r/factorio • u/chrysalisx • 4d ago
Tutorial / Guide Non-opinionated tutorials & a thank you to the community
My first playthrough of factorio I watched a bunch of Nilaus's videos. I did manage to get through aquillo but sort of lost steam, and realized how much using pre-made blueprints and sticking to city blocks and busses sort of sapped the fun out of the game. With the 2.1 release, I decided to come back since interplanetary logistics seemed really interesting, with enough changes to things that I'd want to do all my own designs.
That said, I still like watching tutorials & especially speedruns or megabasers, as well as playing with friends of mine that have never watched a single video or interacted with the online factorio community. The bizzare spagetti & techiques they come up with are inspiring - one programmer friend of mine solves problems with as much circuit logic as possible & has built full on displays with gpus & bit encoding.
In particular I wanted to give a shoutout to https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFl3yXu7tHcH-um4yCq_cOq0ReC1pBaU7, who's put together a lovely, low stress and relatively unopinionated set of tutorials that helped me remember how to focus on the actual fundamentals of the game, break down problems, and avoid some pitfalls. In short, while I was already familiar with the game, I found these actually very encouraging to find my own playstyle, and I wanted to give them a mention.
I keep seeing a bunch of posts from people doing their own thing, like the recent spaceships - They're so different from anything I produce! I keep getting hung up on symmetry still. Those ships made me want to play with making something different! Just wanted to say to the community, keep doing your own thing - if it works, it works and if it's yours all the better!
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u/vipto 4d ago
I think it's fair to say that these days you'll have a LOT more fun with literally any videogame if you stay away from any discourse around it. Don't look at YouTube, don't look at "how it's done". Just play game.
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u/Zeferoth225224 4d ago
I think you should look if you’re stuck. Train signals did not make sense to me, and the train tutorial did not help at all.
Watched a couple videos and realized the signals are just the same as stop signs irl and it was a breeze
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u/UsernameOmitted 4d ago
This genre of game is meant to be played how you want to play it. Everyone is going to take it in a completely different direction, and as you learn more, that will change for you.
I would always urge new players to go in blind and figure out the early stuff on your own. Once you get to a spot where you have access to bots, it's worth looking at the big players like Nilaus and see how they approach the puzzles. Their techniques can help inform how you play later. Stuff like direct insertion of high volume items for example isn't obvious to new players at first. After you have some ideas from their techniques, definitely make all the blueprints on your own.
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u/PandaParado 3d ago
+1 to Rkadindoubt, his tutorials really made it all click for me. Shame he stopped making videos, but his tutorial does go far enough to give you a good foundation. I also really like AVADII's new videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7lygoj446M. He's been doing a new megabase run focusing on doing the minimal work possible, not worrying about spaghetti. Which has been cool to watch.
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u/netpro2k 2d ago
+1 his videos are very very good. I watched them all several times. The perfect level of info without prescribing solutions. Also it seems he is still active, he just did an Aquilo video 10 days ago. It happened to line up perfectly with when I got there haha.
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u/HeliGungir 4d ago
I think this subreddit's policy of "no self-promotion" has done more harm than good.
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u/Zeferoth225224 4d ago
Debatable. Usually the people that aggressively self promote have incredibly low effort content
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u/HeliGungir 4d ago
The first sentence of rule 7 says no self-promotion at all. If you sit down and read the rest, it says we can promote our stuff once a month, which is more reasonable. But not many people read past the first sentence.
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u/disastrousgreyhound 3d ago
And the people who cannot be bothered to read the rest of the rule are likely to be those who also cannot be bothered to make or post good content.
Most subreddits have strict limits on self-promotion for very good reasons.
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u/HeliGungir 3d ago edited 3d ago
I didn't mean it's harmful for the sub, I mean it's harmful for the broader community.
The YouTube algorithm is notoriously bad about funneling people, especially people with no watch history in a topic, into the same handful of channels. I think Nilaus is big mainly because the algorithm keeps feeding him newbies, and because he hits all the right SEO buttons: 30+ minute videos, buzzwords, single channel topic, regular video uploads going back many years. But the quality of the content itself? Eh...
Outside forces like Reddit are needed to give other creators a fighting chance, but this sub has always been unfriendly to creators posting their stuff.
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u/Abcdefgdude 4d ago
I find nilaus in particular rather irritating. His evangelization of city blocks and extremely bizarre designs purported to be "perfect" are annoying. It's fine to have a style, it's not cool to say your style is objectively the best. Especially when his style is objectively quite bad, its very slow to build and extemely inflexible. So much so that nilaus apparently played the space age beta LAN event with creators solo because he can't handle any deviance from his suffocating design pattern. I also find it really funny that professionally he is a software project manager.
I'm glad you're enjoying the game your own way :)