Factorio Before The Bus

Introduction

Starting a new factory can be pretty daunting, whether it's due to inexperience or the opposite - being accustomed to the conveniences of late game tech which does a lot of work for us. In this guide, we will be covering how to set up our own jump-start base to get us into a good position before we have to think about clearing out a large area to start setting up a streamlined but large factory based on a main bus.

While I have another guide covering the early game, that one focuses on semi-autonomous setups which don't stray far from burner tech, with the intent of gathering up the supplies necessary to build a main bus right away. In this guide, the focus will instead be on using a belt-fed setup to fully automate our progression all the way through red, green, and grey science (and optionally blue science as well) before we have to start thinking about building a bigger factory. With this, we can delay the main bus for quite some time while containing our operation to a very small area.

Why do this? In the short term, it allows us to work within the confines of our starting area, which is surrounded by biter bases and caged in by cliffs under default settings. In the long term, it makes us much better prepared to build our mid or late game factory without requiring us to tear it down and replace large sections of it later.

This guide will be presented as a walkthrough so that it can be followed top-to-bottom, but each general stage of progression will have its own section to make it easier to skip around. With that out of the way, it's time for the content to begin.

A Word On Blueprints

The focus of this guide is on acclimating new and returning players with the fundamentals of a typical early game in Factorio freeplay. Insofar as blueprints are concerned, I highly encourage use of the Sandbox mode to experiment and design them manually, even if it's just to reproduce a setup from this guide or elsewhere. Doing so will help to gain familiarity with the process of putting a working design together so that its function can be fully understood from having personally built and tested it.

This way, we can take what we've learned from constructing our own blueprints and use that knowledge and familiarity to build new designs or improve existing ones.

Specifically, I suggest using a Rail World when generating a Sandbox game, as this gives us large resource patches and restricts biter expansion, while offering lots of space in which to experiment.

Start And Burner Stage

The first thing we need to do is make sure our map is decent enough to work with. I try to aim for something like this:

What we're looking for are a few things. First, we want to have a nice enclosed area which has ready access to iron, copper, coal, stone, and oil. With cliffs and water giving us plenty of barriers, we can clear out our starting area and defend it without having to build too many defenses. It's best if the coal is somewhat close to a safe water source, so that we can get our power generation started with little hassle. Trees are a balance - too few, and our pollution cloud will spread far and wide, attracting biters to us in a hurry. We may also face a shortage of power poles and wooden boxes if we can't gather enough wood to start out. Too many trees, however, and we'll be hacking through them for much longer than we want to in order to clear even the minimal space we need to get off the ground.

So far, things are looking good. We can go ahead and jump into a map like this one with no problems.

First, the wreckage. Our starting inventory is divided between ourselves and the scattered remains of whatever space tragedy landed us on our planet. While taking care not to catch fire, we should recover everything we can from the our crashed ship's inventory. Disassembling the wreckage completely is not necessary and will not net us any additional resources - instead, we will use Ctrl + left mouse click when hovering over parts of the ship to instantly obtain everything from its inventory slots. When we're done, our complete inventory should look something like this:

We could start by hand-mining some of what we need to get started, but we don't have to. We already start with a burner miner and a furnace. We just need some fuel to get it started. We can grab a bunch of coal out of a large enough rock - if you hover over surface rocks with your mouse, you'll see what's in it so you can know to just mine that for some stone and fuel right off the bat.

This is much faster than hand-mining for coal or using wood for fuel from the start.

Once we have this in our inventory, we can grab a stack (or as much of one as we have) and start throwing it into our burners and furnaces. To throw all of a stack into something, hover over it with the stack in your hand and press Ctrl + left mouse click. For half a stack, use Ctrl + right mouse click. This lets us easily distribute limited supplies of materials into multiple devices, like our first miner and furnace.

To start, we should get some iron mined and smelted right away. This will let us build more burner miners out of the iron we drill up and smelt, which in turn will let us dig up more coal and iron to expand the process.

Remember to press Alt to show a view which displays more information about what's going on with all your machines. The direction of inserters and miners depositing their materials will be shown, as well as what kind of materials are being made in which structures. This makes it easier to see at a glance what's going on with your machines.

To grab items out of a machine which produces them, make sure you're not holding anything (press Q if you're holding something to empty your hand) and then use Ctrl + left mouse button to pull all of an item from a box or machine. Ctrl + right mouse button will pull half of the available item. Once we get some iron smelted, we'll want to start building more burner miners. We'll want to use these ones to get more coal for ourselves.

Another very handy trick to remember is that we can use Q to select something already on the map (even if it's a ghost version from a blueprint), and if the item is already in our inventory, it will be placed in our hand so that we can place it down. If we don't have any, this will put it in our hand as a ghost so that we can plan out our next placement like a blueprint. This makes it much easier to expand already-existing machines or setups with more of the same, or to fill in a complex blueprint without having to do a bunch of clumsy sifting through our inventory. For people like me who can never remember what we put on the hotbar anyway, this tool is extremely useful for manual construction.

An effective way to use burner miners for coal is to point pairs of them directly at each other. They mine coal faster than they burn it, so each miner will fill up the other with coal, allowing them to dig until they are both completely full. They can also chain into each other like this over longer loops - I normally try to build up to ten burner miners feeding each other in a loop while I'm still in the burner stage.

We can use this steady income of coal to power increasing numbers of iron miners and furnaces, gradually building them up until we have enough to fulfill our needs. For iron, I try to have twelve miners and furnaces before moving on to other things. If we run low on stone for building furnaces and miners, we can always break surface rocks to get more.

If we want to make a quick count of how many machines we have in an area, we can grab a new blueprint tool and drag over the area we want a count of. After we have our tally, we can just drop the blueprint like any other item without creating one.

Before long, we'll want to mine stone from a patch. We won't need to smelt it yet, so it's as simple as putting a few miners around a box and feeding them with coal.

For copper, we won't need nearly as much early on in the game. I usually run with four miners on copper at this point.

With this, we are now mining all of the resources we need to get a factory started. We'll have to hand-deliver coal to our miners and furnaces, so the process is only semi-autonomous at this point, but we are free to start setting up our starter base.

Power And Initial Research

From here, we'll want to get our power production started so that we can start working our way through the tech tree and convert to electric and fully automated mining. Ideally we'll want a body of water near our starting coal patch so that we can start throwing down a steam generator somewhere between the two.

To start, I throw down a blueprint like this near a body of water:

One offshore pump will provide enough water to supply twenty boilers, and each boiler is able to supply two steam engines. A design like this will provide all of this - in this case, water is coming in from the southern pipeline and coal is being belted in from the north. Burner inserters, while usually not the best option for other purposes, are effective as a failsafe in a steam boiler setup, as they simply power themselves using the burner fuel they pluck off the line, which they also must feed into the boilers. This allows them to feed boilers with fuel even during a blackout or a brownout (usually caused by suddenly adding laser turrets to our defenses).

We don't have to build the entire power plant immediately. We can start with two or four boilers and leave the rest of the blueprint to be filled in later. We only need a small amount of power for now. Once built, it should look something like this:

Now we need to get coal onto this belt automatically. To do this, we will need to lay down some electric miners on our coal patch. There's not much to this - laying down miners in a simple line on each side of a belt will do. I use a setup like this, which tiles cleanly in any direction and is easy to place down manually as every part can be click-dragged into place.

With the electric coal mine set up, we just have to connect it to the power lines for our steam engines and start the process by hand-feeding a bit of coal into our boilers. Once powered, the miners will dump coal onto the belt, which will continue to feed the boilers, and we will have automatic power.

Now we need to get our research started so that we can begin automating production. We'll need to craft and build at least one lab and ten red science packs (automation science) by hand, but after that we will be able to set up a more automated method of research.

Once we have our lab down and filled with ten science packs, we can press T to open up the tech tree. Our first order of business should be to research Automation, which will allow us to build assembly machines to craft things for us, rather than doing it all ourselves.

Once that is done, we can use a small blueprint to start assembling red science in a semi-autonomous fashion. With an input box, we can drop iron and copper plates, and then a handful of assembly machines will convert them into red science packs which it will deposit into a small chain of labs.

We only need to remember that this process costs twice as many iron plates as it does copper plates, so we can drop two stacks of iron in the box for every one stack of copper and the rest will take care of itself.

I strongly recommend setting Logistics as our second research item, as that allows us to use splitters and underground belts to weave our belts through each other and divide or combine our belts. This will be essential in getting all of our materials to where they need to go, which is important for the next stage of our construction. Another critical tech is Gun Turret, which we may want to go for before Logistics, depending on the severity of the Biter situation at hand. We'll be dealing with the biters in greater detail in the next section.

Early Biter Clearing

If we haven't been attacked by biters already, we will be soon. Fortunately, we can get by with a few technologies from what we have immediately available - primarily Gun Turret and Military 1. These will give us access to tools which we will need to clean up any encroaching biter bases in the area immediately pressing against our starting point.

The Submachine gun is an excellent upgrade from the pistol. It shares ammo with gun turrets and is well suited to personal defense. Turrets are a reliable way to defend our machines from biter attacks in our absence, but they can also be used offensively to destroy biter nests in a tactic known as Turret Creep. By now, we will have a pressing need to do this.

Here we have a biter base which is much too close to our starting area. It's brushing up against our pollution cloud, which will provoke attacks against us. For this first target, we'll take them out with a turret creeping attack. To prepare for this, we should stock up on a stack of ammo, at least three turrets, and a couple of repair packs. Once ready, we'll set out to clear the menace from our territory.

First, we want to set up a small defensive line of turrets at a safe standoff distance. Using the green circle, we can see how far our turrets can reach with their firing range. Ideally, we will move forward, building more turrets in front of the previous ones while still staying inside of their range, until they are as close as they can get without being able to fire on the nest or being fired on by the worms defending it.

When turret creeping, we want to have everything we need on our hotbar - it is much faster to hit hotkeys for all of our combat tasks than it is to rifle through our inventory manually. As we can see in the above screenshot, the simplest turret creep is just a game of leapfrog which we can play with as little as three turrets. As we advance, we pick up the farthest turret and place a new one closer than the currently standing ones, "creeping" toward the target biter nest with a slow advance of turrets.

Note that it is easier to do this after unequipping our personal weapon and ammo. That way, ammo will always be made available directly from our inventory when we pick up a turret to place closer to the target. Otherwise, ammo will fill up in our equipped slots, which makes it unavailable for immediate distribution to our turrets. Our real personal weapon in this type of attack will be our repair packs, not the pistol or submachine gun.

A big mistake often made by new or impatient players is to make those leaps as large as possible, sometimes going all the way up to the edge of the closest turret's firing range or even beyond it. I do not recommend this, as it exposes the player and the new turrets to a lot of hostile action without the prior turrets being able to provide good protection for the advance. It's much safer to build our new turrets within arm's reach of the last one, so that the old turrets can effectively cover the new ones.

Be aware that when turrets start reaching nests with their firing range, they will not switch targets to defend themselves against the biters they spawn. Always keep one or more of the creeping turrets outside of the range to fire on biter nests or worms so that they can cover and protect the more forward turrets from newly spawned biters.

This method is safer than going after the bases with our personal weapon, but it can consume quite a bit of resources in ammo consumption. The greater goal is to improve our situation so that we do not have to rely on somewhat risky attack methods like this to secure our territory. For now, we'll have to secure our safety this way.

To keep an eye on our surroundings, we should start placing down a couple of radars, which will let us monitor a large area around them while they scan further into the distance. This will help us keep track of potential problems in the future so that we can be proactive about keeping new biter nests and their attacks away. Note the blue area highlighted in the minimap when holding a radar in hand - it shows us the area that will be constantly revealed by the radar's presence, allowing us to maximize the efficiency of our coverage.

With our monitoring up, we can return to our main task of expanding our factory.

Automatic Smelting And Research

Our current semi-autonomous setup will allow us to make our way through the red science portion of the tech tree as long as we hand-deliver iron and copper plates periodically to our input box. However, we do not want to continue operating in this way - we want our research as well as our production to operate without needing direct input from us. To do this, we'll need to expand our mining and smelting operations to include electric mining of all ore fields and feed the ore into automatic smelting arrays so that we can more easily feed the needed materials into an assembly line.

It is extremely common for ore patches in the starting area to be in direct contact with each other. This causes miners to output two different ores on the same belt lane, causing the belt to become what we call a sushi belt. Sushi belting is generally bad and we want to avoid it whenever possible, because one object being used less than the other will clog up throughput and potentially gridlock an entire delivery system. Fortunately, we can sort this out using splitters. If we left click on a splitter, we can designate both input and output priorities, as well as setting a filter for one item on the output:

In this case, we have a pure iron belt and a coal belt with some iron sushi in it. To fix this, we filter the output priority to either iron on the iron belt exit, or coal on the coal belt exit. For input priority, we target the belt which is suffering a sushi problem - this prioritizes clearing out the sushi belt first, which keeps the outputs clean and minimizes the chance of the input belt getting clogged up with the unwanted mixture.

Once we have enough electric miners in our ore patches, we can start to set up our smelting area. I suggest staying close to the ore patches while giving a little bit of space for belts to be woven around as needed. For smelting at this stage, I use a blueprint like this:

This takes a belt of ore and a belt of coal, splits them into separate lanes on two belts, and feeds them into two lines of furnaces which deposit the smelted plates into a central output belt. It's a cheap and compact way to meet our needs in the early game.

It takes 48 stone furnaces in total to completely fill a belt, but this design only uses 24. This is because our demand will not be that high initially, and we will be in a position to replace these with steel furnaces when the demand does increase. It only takes 24 steel furnaces to fill a belt, so we won't have to rearrange anything to maximize our output here when the time comes. For now, we need to put these blueprints down in an open space near our ore patches and get them built.

When completed, the smelting setups will look something like this:

With all of our mining and smelting in place, we are now automatically producing stone bricks, coal, iron plates, and copper plates. We're going to gather these up for further use, but first we will add some convenience to our life. We already have some high-use items such as transport belts, ammo, small power poles, and walls which we will want in large quantities no matter what we're doing from now on. A couple of temporary assembly setups will take care of this for us while we focus on the larger task at hand.

With that out of the way, we can gather our four major resources onto two belts by side-loading them onto a lane of each.

Everything we need to build - before getting into oil production - is guaranteed to require only these four resources as base ingredients. Therefore, we can snake these two belts through an open area and feed some assembler arrays directly from it, simplifying our transportation management. It's not quite a true bus system, but it's a compact miniaturized version of one, and it will carry us all the way up until we need to start using oil products.

Later, we'll have assembly machines set up to manufacture all sorts of things for us using the mini-bus. But first things first, we are likely running out of red science technologies to research if we haven't already, so we need to set up a way to cover more research.

For that, we have another blueprint we can use:

This might look like a sudden jump in complexity from what we were doing, but the premise is pretty simple. Assuming the iron/copper belt is on the near side to the assemblers, we can pull the base ingredients to convert into intermediate ingredients, which we can then assemble into science packs and feed them into a line of labs for research. Because we have yet to research some technologies, we won't be able to assemble grey or blue science packs quite yet, but we can lay down the foundation for them now anyway. Once we get the tech, we can assign them to the assemblers and easily prioritize military upgrades right away.

In the meantime, we can use the belts to bypass most of this starter base research lab so we can move on to the production area.

In practice, the completed automated science will run off of the mini-bus looking something like this:

Now that we have our automatic research producing science for us, we can let it run while we do other things and select our preferred research goals at our leisure. From now on, it'll be smooth sailing until we need to expand to new resource patches.

One important thing to note is that this setup gives us very quick access to the Defender robots technology, which allows us to construct Defender capsules.

These things are absolutely monstrous in their effectiveness at biter stomping, and can easily replace turret creeping as our dominant tactic against them. I strongly encourage prioritizing research on this tech.

Automatic Line Production

Now that our research has been automated, we can continue to use our little mini-bus to manufacture supplies that we'll need for things like defenses and factory expansion. To start, we want to extend our supply belts past the research area, so that we don't cannibalize supplies from the line before they're used in research. One of the disadvantages of this method is that it is very easy to starve one of the lanes, depleting it of resources by consuming them in one manufacturing project and preventing assemblers further down the line from being able to use those base ingredients for what they need.

We have solutions for that, of course, but for now it's something we need to keep in mind. Starting your assembly line should look something like this:

In this example, we started with power poles. This is a bit unusual as one of the ingredients is wood, which is not on the minibus. We use an input box on the back end of the assembly setup to dump wood into, making this particular process only semi-autonomous. We can get away with this in this case because wood is plentiful, small power poles are cheap to produce, and we'll rarely if ever need to refresh this box. If anything, it being there spares us the space in our personal inventory. More importantly, we see how easy it is to chain assembly machines into one another along this line - copper cables pluck from the minibus and easily feed into the power pole assembler, and that finishes this simple two-step production for us. This basic premise will guide how all of our assembly setups work on the mini-bus.

This also allows us to demonstrate another technique, which is chaining multiple different production lines off of the same intermediate product assembler. In this case, the copper cable assembler is making more than enough to feed power pole production and still have materials to spare for another purpose.

We'll use this to begin assembling a series of much needed items: inserters.

By chaining assembly machines and their outputs either directly into each other or passing them "behind" each other, we can create assembly processes which can automatically produce as much as we want of commonly used items straight off the belt, turning our mini-bus into a sort of mini-mall for us to come by and pick up what we need for what we will build later. In this example, we're getting red, yellow, and blue inserters made using eight assembly machines in a row. We can do this for just about everything we need.

One thing to be mindful of is the quantity these setups will produce. They're fully automatic, so they'll run until their outputs are full. We probably don't want to spend all of our iron making 800 inserters of each type all at once, so we should put some limits on our boxes to store only what we need, freeing up resources for other assembly projects down the line.

We can also smelt straight off the mini-bus to feed our assemblers. We will need to do this to make steel for the products which use them. This is easy to do and requires no special filtering as iron and coal are the only objects on the minibus which can be inserted into furnaces. Steel does take a longer time to create than most intermediate products, so it may be prudent to double up on the furnaces feeding into steel-consuming assembly machines. Furnaces can feed into a machine from the sides as usual, using a pass-behind belt, or even directly from the path of the minibus by using underground belts.

As we continue adding to our assembly lines, we will inevitably experience the starvation of some of our materials.

This will happen most commonly with iron, which is in the highest demand. While this starvation will only last until the assembly lines consuming our resources reach the limit of what they need to produce, we can't always afford to wait for, say, an inserter box to be full before we get more belts being made.

Fortunately, we can fix this fairly easily. Our burner miners are still functioning, so we have a readily available source of extra materials on hand for times like this. All we need to do is identify where the starvation occurs and patch it up using a box and a fast inserter to replenish the lane after its starvation point.

Note that inserters deposit items on the far lane of the belt from where they are located. This makes it uncomplicated to add to the belt if the target lane is already in that spot. If it isn't, a more indirect method of side-loading with an underground bypass can be used. Both methods are pictured below:

We can patch this up for now by adding an insertion point to fill gaps in the iron lane, and that will keep things going for now. This semi-autonomous and temporary solution is acceptable because the problem is also temporary - once we have enough of the product we need farther down the line, it won't be as urgent for them to be produced immediately.

Bear in mind that starvation can occur at more than one location at a time, so be ready to patch in the fix at multiple points along your line. That's all it takes to keep this starter setup running as smoothly as it needs to be for now. Just keep building assembly arrays for whatever you feel you need and the mini-bus will provide them to you automatically, and in a relatively compact space.

Another thing to note is the space required for the pass-behind effect. We will be making additional turns in the minibus when we run out of room to expand in a single direction, so it's important to leave enough room for this backside logistical solution. I recommend leaving three open tiles behind an assembler which is placed directly on the minibus - one space for inserters, and two for belts to be reached by short and long inserters on the backside. When you fold the minibus to make assembly lines which are back-to-back, this would mean leaving six spaces between those assembly machines in the main pulling position. Eventually, we can even add fluid inputs to this pass-behind space if we leave at least this much room behind assembly machines.

And just like that, we have ourselves automated production to keep us topped off on the things we'll need in large quantities to expand our operations.

Thanks to our access to military science, we are able to manufacture Defender robots in quantity almost immediately. We'll be demonstrating how that will help us better secure our perimeter and push back against the expanding biter menace using all of that military hardware soon.

Better Biter Stomping And Perimeter Defense

Now that we're able to automatically produce sufficient quantities of the supplies we need to defend ourselves, we should take this time to get our bearings and figure out what our protection plan is going to be.

With our pollution cloud, we can see the area in which we are likely to provoke attacks from any biter bases which expand toward us. We can also see if any biter bases are getting worryingly close to that cloud if not already inside of it. We can see one such base now, and it appears to be noticeably bigger than the initial bases which we were able to stomp with little risk.

This time, we will be relying on better equipment. We already have steel being smelted along our production line for our science, so we can cannibalize some of that excess or just build smelters farther down the line just to produce steel and store some in a box for us. With that, we can build ourselves some heavy armor to make us a little tougher to kill.

Apart from that, we also should be able to produce Defender robots in sufficient quantities to go on some biter stomping expeditions. These things are basically flying gun turrets which follow us around once deployed, and they make the previous tactics of turret creeping obsolete.

There are the jerks now. We may still want to set up a couple of turrets at a standoff distance so that we have a place to retreat to, but we'll soon see that this sort of precaution isn't generally necessary as long as we bring enough combat robots to do the job.

Deploying the bots is as simple as holding them like any other object and clicking within their deployment range. Note the limit on our follower bot count on the right side of the hot bar. A green number indicates that we have reached the maximum number - deploying any more at once will only destroy the already deployed bots, wasting them before their timed lifespan runs out.

When attacking in this way, the bots will do just about all the work for us. All we need to do is guide them with our movement into their targets, and dodge enemy attacks as best as we can. Often the biters and worms will target the bots instead of us, giving us some extra breathing room to survive while doing this. In practice, this kind of attack is quite easy to pull off and generally goes smoothly.

In this case, all it took was one pass with a handful of bots from one end of the biter base to the other, and the whole mess was sorted out in short order. The only reason I took so much damage was because of carelessly fumbling around trying to take screenshots. In reality, it's trivial to dodge worm spit while letting the bots do the work of cleaning out the nest.

Later, we can improve on our tactics against even more heavily-defended biter bases by using vehicles to "swing" our trailing bots deep into their nests while reducing our own exposure to counterattack. Defender bots follow and orbit us as if by gravitational pull, so we can launch them pretty far out ahead of us if we pick up a decent speed and then suddenly stop or reverse our direction. The car is great for doing this, keeping us much safer than simply walking through a biter nest with a bunch of bots in tow.

But we don't need to worry about that for now. Our next priority is establishing a standing perimeter defense, so that we don't always have to be so proactive in checking our map for encroaching biter bases. It's time to start planning our walled defenses so we can seal off a safe zone for us to work within.

If we open up the map, we can drop down tags to mark areas of interest. In this case, we're following terrain features such as cliffs, bodies of water, and to a much lesser extent, trees. Cliffs and water will absolutely stop biter advances, but they can chew through trees if they get in their way. It's best to pretend that trees don't exist - we can use grenades to clear them out of our way if our perimeter wall has to carve a path through them anyway. We shouldn't chop down or blow up more trees than we have to - their presence absorbs pollution and impedes the movement of biters, which is helpful to us.

At this point, however, a continuous wall stretching completely from one end to the other of our perimeter might be a bit too taxing on our production capability. What we can do is put up a perimeter made of more flexible, self-contained defensive structures which can protect us from biter incursions while staying within budget.

This is a blueprint for a small bunker used to defend against biter attacks along our perimeter, facing north in this example. We need to stretch our power poles out to reach them, but doing so gives us a lot of options. In this most basic setup, a pair of turrets are fed ammo from a box by inserters, allowing us to drop as much ammo in the box as we feel we need in a particular area - much better than trying to manage how much ammo is in each and every turret and feeding them by hand until they run out.

If we expect biters to be more persistent in a particular area, we can use a slightly beefier bunker in place of the standard two-gun one.

We will also want to add wall-protected radars to our perimeter defense line. It's natural that we would want to monitor our frontier above all else, and doing this lets us see farther out so we can plan future expansions anyway.

Inherent in the design of these bunkers is that they are semi-autonomous; they need their ammo hand-delivered to them when they are first built, and if they receive biter attacks, they'll need to be replenished periodically as well. Later on, we'll want to transition into using a continuous perimeter wall with an automated system to supply the whole thing, but that will be feasible later on. For now, we can throw a stack of ammo into each box and adjust how much more we give them as needs demand.

For now, we need to start placing these blueprints as ghosts to plan out our actual perimeter defenses.

When placing these ghosts, obstacles such as trees or surface rocks will often be in the way. Simply hold shift and left click to disregard them and place the blueprint anyway - the interfering objects will be marked for deconstruction and our blueprint will take their place when they are gone.

Using the green circles as a guide, we can place our bunkers as close together or as far apart as we think we may need. It's best to at least make sure their attack ranges overlap each other in the open space between bunkers.

Once the planning is done, it's just a matter of gathering up the supplies we need to fill in those blueprints with the real stuff. Remember that we can use the Q button not only to empty our hand, but also to select something from our inventory to match an already-existing object on the map, or a ghost of it.

After a bit of time, we can wrap things up and have a section of our perimeter sealed off. It didn't cost us too much in the way of materials or time, and we can rest assured that we won't be getting any violent surprises from this area of the map.

Landscaping And Fluid Inputs

We're almost ready to use our mini-bus assembling line to supply us for the construction of a more organized factory fed by a proper main bus with a large smelting array. But first, we need to prepare ourselves for the necessity of landscaping some pretty large areas to clear terrain obstacles and shape the land to suit our needs.

Our main obstacles will be trees, cliffs, and water. Fortunately, we can build what we need to get rid of unwanted trees and water just by using our mini-bus. Grenades and landfills, readily available and probably already unlocked by our research, are a simple one-step assembly process. Grenades can simply be assembled directly from the mini-bus. Landfills use stone instead of stone bricks, so they will have to be split off from the stone mines before the furnaces.

The trouble is with the pesky cliffs. They can't be mined, they can't be landfilled or blown up with grenades, and they get in the way of absolutely everything. The only way to get rid of them is to use cliff explosives, which requires us to drill and refine oil, then process it through several steps.

Thanks to our blue science research setup, we already have a location for producing at least some oil products. The process for harvesting oil and adding fluids to our mini-bus system is actually remarkably easy if we remember that we're only starting with the bare minimum to get our little mall operating at all. First, we need to grap a bit of oil from the nearest field that we could secure:

The simple way to do harvest oil is to gather everything into a common pipeline in the field, pump it into a storage tank on site, then pump it out to the series of underground pipes which bring it back to our base.

From there, we just need to pipe in oil for the basic recipe, though our setup allows us to transition into advanced oil processing when it becomes available to us. for now, we're just going to start with the basics. Apart from filling out the ghost piping in our research setup, we can also route some of the excess away and bring it down to the outside of our minibus snake. At any point, we can pipe in fluids from the outside into our pass-behind area. If we left enough space between the backsides of our assembly machines, there should be more than enough room to do this.

From there, it's a simple matter of reusing the techniques with which we are already familiar. Just like that, with very little hassle, we can now add cliff explosives to our grenades and landfills, making all of our landscaping tasks possible. Now that the terrain has no way to permanently obstruct our progress, we are free to expand in any direction we like.

Advanced Oil And Conclusion

From this point, I strongly recommend directing research to modular armor, portable solar panels, personal batteries, and the personal roboport. This takes some doing, but we have all the tools and techniques we need.

There is no understating how drastic of an improvement it is to have personal construction robots helping us out as we build. They are as useful for building as Defender bots are for biter stomping - they're easily the two biggest upgrades in our quality of life that we can achieve out of a starter base like this.

Doing that requires the use of advanced oil processing, and that has been a stumbling block for new players for a long time. This is because the refinery must output all three of its oil products at the same time, so if there is not enough storage to hold any of the three products, the process is halted and the other two will not be made. Fortunately, there is an easy way to dump excess oil products: solid fuel.

With a couple of chemical plants, and a very tiny circuit condition, we can fix this problem for good. Light oil can be refined into solid fuel, and heavy oil can be refined into light oil. The trouble is that we may not necessarily want to dump all of our oils, just the excess (light oil makes good flamethrower fuel, after all). This means we want the plants to make fuel only when there is getting to be too much light or heavy oil.

All it takes to accomplish this is a red or green wire connecting a storage tank to a pump that is directly outputting from it towards the fuel (or cracking) line.

If we click on the pump after attaching a wire to it and its storage tank, we can set a condition by which it will turn on. In this case, that condition is the presence of at least 20k oil in the tank (which can hold a max of 25k). This will cause the pump to send oil to the cracking or solid fuel making area, but only if the tank is 80% full. This way, we can route oils to other uses (such as lubricant and flamethrower juice) which will take priority before the excess is "dumped" into solid fuel production. As for what to do with the solid fuel, we can simply toss it on a belt and send it to our boilers to produce power for us.

Now all of our advanced oil refining problems are permanently behind us, and all it took was a pair of red wires and one simple little circuit condition.

And that's all there is to it. After following the steps listed above, we should have an adequately protected perimeter, a steady progress of red/green/grey and even blue science chugging along, and a compact starter factory supplying you with everything we need to expand our operations. All we need to do is find a suitable area, bring a bunch of landscaping tools to clear it open, and use our mini-bus mall to supply us with everything we need to kick start our newer, bigger, better base.

As for how to start a main bus, build that better base, set up a train network, or strengthen our perimeter defenses with a continuous wall, there are other guides out there which cover these topics more than well enough. Those topics fall outside the scope of this guide, which will be ending here.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1977444216

Before The Bus