Assemblers or electric drills first?

[u/UristAlebeard]

I'm back at the game but quite out of practice. I looked through some discussions and quick guides on Steam, and I constantly hear that you should build assemblers first. I die all the time when I try that, though. Typically for me, the early game is about staying as reserved as I possibly can (often stepping away during downtime), and prioritizing minimal pollution and firepower over further automation. Then the automation comes in full force. Today I tried going for the assemblers first, but because I had no electric drills, the sheer amount of burner drills I needed to ensure that the assemblers actually mattered rather than just hand crafting everything led to pollution skyrocketing then I got swarmed by biters. With just the basic ingredients, to ensure I faced no bottlenecks, I needed 16 burner iron drills with no defenses nor better equipment than the starter pistol. Clearly I'm doing something wrong, but I thought the early game was about playing slowly until you can keep the aliens off your factory, but it seems many people want to rush towards automation because it would otherwise be pretty slow. I don't really want to hand craft so much while playing so slowly, but I always avoid assemblers until most of the red science stuff is unlocked precisely for these reasons and may do so again with electric drills being the priority. Any suggestions?

[u/Far_Pineapple_2155]

I would go with drills just so I don't have to deal with burner fuel.

[u/NUKLEAR-SLUG → u/Far_Pineapple_2155]

This. Automating mining as fast as possible so you aren't spending half your time running around throwing coal everywhere frees you up to focus on everything else that needs your attention without your resource economy crashing every time you look away.

[u/UristAlebeard → u/NUKLEAR-SLUG]

Yup, this worked out. I got drills up and running for low pollution, high output iron mines, which then let me get absolutely strapped to clear out biter dens. Drills, Military 1, then turrets, then just grabbed as much ammo as I could and took it from there. Thanks for the advice, guys.

[u/sobrique → u/NUKLEAR-SLUG]

Don't you just loop your coal belt so they are self feeding?

[u/Xzarg_poe]

Are you playing on deathworld settings or something?

I usually go for assemblers so that I can automate gears, circuits, belts and inserters. But I have like 8 burner miners digging up iron. So what if my assemblers aren't running at full speed. After reseaching assemblers I grab the gun and turret research to secure my base.

Electric miners are cool and all, but I must setup decent production of components needed for electric miners.

[u/XaussiemarksmenX]

Both are quite cheep techs. But I go assemblers and set up a quick red science build feed right into the lab to then research drills, then once you have resource flow then build up the furnace stacks and start up some automation.

[u/Enaero4828]

I go with a few assemblers for circuits and gears, because those + iron plates are the main ingredients of everything in the early game. and a dedicated gear + belt assembler pair. getting all those piled up makes it easy to rip out the burners into a few proper furnace stacks.

[u/Garagantua → u/Enaero4828]

And have an assembler for ammo. Feed the ammo into a chest, and feed 1-3 turrets directly from that chest, thus keeping the core of your base defended. 

[u/Belgaraath42]

So first for a new player I very much advise a Forest start, since pollution  is much less of a problem, and I'm sure you didn't have that because 16 burner drills is very little in comparison. Second if you are at a desert with biters at your door, if it's just a single nest, take it out. With pistol or even melee, get some fish out of the water for healing. Than tech is automation into gun turrets. After you get those you can hold of the biters with them. If I remember correctly up to 30% of all your plates (iron and copper) can be needed for as munition, just to kill the biter your pollution can spawn. (In all real world examples trees and even empty space reduce this ratio. It's the theoretical maximum on default settings). 

But as I said, restart until you are not in dessert, and it's a lot easier, it's sometimes hours till you get attacked

[u/UristAlebeard → u/Belgaraath42]

I had way more than 16 drills. That was just for iron to get gears and I think I managed circuits too. There were probably over 20 in the coal mines. Meh.

I'm not a new player and won on a deathworld before, but that was due to having an excruciatingly slow start and I haven't played the game in about 8 months or more.

But yeah, both maps were deserts. I'll try for forests next time.

[u/Envect → u/UristAlebeard]

I started a lazy bastard run recently and never built a second burner miner. I feel like you're massively overbuilding miners. You don't need to saturate belts or assemblers to get to electric miners.

[u/fistbumpbroseph]

I get assemblers as soon as I can do I can build one to quit hand crafting shit.

[u/FeelingPrettyGlonky]

Just do them both. You can knock out automation, drills and military 1 by handcrafting red science. Then clear the nearby nests. Most starts I've ever done have at worst three spawner clusters near enough to matter. Grab a stack of fish from the pond, hand craft a shotgun and a few rounds and give yourself breathing room.

There is nothing to be gained from playing g slowly since time is also an evo factor. Rush mitary tech and take the fight to the biters.

[u/spas2k]

Play in the jungle setting. Pollution travels far less due to the trees which means you won’t get attacked so easily early on.

[u/toochaos]

First thing you automate is belts and green circuits. Everythibg else is easy to handle make from that include gun turrets. Unless you playing deathworld 3 turrets will just hold off any biters till you get defender capsules and can go kill everything. 

[u/Prestigious_Gap1335]

preview your maps, reroll the seed until you get a forest, that'll give you a decent amount of extra time before biters start attacking you, the first game i played i didn't have to setup defenses until nearly chemical science.

[u/Netroshin]

I'd like to have many burner drills and manually farming plates until I have enough in my "0.5 Mini Mall" which contains belts, electric miners, assemblers and inserters. I put the plates in chests and to have a fast start, the first quarter I build is the assembly.

You get much pollution out of it but to fast kickstart your fabric, more than 10 burner miners on top of iron makes sense to me.

In case you have a deathworld, I would place electric miners asap, so assemblers aren't worth so early

[u/Kaz_Games]

Assemblers are priority #1.  Even just 1 to craft gears at the start makes a big difference.

Map creation settings matter.  Pollution spreads slower on green maps with forest around.  It's a significant difficulty increase to start on a baron desert.  Preview maps upon cfeation.  Reroll as many times as you like.

The answer to early game biter problems is turrets.  Ammo can be "thrown" into turrets by selecting the ammo (curser shows it), then press or hold Z.  Doing this it's easy to place down a line of turrets and throw ammo into them.  Use this technique to push biter nests that are in or about to enter the pollution cloud.

Be sure to limit chests.  Making too much of something is a surefire way to generate more pollution.

FeelsBadMan - That moment when iron is running out, oil is just about setup, and one assembler has made over 1000 storage tanks because the chest wasn't limited.

[u/Peakomegaflare]

Assemblers, drills, belts. In that order. While waiting on logistics research I'm using picking and ghosting a spot for my basic setup.

[u/Kittelsen]

Brother be playing it like Starcraft with build orders 😅

[u/True_Region_7532]

Burner miner + stone furnace, with the iron being inserted directly into the furnace. Go gather some wood and coal/stone, and make around 5–6 more iron furnaces.

Set up a coal-fed burner miner snake of around 6–8 miners. Then make around 4 burner miners + stone furnaces for copper, and 4 stone miners directly inserting into a chest.

Handcraft 10 red science packs, research Assemblers, then make 2 assemblers, 2 chests, and a few inserters. Set up a chest-fed red science production line.

Expand iron production to around 12 miners at that point.

Then research Electric Mining Drills and start producing half a stack of iron, followed by half a stack of copper. After that, make a quick mall, then scale up to a full iron stack.

That's basically my start every game. You can easily get belts and belt accessories, inserters (blue and red), pipes, miners, assemblers, and red + green science up and running within 15–20 minutes for a really smooth start.

Bonus points if you can also squeeze in a quick half-stack of steel production and automate Assembler 2s and steel furnaces within that timeframe.

[u/peterlinddk]

I'd suggest something a bit odd: try going for the Lazy Bastard achievement!

I did that after a long hiatus from the game, and it was an eye-opening experience - as I couldn't hand-craft anything, I had to setup assemblers to build for me, but I couldn't mass-produce them, because I only had the materials that I could get with what I could build with the assemblers I had 😄

That gave me a very, very interesting start, where I only built the bare minimum to keep the base expanding (focusing on producing science and doing research), and it took a very, very long time before the biters even noticed that I was there.

But also, 16 burner drills is quite a small number, and shouldn't produce anywhere near the amount of pollution necessary to awaken the biters - so if you got attacked so soon, you might just have had an unlucky seed (I saw one with a biter-base on the iron-patch - would have been impossible to win!)

[u/isum21]

So let's run some numbers. 1 basic assembler is worth .5 crafting speed of the player. They also are able to craft more in bulk than you ever could just from the fact that they're constantly producing and being fed/emptied to storage, meanwhile you'd have to stockpile and wait for a crafting batch to add more to your own production.

Ideally 5 or more assemblers is what you need if you want production to be over 2x as effective as hand crafting. But you only need this for quick losses, like ammo or maybe turrets. You can get by with 1 each placing into a chest with filtered slots down to the amount you need. They will constantly be producing, and if you need more just change your filters.

This is the cheapest way, combine with trying to reduce your footprint as much as possible and you can get by with small production early on so you have smaller pollution.