Basic Tips
Some "ah-ha!" moments for things that are not immediately obvious:
General StuffWhen viewing a recipe in the build menu, hover the cursor over the icon for the item to be built and you should get a short descriptions (these are not always useful). Hover over the icon at the right side and you will get other useful information, such as sell price and ingredients.
Plan on making roads that are at least 2 lanes wide, and consider giving buildings an extra space between the door and the road. Carts cannot pass through each other, and will sit at the front (or side) of a building, potentially blocking traffic and causing a mess.
Read through the tips that pop up at launch. That's where you can find directions on moving units around, setting your hotbar keys, etc.
Upgrading your base unlocks recipes, increases the number of inventory slots in the base, and increases the capacity of each inventory slot. (Example - at a level 5 base, you have 5 rows of 4 slots, each of which can hold 600 units.)
Type "m" to get the move tool. You can use this to pick up a worker & place it wherever you wish. This is especially useful for moving carts all the way across your map, clearing traffic jams, or just getting a worker unstuck between another worker and its only path out of a dead end.
As of update 1.05 or so, the move tool now works on buildings! This makes updating your town much easier when things get crowded or you have the resources to create longer supply lines.
Forestry and Farm buildings You can choose which things your farm harvests. If you want to only produce one thing, go in and make sure it is the only "recipe" checked. You will want to de-select the "Auto-manage" box as well. This is useful early in the game when you may wish to output a single type of item onto a chute.
Although the game will let you plant trees (once you build the box for them) in the area covered by a farm, you will not be able to harvest them. This includes fruit trees, which must be harvested by a "forester" building.
A forestry building requires red coins to harvest regular trees, but not fruit trees.
Water and fertilizer only affect the re-growth of crops on farms, not the harvest rate. You can increase the harvest rate by adding workers to your farm. (Click the building, then use the "+" button).
You can place farms close together and overlap their areas.
PasturesAlthough you can produce Fertilizer using its own recipe at a pasture, don't bother. It is a by-product of most of the other options and you will have plenty.
Even if the fertilizer storage is full at a pasture, other items do not stop production. For example, the recipe for wool produces fertilizer as well. You will still generate wool if you're not using your fertilizer quickly enough.
Chutes
Chutes can be very frustrating, as it is not obvious which items and buildings can use them successfully. They can be set and will work even on flat ground (no slope needed), and you can assign your workers to deposit their loads at the end. Please note that they cannot place items in the middle of the chute!
Because they are inexpensive to build, it is worth even short stretches to save your workers a walk. The farther from a building your resources are, the more beneficial it is to build them. You can use "r" when building a chute to change between straight and corner pieces. Although you can draw an entire line from start to finish, it doesn't always end up where you want it.
Important note: Your workers will have to GO AROUND any chutes you build at the beginning of the game. You can eventually fix this (somewhat) by using ramps and scaffolding, but that demands resources that are scarce in the early game.
The graphic to the right shows a list of all items that can be used with a chute. (This only shows up if you try to make a worker put something onto a chute that doesn't work.)
The following materials will flow down a chute, in order from the top left:
Wood, stone, iron ore, gold ore, coal, grain, apples, berries, carrots, cotton, tomato, pear, potato, herbs, flour, animal feed, eggs, mana shards, fire stone, air stone, water stone, earth stone, fire ether, water ether, earth ether, air ether, mana crystal, fire crystal, water crystal, earth crystal, air crystal, depleted fire crystal, depleted water crystal, depleted earth crystal, depleted air crystal.
Use this to your advantage - as soon as you have planks, for instance, you can harvest grain onto a chute & send it directly to your food market until you get a grain mill going.
Note that flour and animal feed are the only early-game items that can be produced directly into a chute. This makes it possible to get some early production chains going without extra workers to shuttle materials around. In order to have a building output directly onto a chute (or conveyor belt, later) simply find the green arrow pointing away from the building (visible when you are placing it on the map, or when the building is selected).
NOTE: Although your workers cannot place items in the middle of a chute (only at the end), this is not the case for conveyor belts.
Material Management
Although a lot of recipes are listed on the official wiki, one thing I have noticed is that I may have a surplus of something (leather, for instance) and I want a quick reference to see how I could use that item. Of course, many things can be shipped directly to the general store or market, etc. & get purchased by your population, but higher-ranked goods sell for more and keep people happy longer.
In addition, some materials will be needed both for building and for recipes. In order to avoid running out of items, you may wish to have 2 or more buildings producing the same thing (especially in the early game). Deliver one to a barn for building only, and allow the other to provide resources for other recipes. For example, you need planks for a lot of things; in order to not run out the next time you want to build chutes or a barn, you could dedicate a forestry / lumber mill / barn setup to collect lumber. Feel free to filter the barn slots so you always have 2 stacks of planks and 2 stacks of stone bricks, or something like that.
LeatherA lot of the workshop leather recipes require cloth, and in the early game you may want to reserve your cloth for making conveyor belts. You can also use it to make books, but not a lot else. Books are more efficient at providing research than paper, so it is probably your best use. (4 paper for 10 knowledge, instead of 4 paper for 4 knowledge)
FertilizerIt may seem like you have way more than you need, but you can use it to build farm tiles. These allow you to plant additional crops within the boundaries of a farm. You can also use the fertilization tool to directly apply to fields instead of supplying your farm with fertilizer.
Planning Out Your Town
Resources in your way? For 20 coins, you can remove any resource on the map (even crops planted on farm tiles). It isn't a good idea to clear very much, but this gives you a way to send items down a chute through a forest, or get rid of a few rocks that are blocking a good place for your kitchen.
Avoid putting buildings too close togetherMost buildings have a 3x3 footprint. However, there are disadvantages to putting them right next to each other.
The carts you will use for most of your material transport cannot pass each other on a one-lane road. This means if a cart is waiting outside a building, the others have to re-route (sometimes a really long way) to get where they are going. You will need to balance efficiency of space with needing lots of rooms for carts to maneuver. Putting a space between your building and the road, such as seen at the right, is one option. This particular arrangement also allows workers access on all sides. That's not necessary all the time, but you may find it useful for some buildings. It also allows for a chute or conveyor belt between buildings.
Chutes in your way?Be thoughtful about when and where you use chutes in the early game, because workers have to go around them. The arrangement shown here was set up to harvest a huge stone quarry quite a distance from my base, but there is no traffic that needs to cross it. I extend the chute by a square or two every once in a while so my workers don't have to move more than 1 or 2 spaces.
HousesThe only time it's handy to have houses close to any of your production is at the beginning of the tutorial, when you're hand-delivering items to every house. As soon as you set up a Food Market, this is no longer necessary. At the beginning of your game, then, long-range planning includes finding an area where you can clump all your houses together with your markets/stores in the center. Leave plenty of room for roads so your carts can deliver items to the stores, and if you can auto-feed the food market with some flour in your early game it helps a lot.
WaterMake good use of the bridges available! In the example shown, I put down bridge blocks and laid conveyor belts over it, but you can also build paths or roads, as shown at the bottom (I included one-way indicators there to try & prevent my carts from going all the way around the lake). In this case, I could make the kitchen directly feed the food market, reducing the congestion and dependency on carts for transport. It also allowed me to place conveyor belts in a place that wouldn't block the routes the carts were taking.
Happiness and HousesYour town's happiness directly affects production. As happiness increases, your production speed will also increase. This production boost is applied to all your buildings, so is worth increasing! [NOTE: The remainder of this section is no longer accurate. I'll leave it here for archival purposes, however. The 1.08 update changed the ratios on this; you don't accumulate happiness in the same way any longer, but you need less of it to boost production.]
Adding a level 1 house increases your population by 2, but leveling a house up by 1 does the same. If you have the resources to increase your housing level, that should be your first step, as long as you have the ability to provide those items to your houses. Level 4 houses can purchase from specialty stores, but if you haven't built one yet or produced the goods for it, you can't increase happiness by upgrading your house. You can, however, increase your population without increasing the demands for food, goods, or medicines.
You get one "happy face" for each type of item a house has recently purchased. For example, the level 1 house represented here provides 4 happiness. Increasing the house to level 3 demands no more of the food resources, but can instead provide more happiness by allowing the residents to purchase items from the general store (row 2) and the apothecary (row 3). This allows you to earn more happiness without having to increase your food production. The second house is providing 6 happiness. The the moment (mid-April 2019), the game is very open-ended with no set end-point. For those who prefer playing with a goal in mind, having a fully populated town with maximum happiness is a great end game goal.
Although it is mentioned during the tutorial, it is worth noting that higher-level products provide happiness for longer than low-level. The bars underneath each item indicate to the player which items have been purchased, and as the bar decreases, how long it will be until that house needs to purchase a new item in that category to maintain happiness.
Lastly - remember, the higher your Factory Town happiness level, the better the production boost to all your buildings!
Preparing For Future Needs
NOTE: This section is now mostly obsolete, as of v 1.10; you no longer require a supply of a crop in order to plant it on a farm, which makes my little farm-supply setup no longer needed. (I'm actually a bit chagrined at how long it took me to notice this!)
One problem I ran into with early games was that I wanted to plant farms but needed to track down the items to plant. In one case I needed to purchase additional land areas to track down more cotton, because I didn't realize I only had 2 cotton bushes. Eventually, I created the following barn/farm setup to provide an always-ready source of plants and fertilizer for future needs. Please note that this is only possible to set up once logistics blocks are available, as it requires both cloth conveyor belts and grabbers.
The basic setup includes 3 barns, 2 farms, and one each of forester, grain mill, and pasture. Because the supplies in barns are available from anywhere, this "Farm Supply" station can be placed anywhere on your map and you will have everything you need to plant farm tiles and any food item once the barns fill up. For the initial setup, you only need 4-6 of each plant to start with, though you may want additional grain so you can feed the grain mill.
In this screenshot, I placed the forester on the left and planted 3 each of apples and pears. I placed two conveyor belts, each with a grabber, one for each type of fruit, and filtered the barn. This barn will hold one stack of pear, one of apples, and 2 of fertilizer. (Note: There isn't really a need to upgrade these barns unless you find yourself planting a ton of things and running out of supplies.) The middle farm has 2 tiles each for potatoes, berries, cotton, and herbs, and the corresponding barn holds one stack of each. In this case I have 2 sets of 2 conveyor belts, stacked one on the other, and again grabbers to supply the barns separately with the 4 types of food. The last farm and barn are for the sugar, wheat, tomatoes, and carrots. I have a few extra wheat here, and split the chute for wheat so it feeds both the grain mill and the barn. The mill will send animal feed to the pasture, which is set to produce only fertilizer.
For reference, here is a photo sequence of this particular map as it evolved over the course of writing this tutorial:
Early on - still harvesting grain by hand.
Here I have added a forester, a barn, and an extra lumber mill near the school.
Now I've added new pastures, a road & conveyor line across the lake, and have put in one-way tiles to keep the bridge from getting clogged. This setup is not very efficient!
Finally, I have the farm-supply setup in the lower section of the town. I have quite a bit of processing going on up in the top left - fish & fish oil, various foods & medicines. The area on the right includes metal work / forges to supply the general store. This game predates the update that includes the ability to move buildings around, so if I were to continue work on it I would probably reorganize the entire place.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1682719593
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- Factory Town - Starter Guide
- Factory Town - How to Take Cargo from Factory to Proper Silos in an Efficient Way
- Factory Town - Transporting Goods Vertically Directly (Elevator, Escalator, Lift Substitute)
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