Factorio Principles of Industrial Design

Introduction

Welcome to Principles of Industrial Design!

I've been playing Factorio for about a year and have seen some common questions among players in various forums, usually revolving around what the F to do, getting lost in the miasma of options in the game, or otherwise finding themselves lacking in direction. I've put some time into thinking about this myself, and had some decent luck figuring some things out about what is and isn't successful.

What this guide is:

This guide is meant to encourage readers to develop a mental "operating loop" and plan for approaching a given game of Factorio. I do this by explaining my basic method of doing so and positing that you can probably adapt it to your game and improve upon it on your own. You don't have to do anything the way I do it, and remember the most important rule / flow-chart of Factorio: If you aren't having fun, you aren't doing it right!

What this guide is NOT:

Again, this is not a prescribed locked-step plan to go from crash-landing to 100 rockets per minute and then make a million science per minute in only 80 hours play time. I don't play factorio for record speed, or even record achievements in production rate. It's a game, I play it to have fun, and I have fun by my definitions.

Also, this is not a technical guide on the most optimized loop for making X widgets on a science bus. Other people have written better guides than I have and Mrs. Google is more than happy enough to tell you if you ask her. Besides, that's 1000ft altitude thinking. This guide is more of the 10,000 ft how to play Factorio.

Organization of this Guide

I've broken the guide up into what seems like useful segments. Maybe not, leave feedback, I might reorganize it or, whatever man.

Roughly speaking, I'm going to:

Go over some general terms I'll use throughout the guide.

Hand out a few, probably useless axioms (tips) on general gameplay

Cover how I dig myself out of the initial crash landing

Finally get into the real meat and potatoes of the guide and cover a general sequence to planning and winning the game.

Close out with a breakdown of my moment to moment "operating loop" of how I play.

Lastly, before I get into the guide, this is the first guide I've ever written for any game. I'm an older gamer and you whipper-snappers and your dang youtube guides p*ss me off.

*sarcastic voice*

I get it, they're full of video and audio, but finding what I want to know in seconds with ctrl-f doesn't work and I don't have 30 minutes of my life to sacrifice for your like- and subscription-count ego to get stroked. I'm barely going to even screenshot this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and you're going to deal with it.

Back in my day we had to learn industrial engineering with vector calculus walking up hill both ways using only an abbacus. /rant off

Terms

Jargon is key to any industrial profession. The following is not necessarily mine, but I like the terms so I'll use them. No alphabetical order.

Bus: A group of parallel belt runs supplying common materials to a variety of industrial processes. Belts are the first logical step in Factorio-man's attempt to evolve past spaghetti. I will differentiate a bus from the main bus to talk about my method of operating with many separate purpose driven buses to add redundancy and Trivia: borrowed word from electrical engineering

Main Bus: An architectural style of placing ALL (or nearly all) manufacturing processes on a single common bus.

Base: Frankly put, the sum of all machines Factorio-man (or woman, however you identify) has laid down to accomplish their goals.

Buffer: storage built in-situ (in line between production and consumption) to buffer between acutely high consumption requirements and production shortfalls. Can be in the form of tanks or chests or (if modded) larger storage.

District: A specific area of the base built with a specific goal. For example: I often build separate districts to break up smelting, making limited-run materials and machines, making science materials, and building rockets.

Infrastructure: Anything placeable in the world that doesn't make something, make something die, or keep something from making you die. Belts, Inserters, Power poles, Bots, Bot Towers, Rails, etc.

Materials: mats for short. Anything used in an assembler to make something else. Sometimes an infrastructure item or machine can be a material, but if it's being used as a component in a recipe, I call it a material in that instance.

Machines: Anything placeable in the world that does make something or make something die. Miners, Assemblers, Turrets, you get the idea.

Spaghetti An architectural style of just building everything willy-nilly with no specific plan for design. Can be great for maximizing usage of space in, say, a Seablock modded game. Generally frowned upon or scoffed at by high-brow factorio players.

Sushi Belt An architectural style of supplying a process with all of its materials on as few belts as possible by mixing the materials placed on a belt. (Think japanese sushi restaurant conveyors) I don't go into sushi belt architecture in this guide. I haven't taken the time to really study it, it doesn't suit my personal play style, and my experience with mixed material belts beyond split lane belts has been very poor, so I'm not eager to dive into it.

Note: if I start using a word you don't understand later in the guide, leave feedback and I'll be happy to toss in more definitions.

Axioms

The following are just my general principles for designing and playing:

Build Big - Unless you're playing Seablock or some other space constrained map, always build with intent to expand later. As an example: let's say you have a bus running horizontally (east/west or left/right) there should be plenty of space to one side to expand bus lanes as you need more or more types of materials. There should also be plenty of space to the other side to expand a given production line. It eats a good chunk of materials, but it saves headaches later.

If it's worth building more than five of at a time, it's probably worth automating. Except in the early (burner age) of the game, once I get assemblers, I build and dedicate a few to the making of almost everything. I don't always feed them from a bus, but when I do, I still limit their output by sending it directly to a chest and limit it to about as many stacks of the item as I'm going to pick up in my inventory. For example, my current run has a mini-bus feeding a variety of assemblers. I have pickup chests for running down the line and grabbing 5 or so stacks of Iron and Copper, 5 stacks of belts, 4 stacks of rails, a stack of signals, etc. In the time it takes me to flesh out part of the base, those are replenished and my mini-bus can still stay pretty small scale just to feed the items in my mall. No, it's not power or material efficient, but it's damned convenient.

Research your way to a goal technology, then clean up the odds and ends while you implement it. Aimlessly chewing through the tech tree is a surefire way to end up dabbling away your time with small improvements or bits of tech. Doubly so in a modded game like Bobs and Angels. Take some time early game to walk through the tech tree and look at what you need to implement the base you want. Identify key components that will take a while to implement (e.g. rails, petrol, rockets) and look at the sequence that gets you there. Then, dedicate all of your research efforts to get to a milestone. Once at a milestone, go implement it (i.e. lay out your rail production and first rail network) then clean up lesser techs. I typically drive hard for rails early and then mop up all of the red science since that's the only one I've automated before building my true science bus, which is fed by rail cars from other production districts.

If you're lost on what you should be doing at any given moment, fall back to basic priorities Power. Raw Materials. Refined Materials. Infrastructure. Finished Products. (I usually play peaceful mode, so I left out defenses, but I'd probably put it right after power) If you're lost, go back, and evaluate each of these in this order. First, are you making enough power/item X? Second, are you making enough for the next thing you're about to implement? If not, build more power plants, mines, whatever. On infrastructure, take a walk down your beltways. Are they saturated now? If they are, the might handle the next spur you tap off the line. If not, they probably wont. If you're already bottlenecking iron at the front of your bus, you may need to split off a bypass and drop more in later on to shore up the line. Don't neglect the possible need to upgrade your beltways to red or blue. But don't waste time or hesitate expanding just because you can't build blue belts yet.

There is no problem that cannot be solved with the right amount of high explosives - If it doesn't work, if it's getting bottlenecked, if it's gone to spaghetti, just pull back and nuke it from orbit and rebuild. It turns out that tearing down and rebuilding large sections of your base is less tedious and (depending on your researching speed) faster than completely starting over. Once you can deconstruct with bots, this is especially true.

You can run from some of your problems. - If it's ugly and it sucks but it works and supplies you with infrastructure materials or *enough* of something you need, don't blow it up just yet. Move to a new area and build the next version of that bus / plant / district / whatever and refer back to your last design for lessons learned.

I'm not too proud to crowdsource general principles of good design. I'll be happy to take feedback and credit anyone who gives the idea.

Starting Out

So you landed on a new world with a pick, an oven, a mining unit and a small stack of iron plates eh?

Well, it's better than showing up to the party empty handed and punching trees :)

For folks starting out, it's a rough intro to what's honestly one of the toughest and most rewarding games I've ever played.

This is about as in-depth as I'm going to get, but a fair number of people have trouble here, so I figure it's worth it.

Pro Tip: While I don't spend much time looking for my ideal starting patches of coal/ore, I usually do spam the generate preview button and look for maps where the starting area has close or mixed coal/ore patches.

You're probably tempted (or have been told) to go drop that miner on an iron vein, slap the oven next to it and run off to the nearest tree or coal patch and run back and forth feeding enough coal into the miner and oven to keep the iron flowing and at some point do the same with copper and AAAAAARGH at this point I'm clawing my effing eyes out.

Sometimes Notch had it right all along.

Go turn that puny pile of iron in your inventory into more picks and chop some frigging wood, maybe the errant rock littering the landscape while you're at it.

Drop the miner and a wooden box on the nearest coal patch. give it a reasonable handfull of wood (5-10 pieces) and walk away. Go hand-mine some iron or stone, then check in on the coal miner.

When it's out of fuel, put half of whatever you collected back into the miner.

The rest goes into the furnace along with your iron.

If you're a type A, go mine more iron. If not, have a drink or two of your favorite beverage (if this game hasn't driven you to drink, you haven't played enough) and wait till you have enough mats to make another miner (or two and another two furnaces).

While your little yellow hard-hatted friend makes the miner, run up to the coal patch and do another half-split of whatever's in the box. Half into your inventory, half back into the coal miner. If you keep doing this, you'll visit the coal miner(s) less and less frequently. Quality of Life is already improving!

Now go back and place your second Miner on the iron patch. (You did put the furnace smelting the iron right next to the Iron patch didn't you? tsk tsk.) Give it half the coal. By now you should have enough

Wash rinse repeat and get copper going, stone if you're in a world type that has it (I'm playing Bob's these days, and it doesn't. If you're playing bob's you should have figured out the bit about needing some burner grinders and few inserters. If you didn't, you probably shouldn't be playing Bob's yet)

Expand your number of coal miners. Personally I run about half as many burner coal miners as I have burner miners doing other things. How many you build is really up to you and how many materials you want built up before leaping into electricity.

Pro Tip: Remember that bit about finding mixed coal/ore patches? at this point, with some creative use of belts and a burner inserter or two, you can run a fully automated burner only setup with self-sustaining coal miners, ore miners and furnaces to make stacks up on stacks of iron and copper plates and stone bricks.

At this point, if you keep half-splitting your coal and feeding your miners and furnaces, you should be able to work your way up to enough materials for 1 pump, 1 boiler, 1 steam engine, 1 research dome and the requisite electric pole and pipe infrastructure.

Get that going and start your research. I go for the first one that gives the level 1 assembler. Remember: if it's worth making, it's worth automating.

At this point, I've got a self-sustaining burner mine/foundry setup, one researcher plodding along, and if geography willed it, a coal feed going to my first power plant.

And here's where I conceptually zoom out to the bigger picture of this guide.

I leave it to the reader to decide if they want to immediately scale up to electric mining or just expand their steampunk era setup to maximize exploitation of their first Iron/Copper/Coal/Stone fields. I usually go the electric route with iron, copper, and the coal that will fuel my furnaces, but recycle all of my burner miners to feed a dedicated coal line going to my boilers, which are also fed by burner inserters. That way they basically can't run out of coal unless you scale up MANY MANY more boilers or the coal patch runs out.

Phase1: Pave Paradise And Put Up A Parking Lot

At this point in the guide I should probably throw out another axiom: planning is key to running an organized base in Factorio. A number of players out there spaghetti their way pretty far in to the game and are fine with it. I've done this a number of times and it invariably leads to me getting near the bot phase and throwing my arms up in the air over the number of bottlenecks and hack-jobs all over my base. So if you haven't, go ahead and do that a few times. No, really, go break the game.

I fully believe Factorio is a game that has to be played recursively. It's like and industrial rogue. You need to build bad production lines and bad buses and bad bases and wipe your world in frustration a few times before the idea of starting a deliberately planned world starts to appeal to you. It might make sense to you from the beginning, but doing it at that point will probably feel like work, and few people launch a game to do something that feels like work.

Building a few disorganized bases while having fun with the basic mechanics of Factorio gives you an appreciation for what you're going to do.

So there you are, ready to get out of the burner phase.

Instead of jumping immediately into a main bus, I recommend you build a mall. The mall isn't necessarily a bus. I've made some that are just a handful of assemblers, inserters and chests. I hand walk the iron, copper, wood, coal, and stone necessary to build the things I want into the input chests, and collect the finished products in the output chests. The point is to break the tedium of hand assembling the basic machines and infrastructure you need to build the real base. I've heard some folks call this a bootstrap base. I don't think it's a bad name, but its kinda kludgy to build a small spaghetti monstrosity just to build a bigger, supposedly better base with higher throughput for science or rockets or whatever.

You're going to be going back to the mall a lot. You might as well make it an appealing place to go pick out the things you need to shop for to live life as Factorio-Man.

I make a smallish bus (1 lane of iron, copper and stone, wood if I'm using a mod that can make and needs it) and some dedicated assembler groups that make specific products. I have these dump to ouput chests and usually limit the chest size to whatever number of stacks I think I'm going to need to pick up in between runs of building stuff.

For example:

4 stacks of Rails

4 - 8 stacks of belts

4 stacks of iron and copper directly off the furnace line, since I still do hand-build some machines like miners

2 stacks of wooden power poles

etc

My point is, spend time building a nice mall with some reasonable room for expansion. I build it separately from whatever "main bus" I'm working with.

Phase 2: Gerrymandering

Concurrently with building your mall, you'll probably have to upgrade your power at least once.

At about this point, I start looking at the map. You have to start carving out space for what you want. This is why I work in districts.

My typical map gets broken up something like this:

Power district - At a minimum room to do a 1:20:40 Pump:Boiler:Steam Engine group, bigger if I plan on doing solar / nuclear. Actually I'd probably make Solar, Conventional steam and Nuclear steam in different districts.

Mall district - Leave plenty of room, you're going to need more than you think

Smelting district - I might do one for each metal or just one very large one with all metals coming in as ore and going out as plates as needed.

Science district - This would look the most like everyone's conventional Main Bus. The difference is, I take time while burning through red and some of green science to make a dedicated science area. I usually do this Rail-in belt-out. That is to say rails carry in the raw materials and the science flasks go out on a belt to a bank of research labs. The best way to plan for this as I see it, is to make a counter-flowing belt on the bus for each science and build the labs on the starting end of the bus. that way you can keep expanding out (away from the rails bringing in the mats) and up/down (to expan capacity or add lanes to the bus) I build left to right, expand belt lanes up and build production spurs off the main bus in the downward direction. You can keep whatever convention you like, just be consistent.

Petroleum district - I find long pipe runs just make monolithic main buses a bigger pain and prefer to keep all the oil related work in one area and Rail-out the finished products like plastic and batteries.

Rocket district - Obvious.

Defense district - Turrets and ammo production go here. With the advent of military science flasks, I would probably skip this and just output some of what I want into output chests off the science bus. I play pretty peacefully, so your mileage may vary.

Why do I do all this district splitting? Don't I eat up tons and tons of materials just to truck everything in with trains and waste hours of time building redundant belt buses?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is sanity. Districting is like organizing. It may seem obsessive compulsive to have one hammer in your maintenance toolbox and one in your damage control toolbox, but when you need to hammer a plug into a sinking ship, you're glad you didn't have to run back and rummage through the maintenance supplies to fix it.

Districting grants control for prioritization. In a big modded game you may be researching beyond just rockets, or you may be wanting to prioritize rockets over infinite research. By districting, you control how many trains go to each district to drop off materials. This means two things:

1) You can more easily control who to starve. Don't have enough copper? just choose which stop doesn't get a visit from the copper train.

2) If your new rocket district needs more iron than you have production for, you still had a regular train to the science district, and your research kept going. You won't suffer an interruption in research or mall production while you go out and expand your iron production.

Districting also makes renovation easier. If your iron production layout doesn't work, you can go build another Bigger Harder Faster Stronger ironworks while the old one keeps chugging away. Then you can come back, nuke it and repurpose the land for something else.

So go ahead, carve up the map. Err on the side of big. Wasted space on a too-big district is way fewer headaches than running out of room halfway through fleshing out a plan.

Phase 3: Rails To Riches

(To be added)

Brief Summary: I research hard towards rails and build a 2-lane rail system. This interconnects my districts.

Phase 4: Science!

(To be expanded)

After rails, I finally get to work on the Science district and proceed to research hard towards bots.

Phase 5: Death By Robot

(To be added later)

How I implement bots. The short answer is I probably underutilize them, but I primarily use them for construction and shipping stuff to me to save trips to the mall.

Phase 6: Factorio Aeronautics And Space Administration

(To be added later)

Once I've districted, gotten up a science bus, enslaved built a robot army for construction and cutting out trips to the mall, I get into filling out the rocket district.

Phase 7: ... Profit???

(To be expanded later)

After establishing a Rocketry program, I'm at a point in the game I don't spend much time in. At this point, let your ambitions run wild and stop reading this guide!

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1416661068

Principles of Industrial Design