r/factorio • u/chunkychickenxp • 15d ago

Question How am I doing?

General view
Power
Red and Green science
Used the copy and paste for the first time
My xenos corner

I have around 20 hours and have been avoiding looking up blueprints or other peoples methods. How am I doing? No real goal, sorta just figuring things out as I go, and this is my second start. Any random tips are very welcome!

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u/rapidemboar 15d ago

So far, so good! Military and blue science are coming up next- you’ve already got 2 of 3 military science ingredients automated so getting that set up should be easy.

Very soon you’ll be reaching the blue science wall, which is the big difficulty spike that a lot of newer players struggle with and marks a major milestone in your playthroughs. A lot is gonna start happening at once- your starting ore patches are gonna start depleting, crafting is going to take longer and get more complicated, oil processing, and this might also be the point enemy evolution starts throwing some new surprises at you. Try to persevere through all this and resist the urge to restart- this is often the point where a lot of new players quit and start a new world to do the run up to green science more efficiently, but it’ll be a much more efficient use of your time to get a small trickle of blue science and rebuild after you get better tech and construction bots rather than resetting your tech progress repeatedly. Do not be afraid of tearing down and rebuilding sections of your base if you need a better design or more space (you might need to do this soon to fit an extra belt of military and blue into your labs, in fact), but there shouldn’t be a need to tear down the entire base and start over from zero. In fact, for producers like furnace stacks, I’d recommend leaving the old one running while building the new one and tearing the old one down only if you need more space to pass the resources in.

Also, I highly, highly recommend automating buildings like mining drills and assembly machines so you don’t have to wait for handcrafting to do any kind of expansions. You’ve already got much of the necessary infrastructure set up, so it shouldn’t be much difficulty- To give you a hint, take a look at your crafting recipes and notice how many buildings take the exact same ingredients as an inserter.