conveyor belts. the conveyor belts move the stuff to other assemblers that build more stuff. That's the whole game!

There's really no "point" to the game other than to have fun with it. The whole rocket launch thing is just an arbitrary goal. People have different goals... to produce xx items per minute, or to get to a certain level of research, or to create some really fun or crazy or cool or interesting or stupid or ridiculous design. You can play the game however you'd like, but the crux of it is to build assemblers and furnaces and conveyor belts and trains, etc.

Personally, I'm just interesting in building my factory big enough that my computer stops working. (I did it once last year, and now I'm doing the same thing with the new Space Age add-on). After that, I might start a different game and put some sort of artificial limit on myself, or make some different goal for myself. Some people try to build factories with no trains. Some people build factories with only trains. Some people build factories with bots doing all of the work. Some people build factories with no bots. Some people build really crazy designs with the conveyor belts. Some people like to mess with the biters. Some people like to build really elaborate, complicated train networks. Some people build really crazy systems with the circuit networks. It's really whatever you want to do.

As far as wood goes... you generally don't need wood after you find some coal. Wood is just used at the very beginning of the game for the most basic (least efficient) fuel. Once you find some coal, you can plunk a miner down on the coal, and use belts to deliver coal to everywhere you need it, and forget wood, entirely. AND, more importantly, at the beginning, you generally want to leave as many trees standing as you can, because trees absorb pollution that comes from your factories. That pollution aggravates the biters, and causes them to come attack you.

You need wood for one of the cards. Green I think.

Edit : yes. K2 green requires wood, iron plate and copper plate.

[NineNine]

You didn't say you were playing K2. That's a whole different thing. I tried it and didn't enjoy it. I wish you all the best with that, though!

[Kyralessa]

The K2 didn't click for me in the title, and I think I'm probably not the only one.

But OK, you're playing K2, so you're already using mods. There are plenty of mods that give you early construction bots. Why not just use one?

Here's the 2.0 version of one I like to use when I play Space Exploration with Factorio 1.1. It feels less "cheaty" to me because you have to research it and you have to actually create the nanobot ammo in order to use it:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Nanobots2

[NineNine]

I'm sorry that I missed K2 in the title, as well! I apologize! K2 is indeed, a heck of a challenge.

But the wood thing in K2 is solved by putting up greenhouses, which produce wood, so you don't have to run around farming it by hand.