Things I Wish I Knew Before Playing Factorio (Tips And Tricks Tutorial)

Factorio is an amazing game, where everything is wonderful. Ok maybe it’s not that sweet for new players, this is why I will show you almost 999 things I wish I knew before I started playing Factorio, so you don’t need to make the same mistakes I did.

The first thing is the an obvious one, “ALT” key. When I look at my factory without “alt mode” I feel like I’m blind literally I could play Factorio like this and have the same feelings.

After hours of experience with this game, I could tell you, it’s really worth it to have it turned on. The amount of knowledge you are getting from this little thing is just amazing and because of that you can plan your factory even better.

Some people might find this mode view uglier than a normal one but hey! Factory must grow and doesn’t need to look beautiful. Also when you are doing a screen shot of your factory remember to always have it turned on it’s just unwritten rule of Factorio, ok maybe it’s written on reddit.

Factorio was made by programmers yes that’s kind of obvious… And just like every programmer loves to work more efficient with shortcuts. You can also play faster, because this game have shortcut for everything. Look there is at least 100 shortcuts which new player not going to use.

You can for example use “q” to pick up buildings, preSS “shift” to craft a whole stack put all items to a chest with “ctrl” or dose bullets with “z” or “c”. That was only few examples, but it took me way too long to learn them when I was starting.

You of course don’t need to learn all of them right after launching the game but just keep in mind they are useful. So our third thing on the list is “limiting ourselves with walls”. I don’t know why, but new players love walls, and I’m not saying that they like or enjoy walls

I’m saying they could trade their whole family for few walls. Madness starts with this simple research called “Stone walls”. It is the beginning of the end, because from this moment you could build walls everywhere. everywhere *But darker* everywhere *But even darker*

Biters aren’t that scary and few turrets are usually enough to keep you safe, so next time please just leave some more space inside your castle because you will need this space in the future to expand your factory. This thing is somehow connected with the previous one, building “everything to small”.

Beginners don’t realize how many machines they really need. Factorio is a game about building a factory, so everything here need to be huge and effective. Fresh player will think one assembling machine for a gears and maybe four for a green circuits.

Factorio veteran on the other hand thinks one hundred machines for a gears and maybe four hundred for a green circuit. It’s simple example, but shows how different players look at a basic materials in Factorio. You know it’s always better to build too much, than not enough.

Next thing is very simple, “not limiting chests”. I know that 2400 electric miners will be necessary someday, but you really don’t need this amount in first 3 hours of your game. You can very easily limit your chest with this red cross to prevent overproduction.

Depending on how important and expensive is an item you can change amount of that limit. Usually more expensive items should be limited to few stacks and common stuff like belts or inserters could be produced in higher quantity. If you don’t want to set limits *on every chest by hand*

You can use “shift” and “right mouse button” to just copy limit from on chest and past the same limit with “shift” and “left mouse button”, it will make everything faster and more effective. And the number??? next! is “bottlenecking with buffers”.

This is a very common way of making the lest effective buffer in Factorio by just placing a chest and two inserters, for comparison this is the buffer made by a speedrunner Nefrums. I think difference in efficiency of those two structures are plain to see.

The first buffer works like a big dam, that blocks items and slows the whole factory, so it’s good to design something better, if you have even better design than Nefrums feel free to share it in the comments section, maybe you’ll help Factorio speedruners.

It might be shocking for you, but underground belts don’t work faster than regular belts. Few years ago I though this way of placement was better, because items could travel faster, well this presentation should revel you the truth. There are reasons why for example speedruners build belts like this, but they want to keep

High UPS and low robots queue to save few seconds in their runs, for everyday gameplay it’s just waste of resources, because underground belts cost more than the same distance of regular belts. There are many types of bases in Factorio. You can go full Italiano with spaghetti design like most beginners.

Or maybe you want to keep your base very sterile with main buss, that delivers all resources in a simple way. You can build your factory the way you like and this is beautiful in Factorio but you have to keep in mind that some designs are easier to expand then others.

All of my beginning factories was way over compressed without any option for expanding, don’t make my mistakes and plan your factory with easy to expand design because Factorio is a game where you just expand your factory over and over again. Crafting time of more advance machines can take ages

This is why it’s important to prepare intermedia materials somewhere in your factory to speed up this process. Let’s take for example an assembling machine that require 0.5 seconds to craft if you have a gears and a green circuits prepared or it will take you almost 7 seconds to craft everything from scratch.

The most useful materials are already showed gears and green circuits which are used in almost every crafting recipe so dedicated chest for easy access of those resources will save you a tons of time.

You can expand this to more advance materials like red or blue circuits or to important items from mods, everything is up to you. When you are placing a miner in Factorio you can see a green area around it.

I don’t know why, but every time when I show Factorio as a cool game to my friends, they always put miners with 2 tiles spaces to not accidentally connect those green squares. So let me explain, the green area around miners show what will be mined and there is no problem

If 2 miners will mine from the very same ore. In 99% more miners on a patch is better, because in this way you can extract your resources faster. Fluids in this game have their own mechanics and like belts, also pipes have a maximum capacity.

This is why it’s important to place multiple pipes for the same liquid if you’re consuming a lot of that resource. You can also place pumps to increase flow in your pipes system. Whole fluids mechanic might be a bit overwhelming for beginners, but if you messed something

Up there is a special button to remove all of your mistakes. Productivity modules in Factorio are quite op It’s a game about crafting stuff in your factory and what could be better than crafting with less resources or faster? Most new players don’t use modules, because they might look a bit complicated

But they are very simple. Blue module makes machines work faster, but also increase power cost so you must have a good power plant to use those modules everywhere in your base. Green modules just makes your machines eco-friendly and to be honest, nobody use them

Because who needs to save some power when you can just build a bigger coal power plant. And the most beautiful orange productivity modules. They increase production of your machines, so the best idea is to use them in rocket silo labs and assemblers that craft expensive items like blue circuits or science packs.

With 4 productivity tier 3 modules in your rocket silo, you can save 28% of your resources, so it’s really good idea to have them in your rocket silo. Mechanic of creating blueprints that could be use later in your factory is just amazing.

There is no other game that allows you to expand your factory, city or kingdom in that simple way. But of course this great feature also have disadvantages because it’s so easy to download a whole factory from the web and pretend it’s yours.

I mean, if you want to do it, that’s fine, but it will take away all fun from building your own factory with your own mistakes. Factorio is very similar to programming in some aspects and like in programming

Copping a whole code from the stackoverflow is not the best idea and it works the same way in Factorio. Factorio has an amazing modding community which created thousands of mods developers also put a lot of effort into making their game a perfect frame for mods.

It’s of course up to you if you want to install tons of mods but I just want to let you know that core of this game is awesome without any modifications, especially in your first game. After some time you should try big great mods that will change a whole factorio like space exploration

But there will be always time for that, because after installing a factorio you will not spent time with friends or family anymore… Fuel in factorio works slight difference than it works in other games. Let’s take for example a Minecraft where coal that started burning will burn to the end.

In Factorio if fuel is not used then it’ll just stay unchanged until you decide to use it for something *else*. Variance fuels have difference calorific values, so it’s good that your resources high in calories are not going to be wasted.

One more thing, remember that when you deconstruct a building or a car with already started fuel inside you’re not gonna get anything back from it and high caloric nuclear fuel is quite expensive. I was blaming underground belts before, but underground pipes are kind of difference story.

You can walk on belts without any problems and even use them as a speed boost. Pipes are more problematic because you cannot walk through them, what makes access to your refinery machines very hard. This is why investing a few iron plates is worth to hide your valuable oil underground

To make you safe from invasions and make your factory a bit less spaghetti like. Biters will be also happy that nothing blocks their path and you won’t need to worry about constant repairing of your pipes, because biters will just go around. To kill you and your factory. *horror music intensive*

In Factorio every machine makes pollution, even your assemblers or chemical plants. This is why it’s important to watch your pollution cloud from time to time because native citizens of this planet might get triggered and send you their diplomatic representatives.

If it is your first time with factorio or you don’t like fighting with bitters than good idea is to look for a map with big amount of trees, because trees consume pollution and it will give you a lot of time to expand your factory.

Other way to prevent raids is to simply tear down all nests in your pollution area. Without neighbors you don’t need to worry about their feelings anymore. Taking this game too serious is not the best idea overall I was literally planning my factory on notebooks during classes instead of learning.

Making excel spreadsheets to optimize ratios in my factory to achieve the best possible outcomes. Or talking with girls about advantages of city block design maybe this is a reason why I don’t have a girlfriend… Ok I just want to tell you “Have fun” from your game and remember those words:

“if something looks stupid, but works then it’s not stupid”. If you are a factorio veteran with ideas for other tips that I forgot to put in this video, feel free to share them in comments section or in our discord.

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