• Gleba and Space both have infinite resources. Make use of it.
• Bring agricultural towers to Nauvis and start planting trees big style. It will eat up pollution like crazy.
• Underground belts don’t work through empty space and lava. Don’t know why I’m surprised.
• Replace every electric mining drill across the solar system with the big drills. It only depletes 50% of the field it works on, comes with its own productivity bonus, has more mod slots and can put stacks on belts later in the game.

Edit for bonus tip:

• As soon as you unlock foundries, switch to them. No reason to melt iron and copper the old way. The new process uses 50 ore and one caltice and gives 500 liquid iron or copper. So it’s fine to export calcite across the system. You can even cast stuff like pipes, steel etc directly. Even low density structures and concrete without all the intermediate steps. (I forgot to mention it has an in built 50% productivity bonus, which is bonkers)

Wube is what every game developers should aim to be.

That its incredibly difficult to find time to play with a group of three with different professions

Do NOT add quality modules to the mines/electric furnaces feeding your main bus. It is poison for your factory, because you can’t just use any quality with any quality.

I’ve had half a dozen spots in my factory come to a halt because ~10 minutes of higher iron quality plates went onto my normal belt, and then clogged a bunch of assembly machines.

That even though I have been on a sick leave for a week, I barely got off Nauvis.

But seriously, I didn’t expect the game to be that long. And I didn’t even get into many new things yet. Mostly just the refined old things. But those are already awesome by themselves.

Otherwise, the fact that cliff explosives come much later now means Nauvis gameplay is suddenly a lot more interesting. Before it was a quick run to robots and cliff explosives, and landfill and then the challenge posed by the terrain was overcome. Now I spent a lot more time working around landscape, which is actually very interesting, and lead to a lot of beautiful spaghetti.

Once you can produce copper in space make a few platforms small enough to build space foundation. Just let then cook while working on other stuff. Having a bunch of foundation you didn’t have to launch is a huge time saver.

Be careful of stack inserters with things that can rot. If the stack rots before it’s full the inserter won’t take new items and won’t put the rot down locking the output.

When creating space requests you can specify what planet to get them from.

To keep fresh bitter eggs and prevent hatching harvest them into a supply chest. Then set a inserter to remove if quantity is greatest than x take oldest first. I use 100 per nest. Send removed to be burnt. This keeps fresh eggs available without them popping off every so often.

Trying to get quality intermediate resources at scale is a phenomenal waste of time, space, headache, and resources.

In every machine that allows it, use productivity. In every machine that doesn’t that isn’t your end product, use speed or efficiency. Only do quality on the last step.

Skim off the best quality you can make off the top, send everything else into recyclers with quality modules in them. They will upcycle all of the ingredients you need to be able to send them back through your crafting machines, where they’ll get a second upcycle opportunity. The law of large numbers will help guarantee that you’ll always have the ingredient balance you need to never back up, as long as you have some buffer storage to smooth out the fluctuations.

This is the conclusion after weeks of trying to design a factory on Fulgora that makes quality everything while wasting little as possible, and finding out that it’s just not a competitive strategy against only rolling on the last step. It would maybe work in an ultra late game mega factory that is not space or resource constrained, but until you get access to vast amounts of foundation to build wherever you want on any planet you want, my money says don’t bother.

How to actually play factorio. Its been sitting I my library for eight years. I never got past the early game.

When the DLC released I swore I would only get it if I could actually beat the vanilla game and send the rocket to space. I commited the past two weeks to learning the game and growing the factory. How trains and signals work, how robots work, how to better design and space out production lines. And how to SHELL THOSE FUCKING BUGS BACK TO HELL. Nothing felt as good as when the bug attacks ramped up and I finally snapped and built a tank for the first time. Ooooh sweet sweet vengeance.