How to get into Factorio without overcomplicating things.

I find Factorio is one of those games people tend to stumble blindly into. It's fairly complicated, there's more going on mechanically than it can look, and the developers' policy of never putting the game on sale means new players just sort of trickle in with nobody to compare notes with besides old veterans, and in my experience, old veterans will teach some really really terrible habits to people just trying to get into the game by doing things that seem like super efficient perfectly compact precision engineered setups from someone who has the game totally figured out, but are really... kinda hugely wasteful ways to do things that they like to do for purely aesthetic reasons. It also really doesn't help things that if you poke around on youtube or something it is shockingly easy to mix up the probably-as-I-write-this holder of nearly every speedrunning record for the game, and this other guy with a similar name who does a lot of... kinda questionable tutorial videos.

Basically what it comes down to is there's two general types of Factorio player. One likes to replace whatever is on the map with some sort of regularly organized grid of some sort, where they can copy and paste large sections of it, and they'll often tweak map generation to not include any cliffs, water, or enemies because these things get in the way of their orderliness. Then there's the sort of person I'm just going to call horribly sloppy gremlins, who will make a terrifying ugly tangled sprawl as they play the game, cannibalizing stuff they built earlier and doing weird workarounds and such, and improvising in the face of weird map geometry. And I mean, these are both totally valid ways to approach the game, but given how all the things you make in the game look like this, I kinda figure you're really meant to be a horrible sloppy gremlin.

Either approach though works better when you know the stuff I'm going to lay out here though, honestly, so just to dig in...

Hey what am I even supposed to be doing here?

So, the premise of Factorio is that you are some weird highly motivated engineer who has crashed on a hostile planet full of abundant natural resources, and also just... Starcraft Zerg pretty much straight up. From there, you have 3 basic simultaneous goals:

1. Build a bunch of automated infrastructure to do things in a quick and snappy way.
2. Research a bunch of niftier technologies, eventually unlocking the ability to launch a new rocket and win (and maybe also get the last science flavor to grind eternally in the postgame).
3. Don't let the zerg kill you or smash all your stuff up.

But before you do any of that, you have to slog through the early game, which is weird and doesn't really work like the rest of it, and really benefits like crazy from knowing a few hotkeys.

So it's WASD movement, T for tech tree, E for inventory, left click to put a thing down or open a thing up, right click to remove something from the map (either things you placed or like, rocks and trees), space to shoot, and while rarely relevant, enter to get in/out of vehicles.

Then you've got some really important hot keys that you don't NEED but wow are they great especially early on. Holding control lets you snag things out of things, holding F lets you vacuum loose items off the floor, and holding Z lets you quickly drop whatever is in your hand into things. And as a general rule, you can hold buttons down while running around to just keep doing whatever thing where your mouse is. There's even nice quality of life things like if you hold the button to place a conveyor belt, and run around or swing the mouse around, it'll ignore the axis the belt's not traveling in, so you can really quickly drag a big line out. Hold the button to place a power pole down and run around and you'll keep auto-placing more just far enough apart to stay connected. And of course if you have, as tends to be the case in the early game, a line of furnaces smelting things, you can put a stack of coal in your hand, hold Z and smear your mouse over them all to roughly evenly distribute it everywhere, then hold control and drag all over to get the smelted products out. Speed runs for this game are under 2 hours, and like half of that is in the early game where you're constantly moving stuff around by hand. Would be a lot more if not for those time savers.

While I'm at it, when you're fiddling with inventories, various combinations of left and right clicking, holding shift or control let you do stuff like "get 5 of these, take half this stack, put one thing in my hand here not the whole stack" and then there's like the most important hot key in the game, alt, which you hit exactly once after starting a new game so that all of your machines and furnaces display what they're producing and then never touch alt again except to fix it when you alt-tab out and accidentally turn that display back off.

Getting through the early game quick

So the ship you crashed on- Various stray debris bits can be picked up, and/or opened up, and contain some raw materials and starting stuff that's handy to have, so, clean all that up, and maybe some of the stray trees and large rocks scattered around, because you need some wood early on, and grabbing big rocks gives you some nice quick hits of stone and coal in addition to a more open canvas.

Basically the first thing you want to do is grab some stone, grab some coal, and grab some iron (right clicking big yellowish black and bluish splotches on the ground), then go into your inventory and convert those to a bunch of furnaces, and a bunch of miners. The miners will continue to grab stone coal and iron for you, and also copper, and the furnaces will melt the iron and copper from raw ore into plates. Ideally you want to throw down a row of I dunno like 6-8 miners which feed with their little arrows directly into a line of furnaces next to them, so all you have to do is take some coal now again and sloppily throw it all into all the miners and furnaces, then swing by when you have a space moment, and control drag over all the furnaces to get decent sized stacks of useful stuff out.

Furnaces can also cook stone into bricks, and putting iron plates back into furnaces turns them into steel, but you don't need to do either of those early on, so for stone, it's nice to slap down a wooden box in the middle of a stone patch and make a cute little flower of 4 miners feeding into it. Meanwhile the little trick everyone does for their early game coal mining is you put a miner down on the coal whose output feeds directly into another coal miner, which either feeds back into the first one, or into a little conga line of like 4-10 coal miners that all feed eachother in a loop.

Machines and furnaces in Factorio all tend to have decent sized personal inventories, so particularly when things get backstuffed, you can raid stuff out of whatever's producing it and/or what it's getting shoved into. And anything which needs coal to fuel it like these early game burner miners have a big fuel slot, AND generally speaking if something isn't able to do a thing it just shuts off to conserve power/fuel, so left alone, this sort of loop will eventually leave them all with 50 coal each in the fuel slot. You can come control-click raid that out and they'll automatically fill eachother back up.

So once all that's sorted out, you can then set up the stuff you need to escape the early game: By the edge of some water that's ideally close to some coal, you want to plop down a water pump, attach a boiler, stick 2 steam engines on it, put a power pole in range of those, and then another in range of a science lab you're plopping down. Make 10 red science vials in your inventory, dump those in there, get the first tech on the tree, and then move on to actually starting to play the real game. Oh and while you're setting your steam engines up, you should probably make space for a proper steam power setup going forward. This is getting a little ahead of myself, but here:

Mostly Factorio is a really flexible creative thing, but steam power is kind of a solved issue, and there's practically speaking only two viable setups. Water pumps run forever and don't really consume water, but they can only push through so much so fast, so basically, one pump gives you 20 water points and every boiler on the line costs 1 point. You can daisy chain boilers together, so why wouldn't you? And there's just one connector on each to stick a steam engine, which... has enough steam left over to pass some on to exactly one additional steam engine, so you just always want to lay out a line of 20 boilers, add 2 steam to each, and leave just enough space to keep them all connected to the same network of power lines, either putting a piece of pipe down every 2 boilers and putting power poles in the gaps that makes, or putting in a pipe on alternate steam engine pairs, like this. Either way you run a belt along the other side of the boilers to feed coal in.

And tada, that's power solved for... the entire game really. There's two other power sources that eventually become available. Solar, which is pretty simple, you just put a solar panel down wherever, have a power pole in range of it that's attached to the rest of your power lines, and you want to add accumulators in at an ugly 21 accumulators per 25 solar panels so there's batteries to keep things running at night. And it's let's see... 25 boilers vs. 80 solar panels, with the steam setup being cheaper to make, and letting your character pass between the machines slightly better than the not-at-all you get out of solar, so it's not particularly worth it to make that switchover, unless getting coal and water to the same place really isn't working out or you're really committed to minimizing poluton. Later there's also nuclear, but with how late in the game you get it, it's faster to just win the game than to get a single nuclear setup going. Totally worth it if you're playing on after winning, but in the most practical sense, steam now, steam forever is the best bet.

Now it's time to learn about belts and inserters!

Doing convoluted things with conveyor belts and wacky inserter arms is kind of the bulk of what you do in Factorio, and there's some really important mechanics to them that really aren't obvious, so this is kind of why I'm even writing this guide. We'll start with our wacky friend, the nobel inserter. Inserters are your best friend. Remember when you're placing them, they have 2 feet behind them, and 1 foot out front. If they have power, they will grab things from the tile in front of them, whether that's a belt, a machine, a loose item on the ground, or a crate, and plop them down on the tile in front of them, again, whatever's there. If you want to be a total weirdo, you can fully automate a whole factory with nothing at all but inserters, just bucket-line passing everything around in long chains, but they do use power and belts exist so maybe don't. Generally speaking, you set things up so you have a row of machines, a row of inserters and power lines, and a belt, which they're either using to get stuff into the machne, or out and on its way to somewhere else. You can also use them to just directly take things out of machine A and put them in machine B. They're also pretty smart all things considered. If you have a machine which turns iron plates into gears, and for some reason you have an inserter pulling from a belt that contains a mix of iron and copper plates, it will not try to grab the copper plates, and will just let them go by. If you have a mixed belt of iron ore and coal and they're facing a furnace though, they'll grab an even ratio of each. Machine or crate they're feeding not need more? They'll wait until they're needed. You can even stick inserters between two science facilities and snag research vials from one and give them to the other if the one they're feeding into is in need, which can make some setups easier. It's worth noting though that their little animation isn't for show. If items are going by on a belt faster than an inserter can move, it will be unable to grab things off the belt. They just feebly reach out and barely miss. It's kind of cute. This comes up both with standard inserters and very fast belts, or even with standard belts if you aren't producing enough power and machines are starting to slow down. Technically you have access to inserters before you have electricity, but burner inserters are extra slow, and periodically need coal added to them. They do have a quality of life feature that if they're moving coal, they'll just steal some as needed, so they aren't bad for feeding boilers, but if the belt ever runs dry for any reason, they miss their self-refueling, and once you solve everything else you need to run around and hand-feed every one some coal to get them going again, which is a pain. Regular inserters feeding boilers will also grind to a halt when the power goes out, but don't need to be manually babysat to get it back on. Oh and red inserters skip over one tile both in front of and behind them, but any tile of a machine is as good as any other, so, machine, reds, belt belt is handy for getting multiple things into one assembler/science lab/etc.

Then we have belts. Belts are pretty simple. There's a belt tile, it points in a direction. Whatever ends up on the tile gets pushed off to that direction if there's room for it, or sits and waits patiently until there is. This mostly applies to loose items being moved with inserters or dropped with Z, but they'll also move you, or a vehicle, whatever. They don't care. Also, they don't require electricity at all. And they come in 3 flavors, with red going twice the speed of yellow, and blue 3 times the speed of yellow. But now for the big grand glorious secret of success in Factorio- Understanding that every belt is secretly actually 2 belts.

While not particularly clear from the visuals, seriously, when you see a conveyor belt, you should always imagine you are seeing two belts side by side. If one side of a belt is full, things that would otherwise be added to that side will patiently wait, and leave the other side empty. If for any reason one side of a line backs up and everything on it stops, things will keep moving along the other lane. You can put turns in a belt just fine, but if you have a T intersection, we don't get the nice curved belt graphic, and everything gets shoved to just one side of the belt. This is actually super useful for when you want to have two ingredients both going to the same machine just ridng along together, or making sure to use both side fully when bringing just all the ore ever from a big mining setup to some furnaces, and a horrible nightmare you have to clean up by hand if done accidentally, like in this example which would still work like this without the splitters.

The rules of thumb to remember are that miners, both the early game burner ones you want to stop using ASAP and the superior electric ones, push things out, so everything so if you point one at a north-south running belt, everything ends up on the west side. Inserters meanwhile can grab from either side of a belt as needed, but will only ever place things on the far side of a belt. So again, inserter to the west of a belt, everything ends up on the east side.

All of this matters a lot when you start getting late game recipes where 3 or more things go in and belts need to start pulling double duty. Especially science, where you eventually need every lab to have every flavor of science coming in at once. Also good to remember, as you upgrade to those electric drills: While burner drills both occupy and mine a 2x2 area, electric drills are 3x3 structures that mine out a 5x5 space. Good for covering weird corners/not leaving resources unmined because the belts and power lines have to go somewhere, but much easier if you aren't paying attention to those "expected yield" popups to get the odd bit of copper in your iron line or something and have it make something stop working until you go pull it out.

Playing through the bulk of the game

Once you have electricity up and running, and access to assembly machines, there's sort of an awkward transitional phase where you're still moving stuff around by hand, but generally, you want to set up some big mining setups feeding into big smelting lines (common for people to do mirrored setups where the inside or outside belt(s) have a belt with ore on one side and coal on the other, inserted to rows of furnaces, whose output combines to one nice overstuffed belt), get big outgoing belts of iron and copper, and then set up assembly lines that grab those off to make stockpiles of things you need a lot, and into areas that do whatever necessary sub-steps and eventually spit out some flavor of science to take to your labs.

Now here, a lot of people get hung up on perfect golden ratios and evenly filled belts with no gaps flowing all over, and way too many people have this downright religious obsession with building a "central bus" where they have like 20 parallel belts running out to infinity with the rest of their base diverting resources off them and using a series of splitters to rebalance all the lanes after and make it all pretty again and... yeah there's actually no practical benfit at all to doing that, it's kind of resource intensive, and tends to conflict with the geography randomly generated maps hand you. Also fanc aesthetic builds tend to use way more resources than they need to (the youtuber who I picked bad habits up from while learning the game really loves cramming as much as possible into the grid spaces between large power poles, using fast belts and upgraded assemblers everywhere, and doesn't think much about how much of a given thing you actually really need). My strong advice is just eyeball things and give yourself room to make tweaks.

If you need oh, advanced circuits, and you have a setup that's making at least some, cool. If the thing you need those for needs more than you're producing, go check if the assemblers from those are short on something and add more, or if they aren't, add more assemblers for the advanced circuits, then check if you're overconsuming something now. Do you need more iron? You probably need more iron. Miners eventually pick everything up and need to be moved. The big awful sprawl of ad hoc splitters pulling everything from your one smelting array without a care for ratios of consumption (which, I want to stress, is fine to do. If one side of a splitter backstuffs, everything just flows out the other side, ratio doesn't matter), you might need to feed another smelting line into it. Maybe upgrade to faster belts up through the most significant split. Or just have an unconnected iron artery running from some other source to where it's needed, whatever. If it all works it's fine. Don't worry about how chaotic it looks. Do maybe space major things out enough that you can sneak more belts across the map later, and remember when you hit the point that you need a bunch of undergrounds to cross the belt tangle, the standard ones only skip 4 tiles. Oh and you need more steel. Go set up a big mining smelting section just to have an extra steel line to put somewhere later. Maybe load some into a wooden chest so you can fill up and build pricier stuff at will. Also gears. And you need WAY more copper than that. I know but later you need just tons.

Getting fancy with oil and trains

Trains in Factorio are really neat. You lay down a bunch of tracks on a larger-scale grid, and make networks between stations. Then you can put trains on those, telling them to say, go to Pickup Stop, stay there until your cargo is full, go to dropoff spot, stay there until you're empty. Just set something up to feed fuel in when it's stopped, they'll haul massive shipments everywhere. The question is, do you need that? Because again, they're costly to build. You could just string like 500 tiles worth of belt across the map. Could be cheaper than all that train infrastructure. If you do build trains though, first build rails, with long flat stretches where you want stations, then the stations, then an engine at the station, then cargo cars, then inserters, making sure it all works when the train's stopped at the station.

Meanwhile, there's oil, and various oil products. You need these as you're getting into blue science and beyond. I'm going to level with you. I hate dealing with oil. Once you hit the point where you're splitting it into light and heavy oil, your refineries are going to start stopping constantly because you aren't consuming them in the ratio you're producing them and when any one backs up everything stops. The fix for this is to use logic circuits for setups that check for when things are close to backstuffing and then cracking the surplus, and working that out isn't terribly difficult, but it's a lot of time to spend on a solved problem. To this day this is the one part of the game where I will happily copy a blueprint from someone and probably overbuild just so I don't have to think about oil ratios. Just set up oil derricks, incoming water lines, swipe someone's backstop-proof setup, pump some light oil out to some reserve tanks to make rocket fuel at the end of the game, very few required things require lubricant, petroleum is in high demand.

Upgrades and Modules and Beacons Oh My!

A lot of things in Factorio can be upgraded into better versions of themselves twice, and it's a shame they didn't properly keep the color coding consistent for it. The first of these upgrades is pretty handy. Double speed belts let you feed twice as many machines in the same tileable setup. Fast inserters don't fail to grab things off faster belts, and make dealing with high yield/high demand things like gears and copper wire easier. Assembly machines mark 2 run twice as fast, which is cool if you're tight on space, and also for things like gears where an assembly builds needs a lot of them made before anything else can happen. There's never really a "time to upgrade everything" though. I mean, maybe there is for assembly mark 2s. And after a point standard inserters only really make sense for stuff with longer processing times. Steel furnaces move things along twice as fast AND they're more fuel efficient, which is great when you need a bunch of steel... like you do to upgrade to them. Meanwhile the highest tier upgrades don't give as much bang for their buck, and are mostly upgrades to how many module slots you have. Modules tweak the math on how many resources you're using, how fast you're going, or how much you're polluting, and either go directly in machines, or into beacons that spread their effects over a reasonably large area.