Official Factorio Wiki - User contributions [en]

Rail signal

2020-05-13T17:22:08Z

Jasper-bear: /* States */ added info from Railway#Basic_signaling_rules

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track, it monitors and protects the rail block behind it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. When placing rail signals, the rail signal blocks will be visible, and the opposite signal position will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop. A yellow signal means that a train is approaching and already has the approval to enter the following block. The block is reserved for a train and all other entrance signals of that block turn red.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Tutorial:Train signals

2020-05-13T17:10:52Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}
[[Rail signal]]s are necessary to run a functioning rail system in Factorio. This tutorial explains why and when signals are used, what deadlocks are and where they can happen. The aim is to enable the reader to keep a rail system running smoothly and fix common issues. Examples of frequent use cases are shown.

For beginners who are just learning the usage of signals it is recommended to place radars near all intersections to help identify issues quickly. It is also recommended to set up automation for fueling trains as soon as possible whenever a new train or station is added to the system. Trains can either be fueled at one stop on their usual schedule (this may or may not involve transporting fuel to a station) or by adding a separate fuel station to the schedule.

== Regular signals and blocks ==

[[File:Why_signals.gif]]

Whenever there is more than one train on a track, there is the possibility that trains can crash into one another. To prevent trains from doing this, we place signals at intervals along the track and at crossings. A regular [[Rail signal|rail signal]] protects the rail block after it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. Signals ensure that only one train can be in any block. Whenever a second train would enter a block that already has a train in it, the train will wait at the signal leading into the block instead.

Rail blocks are shown with colors when a player has a signal in hand. The picture shows the block visualization, there are a total of eleven blocks. Rail signals (and chain signals) break up blocks, train stops do not.

[[File:Rail_blocks_example.png|1000px]]

A regular signal is green when there is no train on the block behind it. When a train enters the block, all signals going into the block will turn red. When a train is in the process of entering the block, the signal turns yellow for a short time before turning red.

Signals are placed on the right side of the track. Trains are only allowed to go past signals that are on the right hand side from direction of travel. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal. This can sometimes cause a "no path" error where the track appears to be connected, but part of the connection is a one way track.

[[File:Signal_directions.png|1000px]]

In the image, the tracks are from top to bottom:
# left to right,
# right to left,
# bidirectional,
# bidirectional,
# bidirectional on the left side, splitting into a right to left (upper) and a left to right track (lower).

== Chain signals ==

Using signals prevents trains from crashing into each other but brings with itself other potential issues. Every train will wait until the block in front of it is cleared, so trains are waiting for other trains. This becomes a problem when a train starts waiting on an intersection. In that case other trains will have to wait even if they are not going in the same direction. These trains may in turn cause other trains to wait, resulting in a slowdown of the entire system. Traffic systems should avoid having trains waiting on intersections. In Factorio, [[Rail chain signal]]s are used to ensure that this cannot happen.

[[File:Chain-signal-guards-crossroad.png|1000px]]

The most important rule is that a train cannot wait for an extended period of time in a block ''after'' a chain signal, whereas it can wait in a block after a regular signal. Since trains should not wait on crossings, this leads to the commonly stated rule: Use chain signals in and before crossings and use regular signals at the exits of crossings. In general, whenever a waiting train would block another train that is going on a different track, a chain signal should be used to prevent the train from waiting.

[[File:Double-crossing.gif|1000px]]

How do chain signals work? To determine if a train is allowed to drive past a chain signal, consider the path the train will take from that signal up to the next regular signal or until it reaches the station, whichever comes first. The train is only allowed to go through if all rail blocks on this path are free. If the train goes through, it will reserve all blocks on this path and not allow other trains to pass through a block until it leaves the block. A chain signal which leads to a block that has only one outgoing signal will always have the same color as that signal. If a rail line splits up, it can happen that one outgoing signal is red and the other is green. In that case the chain signal leading into the block will turn blue to indicate that some paths are free while others are not.

[[File:Chain_signal_colors.png|1000px]]

If the rail network contains many chain signals it is possible that a very large number of blocks is reserved when a train drives by a chain signal. This would restrict other trains, reducing throughput in general. Hence it is often suggested to use regular signals whenever possible and chain signals only where they are necessary.

== Deadlocks ==

Using signals can lead to trains waiting for other trains. As a consequence, there might be a chain of trains, each waiting for the next, with the last waiting for the first. This situation is called a deadlock, because the trains will wait forever or until the situation is resolved manually. It should be avoided and resolved as soon as possible because every train going through the area will get stuck. The most frequent causes of deadlocks are
# trains waiting on intersections and
# a rail network that does not allow enough space for trains.

[[File:Deadlock_anim.gif]]

The image above shows a deadlock caused by missing chain signals since only regular rail signals were used. As a result trains can wait on a crossing which leads to a deadlock. A corrected version of this intersection can be found above. The eight signals before and on the intersection should be replaced by chain signals, the ones leading out of the intersection can stay as they are. As stated above, in general chain signals should be used before and on intersections.

[[File:Deadlock_too_many_trains.png|1000px]]

The deadlock in the image happened because there is a circle in the network which was used by more trains than can fit into the circle. The signals are correct; to fix the deadlock the circle must be removed or less trains need to be routed through this area.

[[File:Signal_deadlock.png|1000px]]

This deadlock also happened because there were too many trains in a too small circle. It shows that a deadlock can happen with as few as two trains. In this case the deadlock could also have been avoided by replacing the marked signal with a chain signal, because it would ensure that only one train can enter the offending circle. However this could lead to trains waiting on the main line, so a waiting area for trains near the station should be added.

== Signal spacing ==

[[File:Deadlock_signal_space.png|1000px]]

The image shows a deadlock between two T-junctions. It happened because while a train was waiting at the intersection, its tail end was still in the last intersection. The junctions when taken individually are signaled correctly, however, given the length of trains using them, they are too close to each other. One might argue that they form a single big intersection. There are three ways to fix this: the regular signals between the two junctions could be turned into chain signals, or the junctions could be moved further away from each other, or all trains could be shortened.

After an exit signal of a junction, the next signal must be at least far enough away to fit the ''longest'' train in the rail system between the signals. In general, after every regular signal there should be at least that much space.

It is recommended that you choose a maximum train length before designing your rail system, and stick to it. Then rail signal blocks can be spaced according to the maximum length.

== Splitting rail blocks ==

The following aims to explain where signals should be placed. Long uninterrupted rail tracks should have signals at regular intervals because this allows more trains to move on the track simultaneously leading to higher throughput. Crossings should be separated from uninterrupted rails with signals. Inside crossings, signals should be used so that multiple trains can pass through the crossing without slowing down - for example trains going in opposite directions should not have to slow down for each other, so they need to pass through different blocks inside an intersection. The examples below all follow these rules.

== Examples ==

The most common way to build a rail system is using two parallel rails, one for each direction. The examples mostly follow this architecture. A single bidirectional rail line should not be used for 'main' rail lines in most situations.

=== T-Junction ===

The image shows a basic three way junction. Rail signals have been placed inside the junction to ensure that more than one train can enter the junction in some cases. For example for one train going left to right and one going right to left, the trains will pass through different blocks: the first will go through the left yellow, the blue and the lower right yellow block; the second will use the upper yellow and upper red blocks. Because they use different blocks, they can use the junction simultaneously. While this is not strictly necessary for a junction to work, it will allow better throughput at a low cost.

<gallery mode="nolines" widths=800px heights=800px>

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</gallery>

=== Waiting area ===

If multiple trains use the same station, the trains will wait on the main rail line which leads to a traffic jam in the network and can cause deadlocks. One way to avoid this is to add waiting areas for trains at each station.

[[File:Train_waiting_area.png|800px]]

The image shows a shared waiting area for two stations. The signals leading into the waiting areas are regular signals because this is where trains are expected to wait for an extended time. The signals leading out of the waiting areas are chain signals because the track from the waiting areas to the stations should not be blocked. The stations are also in different blocks to make sure that all stations can be used simultaneously.

There are two ways to design waiting areas, parallel (as above) and sequential. The parallel version is easily extendable, takes less space and multiple stations can share a parallel waiting area. The sequential version as shown below is easier to set up but cannot be shared by multiple stations (and has very minor UPS benefits). Waiting areas are often referred to as stackers.

[[File:Train_waiting_area_sequential.png|800px]]

== See also ==

* [[Tutorials]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Rail signal]]
* [[Rail chain signal]]

Rail chain signal

2020-05-12T03:11:12Z

Jasper-bear: Added external link to official documentation

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail chain signal}}

'''Rail chain signals''' are used for automated transportation on a [[Railway|railway network]]. With rail chain signals, it is possible to use multiple trains on a single track, or multiple rails that intertwine.

== Basic ==
* The best prerequisite to understand chain signals is to understand [[Rail signal| signal blocks]].
* Rail chain signals are placed like block signals at the right side of a [[Railway#Rail Glossary|segment]].
* They work similar to pre-signals in OpenTTD.

== Definition ==
Both normal signals and chain signals prevent a train from entering the next block if it is obstructed. However, a chain signal also looks ahead to the next signal, and turns red if the next signal is red. In effect, this prevents a train from entering a block if it won't be able to leave.

== Usage examples ==
'''Regular signal compared to a chain signal'''

With a regular signal, the block after it is empty, so the train can go there.
[[File:Regular-signals.png|1000px]]

Chain signal with one exit doesn't allow the train to enter the block, since it can't leave immediately.

[[File:Chain-signal-basic.png|1000px]]

'''Simple example with practical usage'''

The chain signal prevents the train from blocking the crossing route while waiting.

[[File:Chain-signal-guards-crossroad.png|1000px]]

'''Double crossing'''

Double crossings are a common cause of train jams, as trains can stop in the middle of the crossing and block everything. It can even cause total deadlock, which require manual intervention to fix the problem. With chain signals, the rails that don't cross are still separated, but trains won't stop in the middle of the crossing.

[[File:Double-crossing.gif|1000px]]

'''Deadlock prevention'''

Another common cause of blockages are bidirectional single track lines with occasional bypasses. Here a train can't enter the line because another train is in it, but that train in turn can't leave the line.

[[File:train-deadlock.png|1000px]]

With chain signals, this problem can be totally avoided by preventing the train from going to the shared section unless it can exit it.

[[File:chain-signal-prevents-deadlock.png|1000px]]

== Advanced ==
[[File:railchainsignal_anim.png]]

* If the chain signal has only one exit, it doesn't allow the train to enter its block, if the train would have to stop in said block.
* Since trains react to chain signals based on their own path, chain signals before a crossing will not stop trains if the other track's exit is blocked.
* If there are several chain signals before a regular one, a train waits before the first chain signal if the block after the regular signal is occupied.

* If a chain signal switches to '''green''', all exits are free.
* If it switches to '''yellow''', the block is reserved for a train and all other entrance signals of that block turn '''red'''.
* If it switches to '''red''', all exits are occupied.
* If it switches to '''blue''', some but not all exits are free. In this case trains may or may not stop, depending on their path.
* If it is '''Blinking''', it is not on a rail, or unable to divide it into separate blocks.

== History ==
{{history|0.16.0|
* Rail chain signals can be read by the [[circuit network]].}}

{{history|0.12.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial: Train signals]]

== External Links ==

* The official Factorio Train Automation Tutorial can be found here: http://www.factorioguide.com/factorio-users-guide-updates/written-guides/

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail chain signal

2020-05-11T22:37:17Z

Jasper-bear: /* Definition */ "the chain signal itself has no idea which path the train wants to take, it just knows that some exits are obstructed and some aren’t." -- from https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pDj-ccWjUrwG_9_fDzLUosFZx_luGUet5XZwt7uUyzM/edit#s

Rail chain signal

2020-05-11T22:35:47Z

Jasper-bear: removed info i added that may not be true

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail chain signal}}

'''Rail chain signals''' are used for automated transportation on a [[Railway|railway network]]. With rail chain signals, it is possible to use multiple trains on a single track, or multiple rails that intertwine.

== Basic ==
* The best prerequisite to understand chain signals is to understand [[Rail signal| signal blocks]].
* Rail chain signals are placed like block signals at the right side of a [[Railway#Rail Glossary|segment]].
* They work similar to pre-signals in OpenTTD.

== Definition ==
Both normal signals and chain signals prevent a train from entering the next block if it is obstructed. However, a chain signal also looks ahead to the next signal, and turns red if the next signal is red. In effect, this prevents a train from entering a block if it won't be able to leave. When more than one exits exist, the one where the train is pathing to is considered.

== Usage examples ==
'''Regular signal compared to a chain signal'''

With a regular signal, the block after it is empty, so the train can go there.
[[File:Regular-signals.png|1000px]]

Chain signal with one exit doesn't allow the train to enter the block, since it can't leave immediately.

[[File:Chain-signal-basic.png|1000px]]

'''Simple example with practical usage'''

The chain signal prevents the train from blocking the crossing route while waiting.

[[File:Chain-signal-guards-crossroad.png|1000px]]

'''Double crossing'''

Double crossings are a common cause of train jams, as trains can stop in the middle of the crossing and block everything. It can even cause total deadlock, which require manual intervention to fix the problem. With chain signals, the rails that don't cross are still separated, but trains won't stop in the middle of the crossing.

[[File:Double-crossing.gif|1000px]]

'''Deadlock prevention'''

Another common cause of blockages are bidirectional single track lines with occasional bypasses. Here a train can't enter the line because another train is in it, but that train in turn can't leave the line.

[[File:train-deadlock.png|1000px]]

With chain signals, this problem can be totally avoided by preventing the train from going to the shared section unless it can exit it.

[[File:chain-signal-prevents-deadlock.png|1000px]]

== Advanced ==
[[File:railchainsignal_anim.png]]

* If the chain signal has only one exit, it doesn't allow the train to enter its block, if the train would have to stop in said block.
* Since trains react to chain signals based on their own path, chain signals before a crossing will not stop trains if the other track's exit is blocked.
* If there are several chain signals before a regular one, a train waits before the first chain signal if the block after the regular signal is occupied.

* If a chain signal switches to '''green''', all exits are free.
* If it switches to '''yellow''', the block is reserved for a train and all other entrance signals of that block turn '''red'''.
* If it switches to '''red''', all exits are occupied.
* If it switches to '''blue''', some but not all exits are free. In this case trains may or may not stop, depending on their path.
* If it is '''Blinking''', it is not on a rail, or unable to divide it into separate blocks.

== History ==
{{history|0.16.0|
* Rail chain signals can be read by the [[circuit network]].}}

{{history|0.12.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial: Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail chain signal

2020-05-11T22:31:33Z

Jasper-bear: /* Definition */ Updated definition based on official document: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pDj-ccWjUrwG_9_fDzLUosFZx_luGUet5XZwt7uUyzM/edit#slide=id.g12a2bb5fc4_884_177

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail chain signal}}

'''Rail chain signals''' are used for automated transportation on a [[Railway|railway network]]. With rail chain signals, it is possible to use multiple trains on a single track, or multiple rails that intertwine.

== Basic ==
* The best prerequisite to understand chain signals is to understand [[Rail signal| signal blocks]].
* Rail chain signals are placed like block signals at the right side of a [[Railway#Rail Glossary|segment]].
* They work similar to pre-signals in OpenTTD.

== Definition ==
Both normal signals and chain signals prevent a train from entering the next block if it is obstructed. However, a chain signal also looks ahead to the next signal, and turns red if the next signal is red. In effect, this prevents a train from entering a block if it won't be able to leave. When more than one exits exist, the one where the train is pathing to is considered. However, if the destination train stop is in the block, the train is not required to be able to leave the block.

== Usage examples ==
'''Regular signal compared to a chain signal'''

With a regular signal, the block after it is empty, so the train can go there.
[[File:Regular-signals.png|1000px]]

Chain signal with one exit doesn't allow the train to enter the block, since it can't leave immediately.

[[File:Chain-signal-basic.png|1000px]]

'''Simple example with practical usage'''

The chain signal prevents the train from blocking the crossing route while waiting.

[[File:Chain-signal-guards-crossroad.png|1000px]]

'''Double crossing'''

Double crossings are a common cause of train jams, as trains can stop in the middle of the crossing and block everything. It can even cause total deadlock, which require manual intervention to fix the problem. With chain signals, the rails that don't cross are still separated, but trains won't stop in the middle of the crossing.

[[File:Double-crossing.gif|1000px]]

'''Deadlock prevention'''

Another common cause of blockages are bidirectional single track lines with occasional bypasses. Here a train can't enter the line because another train is in it, but that train in turn can't leave the line.

[[File:train-deadlock.png|1000px]]

With chain signals, this problem can be totally avoided by preventing the train from going to the shared section unless it can exit it.

[[File:chain-signal-prevents-deadlock.png|1000px]]

== Advanced ==
[[File:railchainsignal_anim.png]]

* If the chain signal has only one exit, it doesn't allow the train to enter its block, if the train would have to stop in said block.
* Since trains react to chain signals based on their own path, chain signals before a crossing will not stop trains if the other track's exit is blocked.
* If there are several chain signals before a regular one, a train waits before the first chain signal if the block after the regular signal is occupied.

* If a chain signal switches to '''green''', all exits are free.
* If it switches to '''yellow''', the block is reserved for a train and all other entrance signals of that block turn '''red'''.
* If it switches to '''red''', all exits are occupied.
* If it switches to '''blue''', some but not all exits are free. In this case trains may or may not stop, depending on their path.
* If it is '''Blinking''', it is not on a rail, or unable to divide it into separate blocks.

== History ==
{{history|0.16.0|
* Rail chain signals can be read by the [[circuit network]].}}

{{history|0.12.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial: Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail signal

2020-05-11T22:22:28Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track, it monitors and protects the rail block behind it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. When placing rail signals, the rail signal blocks will be visible, and the opposite signal position will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

== External Links ==

* The official Factorio Train Automation Tutorial can be found here: http://www.factorioguide.com/factorio-users-guide-updates/written-guides/

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail chain signal

2020-05-11T22:11:36Z

Jasper-bear: /* Definition */

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail chain signal}}

'''Rail chain signals''' are used for automated transportation on a [[Railway|railway network]]. With rail chain signals, it is possible to use multiple trains on a single track, or multiple rails that intertwine.

== Basic ==
* The best prerequisite to understand chain signals is to understand [[Rail signal| signal blocks]].
* Rail chain signals are placed like block signals at the right side of a [[Railway#Rail Glossary|segment]].
* They work similar to pre-signals in OpenTTD.

== Definition ==
While normal signal prevents train from entering the occupied block, chain signal prevents train from entering a block if it won't be able to leave. When more than one exits exist, the one where the train is pathing to is considered. However, if the destination train stop is in the block, the train is not required to be able to leave the block.

== Usage examples ==
'''Regular signal compared to a chain signal'''

With a regular signal, the block after it is empty, so the train can go there.
[[File:Regular-signals.png|1000px]]

Chain signal with one exit doesn't allow the train to enter the block, since it can't leave immediately.

[[File:Chain-signal-basic.png|1000px]]

'''Simple example with practical usage'''

The chain signal prevents the train from blocking the crossing route while waiting.

[[File:Chain-signal-guards-crossroad.png|1000px]]

'''Double crossing'''

Double crossings are a common cause of train jams, as trains can stop in the middle of the crossing and block everything. It can even cause total deadlock, which require manual intervention to fix the problem. With chain signals, the rails that don't cross are still separated, but trains won't stop in the middle of the crossing.

[[File:Double-crossing.gif|1000px]]

'''Deadlock prevention'''

Another common cause of blockages are bidirectional single track lines with occasional bypasses. Here a train can't enter the line because another train is in it, but that train in turn can't leave the line.

[[File:train-deadlock.png|1000px]]

With chain signals, this problem can be totally avoided by preventing the train from going to the shared section unless it can exit it.

[[File:chain-signal-prevents-deadlock.png|1000px]]

== Advanced ==
[[File:railchainsignal_anim.png]]

* If the chain signal has only one exit, it doesn't allow the train to enter its block, if the train would have to stop in said block.
* Since trains react to chain signals based on their own path, chain signals before a crossing will not stop trains if the other track's exit is blocked.
* If there are several chain signals before a regular one, a train waits before the first chain signal if the block after the regular signal is occupied.

* If a chain signal switches to '''green''', all exits are free.
* If it switches to '''yellow''', the block is reserved for a train and all other entrance signals of that block turn '''red'''.
* If it switches to '''red''', all exits are occupied.
* If it switches to '''blue''', some but not all exits are free. In this case trains may or may not stop, depending on their path.
* If it is '''Blinking''', it is not on a rail, or unable to divide it into separate blocks.

== History ==
{{history|0.16.0|
* Rail chain signals can be read by the [[circuit network]].}}

{{history|0.12.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial: Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Tutorial:Train signals

2020-05-11T22:00:27Z

Jasper-bear: /* Signal spacing */

{{Languages}}
Rail signals are necessary to run a functioning rail system in Factorio. This tutorial explains why and when signals are used, what deadlocks are and where they can happen. The aim is to enable the reader to keep a rail system running smoothly and fix common issues. Examples of frequent use cases are shown.

For beginners who are just learning the usage of signals it is recommended to place radars near all intersections to help identify issues quickly. It is also recommended to set up automation for fueling trains as soon as possible whenever a new train or station is added to the system. Trains can either be fueled at one stop on their usual schedule (this may or may not involve transporting fuel to a station) or by adding a separate fuel station to the schedule.

== Regular signals and blocks ==

[[File:Why_signals.gif]]

Whenever there is more than one train on a track, there is the possibility that trains can crash into one another. To prevent trains from doing this, we place signals at intervals along the track and at crossings. A regular [[Rail signal|rail signal]] protects the rail block after it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. Signals ensure that only one train can be in any block. Whenever a second train would enter a block that already has a train in it, the train will wait at the signal leading into the block instead.

Rail blocks are shown with colors when a player has a signal in hand. The picture shows the block visualization, there are a total of eleven blocks. Rail signals (and chain signals) break up blocks, train stops do not.

[[File:Rail_blocks_example.png|1000px]]

A regular signal is green when there is no train on the block behind it. When a train enters the block, all signals going into the block will turn red. When a train is in the process of entering the block, the signal turns yellow for a short time before turning red.

Signals are placed on the right side of the track. Trains are only allowed to go past signals that are on the right hand side from direction of travel. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal. This can sometimes cause a "no path" error where the track appears to be connected, but part of the connection is a one way track.

[[File:Signal_directions.png|1000px]]

In the image, the tracks are from top to bottom:
# left to right,
# right to left,
# bidirectional,
# bidirectional,
# bidirectional on the left side, splitting into a right to left (upper) and a left to right track (lower).

== Chain signals ==

Using signals prevents trains from crashing into each other but brings with itself other potential issues. Every train will wait until the block in front of it is cleared, so trains are waiting for other trains. This becomes a problem when a train starts waiting on an intersection. In that case other trains will have to wait even if they are not going in the same direction. These trains may in turn cause other trains to wait, resulting in a slowdown of the entire system. Traffic systems should avoid having trains waiting on intersections. In Factorio, [[Rail chain signal]]s are used to ensure that this cannot happen.

[[File:Chain-signal-guards-crossroad.png|1000px]]

The most important rule is that a train cannot wait for an extended period of time in a block ''after'' a chain signal, whereas it can wait in a block after a regular signal. Since trains should not wait on crossings, this leads to the commonly stated rule: Use chain signals in and before crossings and use regular signals at the exits of crossings. In general, whenever a waiting train would block another train that is going on a different track, a chain signal should be used to prevent the train from waiting.

[[File:Double-crossing.gif|1000px]]

How do chain signals work? To determine if a train is allowed to drive past a chain signal, consider the path the train will take from that signal up to the next regular signal or until it reaches the station, whichever comes first. The train is only allowed to go through if all rail blocks on this path are free. If the train goes through, it will reserve all blocks on this path and not allow other trains to pass through a block until it leaves the block. A chain signal which leads to a block that has only one outgoing signal will always have the same color as that signal. If a rail line splits up, it can happen that one outgoing signal is red and the other is green. In that case the chain signal leading into the block will turn blue to indicate that some paths are free while others are not.

[[File:Chain_signal_colors.png|1000px]]

If the rail network contains many chain signals it is possible that a very large number of blocks is reserved when a train drives by a chain signal. This would restrict other trains, reducing throughput in general. Hence it is often suggested to use regular signals whenever possible and chain signals only where they are necessary.

== Deadlocks ==

Using signals can lead to trains waiting for other trains. As a consequence, there might be a chain of trains, each waiting for the next, with the last waiting for the first. This situation is called a deadlock, because the trains will wait forever or until the situation is resolved manually. It should be avoided and resolved as soon as possible because every train going through the area will get stuck. The most frequent causes of deadlocks are
# trains waiting on intersections and
# a rail network that does not allow enough space for trains.

[[File:Deadlock_anim.gif]]

The image above shows a deadlock caused by missing chain signals since only regular rail signals were used. As a result trains can wait on a crossing which leads to a deadlock. A corrected version of this intersection can be found above. The eight signals before and on the intersection should be replaced by chain signals, the ones leading out of the intersection can stay as they are. As stated above, in general chain signals should be used before and on intersections.

[[File:Deadlock_too_many_trains.png|1000px]]

The deadlock in the image happened because there is a circle in the network which was used by more trains than can fit into the circle. The signals are correct; to fix the deadlock the circle must be removed or less trains need to be routed through this area.

[[File:Signal_deadlock.png|1000px]]

This deadlock also happened because there were too many trains in a too small circle. It shows that a deadlock can happen with as few as two trains. In this case the deadlock could also have been avoided by replacing the marked signal with a chain signal, because it would ensure that only one train can enter the offending circle. However this could lead to trains waiting on the main line, so a waiting area for trains near the station should be added.

== Signal spacing ==

[[File:Deadlock_signal_space.png|1000px]]

The image shows a deadlock between two T-junctions. It happened because while a train was waiting at the intersection, its tail end was still in the last intersection. The junctions when taken individually are signaled correctly, however, given the length of trains using them, they are too close to each other. One might argue that they form a single big intersection. There are three ways to fix this: the regular signals between the two junctions could be turned into chain signals, or the junctions could be moved further away from each other, or all trains could be shortened.

After an exit signal of a junction, the next signal must be at least far enough away to fit the ''longest'' train in the rail system between the signals. In general, after every regular signal there should be at least that much space.

It is recommended that you choose a maximum train length before designing your rail system, and stick to it. Then rail signal blocks can be spaced according to the maximum length.

== Splitting rail blocks ==

The following aims to explain where signals should be placed. Long uninterrupted rail tracks should have signals at regular intervals because this allows more trains to move on the track simultaneously leading to higher throughput. Crossings should be separated from uninterrupted rails with signals. Inside crossings, signals should be used so that multiple trains can pass through the crossing without slowing down - for example trains going in opposite directions should not have to slow down for each other, so they need to pass through different blocks inside an intersection. The examples below all follow these rules.

== Examples ==

The most common way to build a rail system is using two parallel rails, one for each direction. The examples mostly follow this architecture. A single bidirectional rail line should not be used for 'main' rail lines in most situations.

=== T-Junction ===

The image shows a basic three way junction. Rail signals have been placed inside the junction to ensure that more than one train can enter the junction in some cases. For example for one train going left to right and one going right to left, the trains will pass through different blocks: the first will go through the left yellow, the blue and the lower right yellow block; the second will use the upper yellow and upper red blocks. Because they use different blocks, they can use the junction simultaneously. While this is not strictly necessary for a junction to work, it will allow better throughput at a low cost.

<gallery mode="nolines" widths=800px heights=800px>

File:T_junction_9.png|{{BlueprintString|bp-string=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}}
</gallery>

=== Waiting area ===

If multiple trains use the same station, the trains will wait on the main rail line which leads to a traffic jam in the network and can cause deadlocks. One way to avoid this is to add waiting areas for trains at each station.

[[File:Train_waiting_area.png|800px]]

The image shows a shared waiting area for two stations. The signals leading into the waiting areas are regular signals because this is where trains are expected to wait for an extended time. The signals leading out of the waiting areas are chain signals because the track from the waiting areas to the stations should not be blocked. The stations are also in different blocks to make sure that all stations can be used simultaneously.

There are two ways to design waiting areas, parallel (as above) and sequential. The parallel version is easily extendable, takes less space and multiple stations can share a parallel waiting area. The sequential version as shown below is easier to set up but cannot be shared by multiple stations (and has very minor UPS benefits). Waiting areas are often referred to as stackers.

[[File:Train_waiting_area_sequential.png|800px]]

== See also ==

* [[Tutorials]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Rail signal]]
* [[Rail chain signal]]

Rail signal

2020-05-11T21:41:29Z

Jasper-bear: /* Direction */

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track, it monitors and protects the rail block behind it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. When placing rail signals, the rail signal blocks will be visible, and the opposite signal position will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail signal

2020-05-11T21:41:14Z

Jasper-bear: /* Direction */

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track, it monitors and protects the rail block behind it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. When placing rail signals, the rail signal blocks will be visible, and the opposite signal position will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also an opposite signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail signal

2020-05-11T21:40:42Z

Jasper-bear: /* Direction */

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track, it monitors and protects the rail block behind it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. When placing rail signals, the rail signal blocks will be visible, and the opposite signal position will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail signal

2020-05-11T21:40:23Z

Jasper-bear: /* Direction */

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track, it monitors and protects the rail block behind it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. When placing rail signals, the rail signal blocks will be visible, and the opposite signal positions will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail signal

2020-05-11T21:07:19Z

Jasper-bear: /* Direction */

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track, it monitors and protects the rail block behind it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. When placing rail signals, the opposite signal positions will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail signal

2020-05-11T21:07:04Z

Jasper-bear: /* Direction */ edited for clarity

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track it monitors and protects the rail block behind it, up to the next signal or the end of the track. When placing rail signals, the opposite signal positions will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Rail signal

2020-05-11T21:05:35Z

Jasper-bear: /* Direction */ edited for clarity

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Rail signal}}

The '''rail signal''' divides rails into ''blocks'' and allows [[locomotive]]s to react to other locomotives allowing multiple trains use the same rails without colliding. Blocks span all connected rails regardless if a train can actually travel between them. Rail signals can also be used in with conjunction [[rail chain signal]]s, which also separate rails into blocks.

[[File:Rail_blocks.png|thumb|Signals dividing rails into blocks. Each block is highlighted with a different color.]]

== Direction ==
Which block a signal monitors depends on which side of a rail it is placed. When a signal is on the right-hand side of the track it monitors the block in front of it. When placing rail signals, the opposite signal positions will be highlighted in white. A train in automatic mode will not drive on a track if it would pass a signal on the left side unless there is also a signal on the right side at that signal.

== States ==
[[File:railsignal_anim.png]]

Rail signals have four states:
* '''Green''' - The monitored block is empty.
* '''Yellow''' - A train is not able to stop before the monitored block and will pass the signal. The [[debug mode|debug option]] <code>show_train_stop_point</code> can be used to see the distance locomotives need to stop.
* '''Red''' - The monitored block is not empty or another signal monitoring it is orange.
* '''Blinking''' - The signal is not on a rail, or the monitored block is also the block before the signal.

When a signal is red, locomotives will stop before it. A rail chain signal can be used to make locomotives stop earlier, as they will always mimic the signal of what is in front of them.

== Circuit network ==
[[File:Rail_signal_circuit_network_gui.png|thumb|The interface for configuring a circuit network connection for a rail signal.]]
A circuit network condition can be configured that when true will make the rail signal red.

A rail signal can also output three different signals depending on if it is in its green, orange or red state. If a rail signal is red because of a circuit network condition the rail signal won't output a circuit network signal.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* The rail signal is now connectable to the circuit network.
* Halved the mining time of the rail signal.
* Rail signal stop placement indicator added.
}}

{{history|0.11.4|
* Rail signal that fails to divide two sections of rail will blink multiple colors.}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Players no longer collide with the rail signal.}}

{{history|0.5.0|
* Players can now see a visualization of the protected rail area when building/selecting the signal.}}

{{history|0.4.1|
* Rail signals connect to more than one rail when connected to a junction.}}

{{history|0.4.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Rail chain signal]]
* [[Railway]]
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Transport}}

Controls

2020-05-06T22:59:13Z

Jasper-bear: /* Advanced interaction */

{{Languages}}
Controls are set by left-clicking them and then pressing the desired key combination. They can be unbound by right-clicking them. The keybindings can be reset in the controls settings menu.

=== Movement ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination
! Effect
|-
| {{Keybinding|W}}
| Move up
|-
| {{Keybinding|D}}
| Move right
|-
| {{Keybinding|A}}
| Move left
|-
| {{Keybinding|S}}
| Move down
|}

=== Basic interaction ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination (Alternative)
! Effect
! Description
|-
| {{Keybinding|E}} ({{Keybinding|Mouse button 4}})
| Open character screen
|-
| {{Keybinding|lmb}}
| Open object's GUI
|-
| {{Keybinding|E}} ({{Keybinding|Mouse button 4}})
| Close window
|-
| {{Keybinding|rmb}}
| Mine
|-
| {{Keybinding|lmb}}
| Build
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Build ghost
|-
| {{Keybinding|Q}} ({{Keybinding|Mouse button 5}})
| Clear cursor
| Returns the item in the cursor stack to the player's inventory. Also cancels wire placement and rail planning.
|-
| {{Keybinding|Q}} ({{Keybinding|Mouse button 5}})
| Pipette tool
| Picks items from your inventory used to build the currently selected entity and places them in your cursor. For resources it will select the fastest available mining drill.
|-
| {{Keybinding|R}}
| Rotate
| Rotates (clockwise) the item held in the cursor or the selected entity.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|R}}
| Reverse rotate
| Rotates (counter-clockwise) the item held in the cursor or the selected entity.
|-
| {{Keybinding|F}}
| Pick up items on the ground
|-
| {{Keybinding|Z}}
| Drop item
| Drop one item of what you are holding on the ground, on a belt or into a machine.
|-
| {{Keybinding|alt}}
| Toggle "Alt-mode"
| Toggles showing additional information about built entities such as recipes in assembling machines and container contents.
|-
| {{Keybinding|space}}
| Shoot [[Enemies|enemy]]
| Shoots at the nearest enemy to the cursor, or for some weapons shoots at the location of the cursor.
|-
| {{Keybinding|C}}
| Shoot selected
| Shoots at whatever you have selected, or for some weapons shoots at the location of the cursor.
|-
| {{Keybinding|Tab}}
| Next [[Weapons|weapon]]
| Cycles to the next equipped weapon.
|-
| {{Keybinding|enter}}
| Enter/Leave [[vehicle]]
| Enters or exits a vehicle you're standing next to or driving.
|-
| {{Keybinding|mwu}} ({{Keybinding|shift|mwu}})
| Zoom in
|-
| {{Keybinding|mwd}} ({{Keybinding|shift|mwd}})
| Zoom out
|-
| {{Keybinding|grave}}
| Toggle chat (and Lua [[console]])
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|rmb}}
| Copy entity settings
| Copies settings from the selected entity. Note that for pasting to work, the source entity must still exist.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Paste entity settings
| Pastes settings from the previous copied entity.
|}

=== Advanced interaction ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination (Alternative)
! Effect
! Description
|-
| {{Keybinding|lmb}} ({{Keybinding|ctrl|lmb}})
| Select for [[blueprint]]
| Select the entities for blueprinting, upgrading or deconstruction.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Select for cancel [[deconstruction planner|deconstruction]]
| Select to cancel upgrading or deconstruction.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|mwu}}
| [[Blueprint book]] next
| When holding a blueprint book in the cursor, cycles the active blueprint to the next available blueprint.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|mwd}}
| Blueprint book previous
| When holding a blueprint book in the cursor, cycles the active blueprint to the previous available blueprint.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|f}}
| Focus search
|-
| {{Keybinding|numplus}}
| Larger tile building area
| Increases the size of the placement area for tiles.
|-
| {{Keybinding|numminus}}
| Smaller tile building area
| Decreases the size of the placement area for tiles.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Remove [[Electric system#Distribution|pole]] cables
| Removes wires from the selected electric pole, starting with electric wires and then circuit network wires.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|lmb}}
| Build with obstacle avoidance
| Usable only for rail building. This is the same as ghost build mode, but trees, rocks and cliffs are avoided.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift}}
| Add station modifier
| Usable only in the locomotive GUI. Hold this modifier while clicking a station in the locomotive GUI minimap to add the station to the schedule.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl}}
| Temporary station modifier
| Usable only in the locomotive GUI. Hold this modifier while clicking in the locomotive GUI minimap to quickly go to that location by adding a temporary station to the schedule.
|-
| {{Keybinding|lmb}}
| Drag map
| Usable only in the map.
|-
| {{Keybinding|rmb}}
| Place a tag on the map
| Usable only in the map. Places an icon and/or text on the map.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Place a tag in chat
| Usable only when the chat is open. Places a chat link to the selected item, recipe, map location, station or train.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|alt|lmb}}
| Ping a map location
| Quickly create a map ping at the selected location and link it in the chat.
|-
| {{Keybinding|mwu}}
| Zoom into world
| Usable only in the map. Zoom with ability to zoom into world view from map view.
|-
| {{Keybinding|mwd}}
| Zoom out of world
| Usable only in the map. Zoom with ability to zoom into map view from world view.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift}}
| Activate tooltip
| Show the tooltip when the tooltip delay is set to a large value or "Never".
|}

=== [[Crafting]] ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination
! Effect
! Description
|-
| {{Keybinding|lmb}}
| Craft 1
| Usable only in the recipe GUI. Crafts 1 of a given recipe.
|-
| {{Keybinding|rmb}}
| Craft 5
| Usable only in the recipe GUI. Crafts 5 of a given recipe.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Craft all
| Usable only in the recipe GUI. Crafts as many as possible of a given recipe.
|-
| {{Keybinding|lmb}}
| Cancel crafting 1
| Usable only in the crafting queue.
|-
| {{Keybinding|rmb}}
| Cancel crafting 5
| Usable only in the crafting queue.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Cancel crafting all
| Usable only in the crafting queue.
|}

=== Inventory ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination
! Effect
! Description
|-
| {{Keybinding|lmb}}
| Pick up/drop item stack
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Stack transfer
| Transfers the selected stack to the other inventory.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|lmb}}
| Inventory transfer
| Transfers all of the selected stack type to the other inventory. If an empty slot is clicked all items are transferred.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|lmb}}
| Fast entity transfer
| Transfers the held stack into the selected entity or if the cursor is empty takes anything the entity has and transfers it to your player.
|-
| {{Keybinding|rmb}}
| Cursor split
| Moves half the selected inventory slot into the cursor if empty. Places a single item from the cursor stack to the selected inventory slot when holding an item.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|rmb}}
| Stack split
| Transfers half of the selected stack to the other inventory.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|rmb}}
| Inventory split
| Transfers half of all of the stacks (rounded up) of the selected stack type to the other inventory. If an empty slot is clicked half of all stacks are transferred.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|rmb}}
| Fast entity split
| Transfers half of the held stack into the selected entity or if the cursor is empty takes half of anything the entity has and transfers it to your player.
|-
| {{Keybinding|mmb}}
| Toggle filter
| Create a filter for the selected inventory slot so only the selected item type can be placed in that slot.
|-
| {{Keybinding|rmb}}
| Open item's GUI
|}

=== Quickbar ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination
! Effect
! Description
|-
| {{Keybinding|X}}
| Rotate active quickbars
|-
| Not set
| Next active quickbar
| Selects the next quickbar for the top quickbar.
|-
| Not set
| Previous active quickbar
| Selects the previous quickbar for the top quickbar.
|-
| {{Keybinding|1}}
| Shortcut 1
|-
| {{Keybinding|2}}
| Shortcut 2
|-
| {{Keybinding|3}}
| Shortcut 3
|-
| {{Keybinding|4}}
| Shortcut 4
|-
| {{Keybinding|5}}
| Shortcut 5
|-
| {{Keybinding|6}}
| Shortcut 6
|-
| {{Keybinding|7}}
| Shortcut 7
|-
| {{Keybinding|8}}
| Shortcut 8
|-
| {{Keybinding|9}}
| Shortcut 9
|-
| {{Keybinding|0}}
| Shortcut 10
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 1
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 2
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 3
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 4
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 5
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 6
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 7
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 8
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 9
|-
| Not set
| Secondary shortcut 10
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|1}}
| Select quickbar 1
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|2}}
| Select quickbar 2
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|3}}
| Select quickbar 3
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|4}}
| Select quickbar 4
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|5}}
| Select quickbar 5
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|6}}
| Select quickbar 6
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|7}}
| Select quickbar 7
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|8}}
| Select quickbar 8
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|9}}
| Select quickbar 9
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|0}}
| Select quickbar 10
|}

=== Tools ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination
! Effect
! Description
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|C}}
| Copy
| Select an area of entities to be copied.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|X}}
| Cut
| Select an area of entities to be copied and marked for deconstruction.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|V}}
| Paste
| Paste the last copied entities.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|mwu}}
| Next clipboard
| Cycle the clipboard history while holding the paste tool.
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|mwd}}
| Previous clipboard
| Cycle the clipboard history while holding the paste tool.
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|Z}}
| Undo
| Undo some actions such as manual entity building/removal, placing of blueprints and usage of the deconstruction planner.
|-
| {{Keybinding|alt|b}}
| Make new [[blueprint]]
|-
| Not set
| Make new [[blueprint book]]
|-
| {{Keybinding|alt|d}}
| Make new [[deconstruction planner]]
|-
| {{Keybinding|alt|u}}
| Make new [[upgrade planner]]
|-
| {{Keybinding|alt|e}}
| Toggle [[exoskeleton]]
|-
| {{Keybinding|alt|l}}
| Toggle personal logistics requests
|-
| {{Keybinding|alt|r}}
| Toggle [[personal roboport]]
|}

=== Panels ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination
! Effect
|-
| {{Keybinding|F1}}
| Open character crafting
|-
| {{Keybinding|F2}}
| Open character info
|-
| {{Keybinding|F3}}
| Open character logistics
|-
| {{Keybinding|esc}}
| Toggle menu
|-
| {{Keybinding|M}}
| Toggle world map
|-
| {{Keybinding|T}}
| Toggle technology screen
|-
| {{Keybinding|P}}
| Toggle [[production statistics]]
|-
| {{Keybinding|L}}
| Toggle [[logistic network]]s
|-
| {{Keybinding|B}}
| Toggle [[blueprint library]]
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|SLASH}}
| Toggle tips and tricks
|}

=== Miscellaneous ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination (Alternative)
! Effect
! Description
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|space}}
| Pause game
|-
| {{Keybinding|tab}}
| Confirm message
|-
| {{Keybinding|BACKSPACE}}
| Select previous technology
| Usable only in the technology screen. Selects the technology you previously had selected.
|-
| {{Keybinding|BACKSPACE}} ({{Keybinding|Mouse button 4}})
| Select previous mod
| Usable only in the mods GUI. Selects the mod you previously had selected.
|-
| {{Keybinding|G}}
| Connect train
| Connects the selected train or the train you're driving to any adjacent trains.
|-
| {{Keybinding|V}}
| Disconnect train
| Disconnects the selected rolling stock or the rolling stock you are in from the rest of the train.
|}

=== Editor ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination
! Effect
|-
| {{Keybinding|mmb}}
| Next variation
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|mmb}}
| Previous variation
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|mmb}}
| Clone item
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|mmb}}
| Delete item
|-
| {{Keybinding|Numpad 0}}
| Toggle entity paused
|-
| {{Keybinding|Numpad .}}
| Tick once
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|Numpad +}}
| Increase game speed
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|Numpad -}}
| Decrease game speed
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|Numpad *}}
| Reset game speed to 1
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|rmb}}
| Set clone brush source
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|lmb}}
| Set clone brush destination
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl}}
| Switch to surface #
| Switches to the surface number pressed in combination with this hotkey: CTRL + 3 -> switches to surface 3.
|}

=== [[Debug mode|Debug]] ===
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Key bindings
! Key combination
! Effect
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|F3}}
| Toggle atlas GUI
|-
| {{Keybinding|F4}}
| Toggle debug settings GUI
|-
| {{Keybinding|F5}}
| Toggle basic debug
|-
| {{Keybinding|F9}}
| Reset zoom level
|-
| {{Keybinding|shift|F9}}
| Set zoom level to 2x
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|F5}}
| Toggle GUI debug
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|F6}}
| Toggle GUI style view
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|F7}}
| Toggle GUI shadows
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|F8}}
| Toggle GUI glows
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|numplus}}
| Increase UI scale
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|numminus}}
| Decrease UI scale
|-
| {{Keybinding|ctrl|Numpad 0}}
| Reset UI scale to automatic
|}

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6687 Some tips for players with disabilities]
* [[Tutorial:Script_interfaces#Custom_input|Creating keybindings in mods]]
** [[Prototype/CustomInput|Keybinding prototype documentation]]

Submachine gun

2020-05-06T22:54:41Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}{{:Infobox:Submachine gun}}
The '''submachine gun''' is an upgrade from the [[pistol]]. It fires the same ammunition types and deals the same damage as the pistol, but has a much higher rate of fire. This same type of weapon is installed in the [[car]] and [[tank]]; the car and tank's version of the submachine gun fires +5 rounds per second and has +2 range compared to the handheld one. This weapon can easily handle moderate waves of small biters, even with [[Firearm magazine|regular ammunition]], but destroying nests efficiently requires damage upgrades or the more expensive [[Piercing rounds magazine|piercing round]].

Equip the submachine gun by placing it in the lower right corner of the screen. Press Tab to change weapons.

== See also ==
* [[Pistol]]
* [[Shotgun]]
* [[Car]]
* [[Tank]]

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Weapons}}

Submachine gun

2020-05-06T22:29:52Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}{{:Infobox:Submachine gun}}
The '''submachine gun''' is an upgrade from the [[pistol]]. It fires the same ammunition types and deals the same damage as the pistol, but has a much higher rate of fire. This same type of weapon is installed in the [[car]] and [[tank]]; the car and tank's version of the submachine gun fires +5 rounds per second and has +2 range compared to the handheld one. This weapon can easily handle moderate waves of small biters, even with [[Firearm magazine|regular ammunition]], but destroying nests efficiently requires damage upgrades or the more expensive [[Piercing rounds magazine|piercing round]].

Equip the submachine gun by placing it in the lower right corner of the screen.

== See also ==
* [[Pistol]]
* [[Shotgun]]
* [[Car]]
* [[Tank]]

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Weapons}}

Firearm magazine

2020-05-06T22:29:16Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Firearm magazine}}

The most basic ammunition for starting weapons. Cheap, but has limited damage.

Each magazine contains 10 bullets.

You can view and equip ammo in the lower right corner of the screen.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* Renamed from basic-bullet-magazine to firearm-magazine.}}

{{history|0.8.4|
* Up to 10 magazines will be placed into gun turrets via [[inserter]]s.}}

{{history|0.1.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Piercing rounds magazine]]
* [[Uranium rounds magazine]]
* [[Enemies]]

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Ammo}}

Light armor

2020-05-06T22:28:28Z

Jasper-bear:

{{languages}}
{{:Infobox:Light armor}}

'''Light armor''' is the most basic craftable armor type. It provides considerable protection against the smallest of biters, effectively reducing their 7 damage to 4. Light armor struggles to protect against larger biters and offers almost no protection against spitters or worms.

The light armor reduces [[Damage#Damage_types|physical damage]] from each hit by 3, then by an additional 20% of the remaining damage (rounded up).

Equip the light armor by placing it in the lower right corner of the screen, next to ammo.

== History ==

{{history|0.15.0|
* Removed required research
* Acid resistance reduced }}

{{history|0.13.0|
* Armor resistances are applied before shields
* Renamed from iron armor to light armor.}}

{{history|0.12.17|
* Update icons }}

{{history|0.11.0|
* New player animation. Three levels depending on the armor.}}

{{history|0.7.1|
* Increased resistances }}

{{history|0.1.0|
* Introduced }}

==See also==
* [[Heavy armor]]
* [[Armor]]
* [[Damage]]

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Armor}}

Light armor

2020-05-06T22:26:37Z

Jasper-bear:

{{languages}}
{{:Infobox:Light armor}}

'''Light armor''' is the most basic craftable armor type. It provides considerable protection against the smallest of biters, effectively reducing their 7 damage to 4. Light armor struggles to protect against larger biters and offers almost no protection against spitters or worms.

The light armor reduces [[Damage#Damage_types|physical damage]] from each hit by 3, then by an additional 20% of the remaining damage (rounded up).

== History ==

{{history|0.15.0|
* Removed required research
* Acid resistance reduced }}

{{history|0.13.0|
* Armor resistances are applied before shields
* Renamed from iron armor to light armor.}}

{{history|0.12.17|
* Update icons }}

{{history|0.11.0|
* New player animation. Three levels depending on the armor.}}

{{history|0.7.1|
* Increased resistances }}

{{history|0.1.0|
* Introduced }}

==See also==
* [[Heavy armor]]
* [[Armor]]
* [[Damage]]

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Armor}}

Light armor

2020-05-06T22:25:55Z

Jasper-bear:

{{languages}}
{{:Infobox:Light armor}}

'''Light armor''' is the most basic craftable armor type. It provides considerable protection against the smallest of biters, effectively reducing their 7 damage to 4. Light armor struggles to protect against larger biters and offers almost no protection against spitters or worms.

The light armor reduces [[Damage#Damage_types|physical damage]] from each hit by 3, then by an additional 20% of the remaining damage.

== History ==

{{history|0.15.0|
* Removed required research
* Acid resistance reduced }}

{{history|0.13.0|
* Armor resistances are applied before shields
* Renamed from iron armor to light armor.}}

{{history|0.12.17|
* Update icons }}

{{history|0.11.0|
* New player animation. Three levels depending on the armor.}}

{{history|0.7.1|
* Increased resistances }}

{{history|0.1.0|
* Introduced }}

==See also==
* [[Heavy armor]]
* [[Armor]]
* [[Damage]]

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Armor}}

Firearm magazine

2020-05-06T22:19:34Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Firearm magazine}}

The most basic ammunition for starting weapons. Cheap, but has limited damage.

Each magazine contains 10 bullets.

== History ==

{{history|0.13.0|
* Renamed from basic-bullet-magazine to firearm-magazine.}}

{{history|0.8.4|
* Up to 10 magazines will be placed into gun turrets via [[inserter]]s.}}

{{history|0.1.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Piercing rounds magazine]]
* [[Uranium rounds magazine]]
* [[Enemies]]

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Ammo}}

Pistol

2020-05-06T22:18:38Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Pistol}}

The '''Pistol''' is the most basic weapon in Factorio. In Freeplay mode, the player starts with a pistol and 10 [[firearm magazine]]s.

The Pistol can only handle the smallest of enemy threats and the player will frequently take damage when trying to use it for self-defense. It is recommended to upgrade to the [[Submachine gun]] as soon as possible.

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Weapons}}

Light oil

2020-05-03T20:45:01Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Light oil}}

'''Light oil''' is a liquid converted from [[crude oil]] (in a [[oil refinery]]) or [[heavy oil]] (in a [[chemical plant]]).

Light oil can be converted to [[petroleum gas]], or used to create [[solid fuel]] and [[rocket fuel]].

{| class="wikitable"
! Building !! Process !! Results
|-
| {{Imagelink|Oil refinery}} || {{Imagelink|Advanced oil processing}} || {{Icon|Crude oil|100}} + {{icon|Water|50}} + {{icon|Time|5}} → {{Icon|Light oil|45}} + ({{Icon|Heavy oil|25}} {{Icon|Petroleum gas|55}})
|-
| {{Imagelink|Chemical plant}} || {{Imagelink|Heavy oil cracking}} || {{Icon|Heavy oil|40}} + {{icon|Water|30}} + {{icon|Time|2}} → {{Icon|Light oil|30}}
|-
| {{Imagelink|Chemical plant}} || {{Icon|Light oil cracking||}} [[Light oil cracking]] || {{icon|time|2}} + {{Icon|Light oil|30}} + {{icon|water|30}} → {{Icon|Petroleum gas|20}}
|-
| {{Imagelink|Oil refinery}} || {{imagelink|Coal liquefaction}} || {{icon|Coal|10}} + {{Icon|Heavy oil|25}} + {{icon|Steam|50}} + {{icon|Time|5}} → {{Icon|Light oil|20}} + ({{Icon|Heavy oil|90}} + {{Icon|Petroleum gas|10}})
|}

== History ==
{{history|0.9.1|
* Can now be cracked into [[petroleum gas]].}}

{{history|0.9.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Fluid system]]
* [[Oil processing]]

{{IntermediateNav}}
{{C|Fluids}}

Gun turret

2020-04-30T23:42:56Z

Jasper-bear: removed sexism

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Gun turret}}
Gun turrets are defensive structures and are the first automatic defense to be unlocked. They use magazines for ammunition which can be refilled manually or by [[inserters]]. Unlike [[laser turret]]s, they do not require power and can operate practically anywhere as long as they have sufficient ammunition. On the downside, this means that ammo must be periodically replenished.

The gun turret has the same fire rate as the human-portable [[submachine gun]]. [[Physical projectile damage (research)]] upgrades both the base damage of the ammunition and the damage of the turret as two separate, multiplicative bonuses, quickly leading to a much higher damage output than the SMG.

== Gallery ==
<gallery widths=310px heights=310px>
File:Gun_turret_rotating.gif|A rotating turret.
File:Gun_turret_firing.gif|Gun turret firing.
</gallery>

== History ==

{{history|0.12.0|
*All turrets now have a 2×2 footprint
*New graphics, color is now force-dependent
*Recipe is 2× more expensive.}}

{{history|0.8.4|
*Maximum of 10 [[Firearm magazine]]s can be put into the turret by inserters.}}

{{history|0.7.1|
*Gun turret damage upgrades
*Faster movement speed of Gun turret
*Range extended from 15 to 17.}}

{{history|0.3.0|
*New graphics
*Bullet particles for turret}}

{{history|0.2.7|
*Warning for ammo-less turret is shown.
*Contents of the turret's inventory visible in sidebar}}

{{history|0.1.0|
*Introduced}}

==See also==

* [[Weapon shooting speed (research)]]
* [[Laser turret]]
* [[Flamethrower turret]]

{{CombatNav}}
{{C|Defense}}

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T20:34:07Z

Jasper-bear: /* Quickbar and Shortcut bar */

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

=== Basic controls and UI ===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

==== Movement ====

Move your [[Player|character]] with the movement keys ("W", "A", "S", "D" by default).

==== Map ====

Press the map key (default "M") to open and close the map. Hover your mouse over resources on the map to see what they are.

==== Gathering resources ====

Some resources can be gathered manually by holding the right mouse button over them. You can use this to gather [[wood]], [[stone]], [[coal]], [[copper ore]], [[iron ore]], and [[raw fish|fish]] only.

==== Inventory and crafting ====

Press the inventory key (default "E") to open and close your inventory. The inventory UI is split into the player's inventory, on the left, and the [[Items|crafting recipes]], on the right. The four big buttons at the top of the crafting recipes are the crafting categories. If you have the ingredients required by a recipe, you can click it multiple times to craft as many as you want. View the crafting progress in the lower-left hand corner of the screen.

==== Placing and removing structures ====

Some items are structures that you can place on the ground. When your inventory is open, you can select a place-able structure from your inventory by clicking it. You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the structure's icon. You can now press the same inventory key again (default "E") to close your inventory. Your mouse icon will still have the structure. Move your mouse around to see where you can place the structure. If the item appears red, you cannot place it there. If it is green, it can be placed. You can change the rotational direction of the structure by either pressing the rotate key (default "R") before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key (default "R"). Left click to place the structure.

After you place a structure, you can pick it up and put it back in your inventory by holding the right mouse button over it.

==== Interacting with structures ====

If a structure is interact-able, left click it to open its UI. Most commonly you will use this to pick which recipe a machine should use, or to put inventory items into a container.

When you open a container, you will be able to see your inventory also. Click an item in your inventory, then click an empty slot in the container, to transfer. You can also transfer by simply holding the "stack transfer" button ("SHIFT" default) and clicking it. If you want to pick up only half of a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' of items, right click the stack in your inventory. You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly transfer half of the stack. If you want to transfer ALL items of one type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click the item. If you want to transfer ALL items of ANY type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click an empty slot.

Press the "alt-mode" key (default "ALT") to toggle "detailed view", which shows extra information about structures.

==== Quickbar and Shortcut bar ====

At the bottom-center of your screen, you will see the [[Quickbar]] on the left, and the [[Shortcut bar]] on the right. Left click the Quickbar to place an item in it. Middle click (or Command-Right-Click) the item in the Quickbar to remove it.

==== Combat ====

This game contains enemies, though they probably won't attack you until you are more prepared. If you need to defend yourself, press space to shoot the enemy closest to your mouse cursor. Keep an eye on your ammunition, which can be seen in the lower-right corner of the screen.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, it's okay if your starting area doesn't have oil, as you won't need it until later in the game. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]].

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

Gathering and crafting manually is a pain, and the purpose of Factorio is to create machines that will do your work for you.

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace. The iron deposit looks like blue-ish gray rocks on the ground.

The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a [[boiler]] and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T20:27:38Z

Jasper-bear: /* Interacting with structures */ moved text

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

=== Basic controls and UI ===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

==== Movement ====

Move your [[Player|character]] with the movement keys ("W", "A", "S", "D" by default).

==== Map ====

Press the map key (default "M") to open and close the map. Hover your mouse over resources on the map to see what they are.

==== Gathering resources ====

Some resources can be gathered manually by holding the right mouse button over them. You can use this to gather [[wood]], [[stone]], [[coal]], [[copper ore]], [[iron ore]], and [[raw fish|fish]] only.

==== Inventory and crafting ====

Press the inventory key (default "E") to open and close your inventory. The inventory UI is split into the player's inventory, on the left, and the [[Items|crafting recipes]], on the right. The four big buttons at the top of the crafting recipes are the crafting categories. If you have the ingredients required by a recipe, you can click it multiple times to craft as many as you want. View the crafting progress in the lower-left hand corner of the screen.

==== Placing and removing structures ====

Some items are structures that you can place on the ground. When your inventory is open, you can select a place-able structure from your inventory by clicking it. You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the structure's icon. You can now press the same inventory key again (default "E") to close your inventory. Your mouse icon will still have the structure. Move your mouse around to see where you can place the structure. If the item appears red, you cannot place it there. If it is green, it can be placed. You can change the rotational direction of the structure by either pressing the rotate key (default "R") before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key (default "R"). Left click to place the structure.

After you place a structure, you can pick it up and put it back in your inventory by holding the right mouse button over it.

==== Interacting with structures ====

If a structure is interact-able, left click it to open its UI. Most commonly you will use this to pick which recipe a machine should use, or to put inventory items into a container.

When you open a container, you will be able to see your inventory also. Click an item in your inventory, then click an empty slot in the container, to transfer. You can also transfer by simply holding the "stack transfer" button ("SHIFT" default) and clicking it. If you want to pick up only half of a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' of items, right click the stack in your inventory. You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly transfer half of the stack. If you want to transfer ALL items of one type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click the item. If you want to transfer ALL items of ANY type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click an empty slot.

Press the "alt-mode" key (default "ALT") to toggle "detailed view", which shows extra information about structures.

==== Quickbar and Shortcut bar ====

At the bottom-center of your screen, you will see the [[Quickbar]] on the left, and the [[Shortcut bar]] on the right.

==== Combat ====

This game contains enemies, though they probably won't attack you until you are more prepared. If you need to defend yourself, press space to shoot the enemy closest to your mouse cursor. Keep an eye on your ammunition, which can be seen in the lower-right corner of the screen.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, it's okay if your starting area doesn't have oil, as you won't need it until later in the game. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]].

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

Gathering and crafting manually is a pain, and the purpose of Factorio is to create machines that will do your work for you.

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace. The iron deposit looks like blue-ish gray rocks on the ground.

The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a [[boiler]] and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T20:26:09Z

Jasper-bear: /* Electrical power */ added wikilink

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

=== Basic controls and UI ===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

==== Movement ====

Move your [[Player|character]] with the movement keys ("W", "A", "S", "D" by default).

==== Map ====

Press the map key (default "M") to open and close the map. Hover your mouse over resources on the map to see what they are.

==== Gathering resources ====

Some resources can be gathered manually by holding the right mouse button over them. You can use this to gather [[wood]], [[stone]], [[coal]], [[copper ore]], [[iron ore]], and [[raw fish|fish]] only.

==== Inventory and crafting ====

Press the inventory key (default "E") to open and close your inventory. The inventory UI is split into the player's inventory, on the left, and the [[Items|crafting recipes]], on the right. The four big buttons at the top of the crafting recipes are the crafting categories. If you have the ingredients required by a recipe, you can click it multiple times to craft as many as you want. View the crafting progress in the lower-left hand corner of the screen.

==== Placing and removing structures ====

Some items are structures that you can place on the ground. When your inventory is open, you can select a place-able structure from your inventory by clicking it. You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the structure's icon. You can now press the same inventory key again (default "E") to close your inventory. Your mouse icon will still have the structure. Move your mouse around to see where you can place the structure. If the item appears red, you cannot place it there. If it is green, it can be placed. You can change the rotational direction of the structure by either pressing the rotate key (default "R") before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key (default "R"). Left click to place the structure.

After you place a structure, you can pick it up and put it back in your inventory by holding the right mouse button over it.

==== Interacting with structures ====

Press the "alt-mode" key (default "ALT") to toggle "detailed view", which shows extra information about structures.

If a structure is interact-able, left click it to open its UI. Most commonly you will use this to pick which recipe a machine should use, or to put inventory items into a container.

When you open a container, you will be able to see your inventory also. Click an item in your inventory, then click an empty slot in the container, to transfer. You can also transfer by simply holding the "stack transfer" button ("SHIFT" default) and clicking it. If you want to pick up only half of a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' of items, right click the stack in your inventory. You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly transfer half of the stack. If you want to transfer ALL items of one type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click the item. If you want to transfer ALL items of ANY type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click an empty slot.

==== Quickbar and Shortcut bar ====

At the bottom-center of your screen, you will see the [[Quickbar]] on the left, and the [[Shortcut bar]] on the right.

==== Combat ====

This game contains enemies, though they probably won't attack you until you are more prepared. If you need to defend yourself, press space to shoot the enemy closest to your mouse cursor. Keep an eye on your ammunition, which can be seen in the lower-right corner of the screen.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, it's okay if your starting area doesn't have oil, as you won't need it until later in the game. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]].

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

Gathering and crafting manually is a pain, and the purpose of Factorio is to create machines that will do your work for you.

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace. The iron deposit looks like blue-ish gray rocks on the ground.

The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a [[boiler]] and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T20:23:29Z

Jasper-bear: moved "Basic controls and UI" to "Getting started"

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

=== Basic controls and UI ===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

==== Movement ====

Move your [[Player|character]] with the movement keys ("W", "A", "S", "D" by default).

==== Map ====

Press the map key (default "M") to open and close the map. Hover your mouse over resources on the map to see what they are.

==== Gathering resources ====

Some resources can be gathered manually by holding the right mouse button over them. You can use this to gather [[wood]], [[stone]], [[coal]], [[copper ore]], [[iron ore]], and [[raw fish|fish]] only.

==== Inventory and crafting ====

Press the inventory key (default "E") to open and close your inventory. The inventory UI is split into the player's inventory, on the left, and the [[Items|crafting recipes]], on the right. The four big buttons at the top of the crafting recipes are the crafting categories. If you have the ingredients required by a recipe, you can click it multiple times to craft as many as you want. View the crafting progress in the lower-left hand corner of the screen.

==== Placing and removing structures ====

Some items are structures that you can place on the ground. When your inventory is open, you can select a place-able structure from your inventory by clicking it. You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the structure's icon. You can now press the same inventory key again (default "E") to close your inventory. Your mouse icon will still have the structure. Move your mouse around to see where you can place the structure. If the item appears red, you cannot place it there. If it is green, it can be placed. You can change the rotational direction of the structure by either pressing the rotate key (default "R") before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key (default "R"). Left click to place the structure.

After you place a structure, you can pick it up and put it back in your inventory by holding the right mouse button over it.

==== Interacting with structures ====

Press the "alt-mode" key (default "ALT") to toggle "detailed view", which shows extra information about structures.

If a structure is interact-able, left click it to open its UI. Most commonly you will use this to pick which recipe a machine should use, or to put inventory items into a container.

When you open a container, you will be able to see your inventory also. Click an item in your inventory, then click an empty slot in the container, to transfer. You can also transfer by simply holding the "stack transfer" button ("SHIFT" default) and clicking it. If you want to pick up only half of a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' of items, right click the stack in your inventory. You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly transfer half of the stack. If you want to transfer ALL items of one type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click the item. If you want to transfer ALL items of ANY type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click an empty slot.

==== Quickbar and Shortcut bar ====

At the bottom-center of your screen, you will see the [[Quickbar]] on the left, and the [[Shortcut bar]] on the right.

==== Combat ====

This game contains enemies, though they probably won't attack you until you are more prepared. If you need to defend yourself, press space to shoot the enemy closest to your mouse cursor. Keep an eye on your ammunition, which can be seen in the lower-right corner of the screen.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, it's okay if your starting area doesn't have oil, as you won't need it until later in the game. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]].

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

Gathering and crafting manually is a pain, and the purpose of Factorio is to create machines that will do your work for you.

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace. The iron deposit looks like blue-ish gray rocks on the ground.

The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a boiler and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T20:19:01Z

Jasper-bear: /* The very first moments */ added Basic controls and UI

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

===Key bindings===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

== The very first moments ==

=== Basic controls and UI ===

Move your [[Player|character]] with the movement keys ("W", "A", "S", "D" by default).

==== Map ====

Press the map key (default "M") to open and close the map. Hover your mouse over resources on the map to see what they are.

==== Gathering resources ====

Some resources can be gathered manually by holding the right mouse button over them. You can use this to gather [[wood]], [[stone]], [[coal]], [[copper ore]], [[iron ore]], and [[raw fish|fish]] only.

==== Inventory and crafting ====

Press the inventory key (default "E") to open and close your inventory. The inventory UI is split into the player's inventory, on the left, and the [[Items|crafting recipes]], on the right. The four big buttons at the top of the crafting recipes are the crafting categories. If you have the ingredients required by a recipe, you can click it multiple times to craft as many as you want. View the crafting progress in the lower-left hand corner of the screen.

==== Placing and removing structures ====

Some items are structures that you can place on the ground. When your inventory is open, you can select a place-able structure from your inventory by clicking it. You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the structure's icon. You can now press the same inventory key again (default "E") to close your inventory. Your mouse icon will still have the structure. Move your mouse around to see where you can place the structure. If the item appears red, you cannot place it there. If it is green, it can be placed. You can change the rotational direction of the structure by either pressing the rotate key (default "R") before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key (default "R"). Left click to place the structure.

After you place a structure, you can pick it up and put it back in your inventory by holding the right mouse button over it.

==== Interacting with structures ====

Press the "alt-mode" key (default "ALT") to toggle "detailed view", which shows extra information about structures.

If a structure is interact-able, left click it to open its UI. Most commonly you will use this to pick which recipe a machine should use, or to put inventory items into a container.

When you open a container, you will be able to see your inventory also. Click an item in your inventory, then click an empty slot in the container, to transfer. You can also transfer by simply holding the "stack transfer" button ("SHIFT" default) and clicking it. If you want to pick up only half of a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' of items, right click the stack in your inventory. You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly transfer half of the stack. If you want to transfer ALL items of one type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click the item. If you want to transfer ALL items of ANY type, hold down the "inventory transfer" key ("CTRL" default) and click an empty slot.

==== Combat ====

This game contains enemies, though they probably won't attack you until you are more prepared. If you need to defend yourself, press space to shoot the enemy closest to your mouse cursor. Keep an eye on your ammunition, which can be seen in the lower-right corner of the screen.

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, it's okay if your starting area doesn't have oil, as you won't need it until later in the game. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]].

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

Gathering and crafting manually is a pain, and the purpose of Factorio is to create machines that will do your work for you.

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace. The iron deposit looks like blue-ish gray rocks on the ground.

The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a boiler and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T19:27:26Z

Jasper-bear: /* Resources */ initial quick-start guide is for a quick start. Removed extraneous information.

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

===Key bindings===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use. Press your map button ("M" by default), and hover your mouse over resources to see what they are.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, it's okay if your starting area doesn't have oil, as you won't need it until later in the game. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]].

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace. The iron deposit looks like blue-ish gray rocks on the ground.

Open your inventory ("E" key by default), and click the "Burner mining drill". You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the drill icon. Press the same inventory button again ("E" by default) to close your inventory.

Now you need to place the drill. Move your mouse around the world, and you will see that the drill turns green when it is over your iron deposit. Left click to place it at the edge of the iron deposit.

You can change the direction of the drill by either pressing the rotate key ("R" by default) before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key ("R" by default). The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack in your inventory and then place it in the fuel slot.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a boiler and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T19:25:29Z

Jasper-bear: /* Resources */

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

===Key bindings===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use. Press your map button ("M" by default), and hover your mouse over resources to see what they are.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, being a liquid, it is much easier to transport over distance than the four solid resources. It's okay if your starting area doesn't have immediate access to oil, as you won't need it until later in the game when long distance liquid transfer is possible. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]]. It is used for end-game power and weapons and it can only be mined after oil has been acquired.

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace. The iron deposit looks like blue-ish gray rocks on the ground.

Open your inventory ("E" key by default), and click the "Burner mining drill". You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the drill icon. Press the same inventory button again ("E" by default) to close your inventory.

Now you need to place the drill. Move your mouse around the world, and you will see that the drill turns green when it is over your iron deposit. Left click to place it at the edge of the iron deposit.

You can change the direction of the drill by either pressing the rotate key ("R" by default) before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key ("R" by default). The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack in your inventory and then place it in the fuel slot.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a boiler and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T19:24:06Z

Jasper-bear: /* Placing mines and furnaces */

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

===Key bindings===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, being a liquid, it is much easier to transport over distance than the four solid resources. It's okay if your starting area doesn't have immediate access to oil, as you won't need it until later in the game when long distance liquid transfer is possible. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]]. It is used for end-game power and weapons and it can only be mined after oil has been acquired.

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace. The iron deposit looks like blue-ish gray rocks on the ground.

Open your inventory ("E" key by default), and click the "Burner mining drill". You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the drill icon. Press the same inventory button again ("E" by default) to close your inventory.

Now you need to place the drill. Move your mouse around the world, and you will see that the drill turns green when it is over your iron deposit. Left click to place it at the edge of the iron deposit.

You can change the direction of the drill by either pressing the rotate key ("R" by default) before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key ("R" by default). The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack in your inventory and then place it in the fuel slot.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a boiler and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T19:21:09Z

Jasper-bear: /* Placing mines and furnaces */

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

===Key bindings===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, being a liquid, it is much easier to transport over distance than the four solid resources. It's okay if your starting area doesn't have immediate access to oil, as you won't need it until later in the game when long distance liquid transfer is possible. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]]. It is used for end-game power and weapons and it can only be mined after oil has been acquired.

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace.

Open your inventory ("E" key by default), and click the "Burner mining drill". You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the drill icon. Press the same inventory button again ("E" by default) to close your inventory.

Now you need to place the drill. Move your mouse around the world, and you will see that the drill turns green when it is over your iron deposit. Left click to place it at the edge of the iron deposit.

You can change the direction of the drill by either pressing the rotate key ("R" by default) before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing the rotate key ("R" by default). The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack in your inventory and then place it in the fuel slot.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a boiler and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T19:20:29Z

Jasper-bear: /* Placing mines and furnaces */

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

===Key bindings===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, being a liquid, it is much easier to transport over distance than the four solid resources. It's okay if your starting area doesn't have immediate access to oil, as you won't need it until later in the game when long distance liquid transfer is possible. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]]. It is used for end-game power and weapons and it can only be mined after oil has been acquired.

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace.

Open your inventory ("e" key by default), and click the "Burner mining drill". You should see that your cursor has been replaced by the drill icon. Press the same inventory button again ("e" by default) to close your inventory.

Now you need to place the drill. Move your mouse around the world, and you will see that the drill turns green when it is over your iron deposit. Left click to place it at the edge of the iron deposit.

You can change the direction of the drill by either pressing "R" before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing "R". The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack in your inventory and then place it in the fuel slot.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a boiler and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Tutorial:Quick start guide

2020-04-30T19:15:06Z

Jasper-bear: /* The very first moments */ wood is also a resource

{{Languages}}
== Getting started ==
If you're still lost after playing through the tutorial levels, this guide is here to help.

=== Starting your game ===
To begin from the Main Menu, you need to select "Play", then "New Game". This will lead you to a menu allowing the [[World generator|customization of your world]]. If this is your first time, you won't need to tinker with these. If you haven't yet played the tutorial and campaign levels yet, you should play these first however. From the main menu, select "Play", then "Start Campaign", then "First Steps". The "First Steps" campaign is a basic tutorial, the "New Hope" further teaches the basics of the game.

==== World generator ====

You can change these options to make the map generate in different ways. Changes to world generation can greatly affect the difficulty of the game.

The first tab in the world generation screen allows the player to choose a preset for the world generation. A preset is just a quick way to change the settings in the other two tabs. For new players, the Default preset or the Rich Resources preset are suggested.

If peaceful mode is enabled, enemies will not attack the player unless the player attacks first.

The Resource Settings tab allows changing how frequently and strongly resources and enemies spawn.

[[Resources]] and enemy bases are controlled by 3 values: frequency, size, and richness.
* Frequency determines how often you'll see ore veins or enemy bases within the game world
* Size determines how large these veins or bases are
* Richness determines how many resources ore tiles will produce before running dry, and the density of enemy bases

If you would like an easier time to begin with, consider increasing the frequency, size, and richness of the resources while decreasing the same for enemy bases. Note that it may be recommended to increase the size and frequency of crude oil for beginner-level players, as oil can be very difficult to find depending on the world generation seed compared to that of other resources, combined with the fact that oil is a necessity for making progress as well the fact that pumping oil will gradually decrease it's yield, requiring the need travel further to find even more oil. Also note that the game can be completed with enemies disabled completely (set size to none), however dealing with enemies is usually a major part of the game.

More information about world generation can be found in the [[World generator|World generator article]].

===Key bindings===

Please refer to [[Keyboard bindings]] to learn more about key bindings and how to configure them.

== The very first moments ==

=== Resources ===

Make sure that you have the four solid resources close to your spawn location; [[Coal]], [[Copper ore]], [[Iron ore]], and [[Stone]]. These should be found within a reasonable proximity to each other; the farther apart they are the harder it will be to route them for combined use.

It's also advisable to have a source of [[Water]] in your starting area, as it is required for [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]].

If your spawn area doesn't have one of these resources, or they are too scarce or too far apart, simply hit the Escape key and choose "Restart." This will re-generate the game world and you will spawn in a new starting location. This may need to be done several times until a passable world is created.

Later we will also need [[Crude oil]]. However, being a liquid, it is much easier to transport over distance than the four solid resources. It's okay if your starting area doesn't have immediate access to oil, as you won't need it until later in the game when long distance liquid transfer is possible. The same goes for for [[Uranium ore]]. It is used for end-game power and weapons and it can only be mined after oil has been acquired.

Almost everything in Factorio is made from these seven basic resources, and you will need all of them except for uranium if you intend to finish the game.

=== Placing mines and furnaces ===

You begin your journey with a [[Stone furnace]] and a [[Burner mining drill]]. This means you only have to harvest a limited number of resources by hand.
First of all, you should place your drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards the furnace.

You can change the direction of the Drill by either pressing "R" before you place it, or after placing it by hovering over it with the mouse and pressing "R". The little yellow arrow shows where the mined iron ore will come out. You want the Furnace to be in front of that arrow, so that the drill automatically inserts the ore into the furnace. It should look something like this:
:[[File:SimpleOre.PNG|center|thumb|150px]]

'''Remember you can press "ALT" to activate the detailed view.''' This makes it easier to see what's happening.

=== Feeding with fuel ===
Now that you've placed the drill and furnace, they need '''[[Fuel]]'''.

You can power them with either [[Wood]] or [[Coal]]. To collect them, you'll need to cut trees or mine coal; this can be accomplished by holding right click over trees or coal deposits, respectively.

Once you have some fuel in your inventory, left click on the furnace or drill to open the interface.
:[[File:Interface.PNG|center|thumb|upright=4]]
To place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click again to put it into the fuel slot.

If you want to split a '''[[Stack|stack]]''' in half, right click the stack in your inventory and then place it in the fuel slot.
Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

'''You can also CTRL-Right Click to directly insert half of the stack'''

You can use an identical setup for copper ore to get copper plates.

== Production upgrade! ==

What's better than iron plates? ''More'' iron plates!

You'll need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, you'll see two lists of materials. The first list shows the components needed to make the drill; the second one at the very bottom of the tooltip window shows the raw resources needed to craft it.
Unlike other games, you do not need to create the pre-requisite items before you select the item you want to make. All required items are crafted for you.
You can see this process happening on the bottom left of the screen, where your Crafting Queue is.
You can also queue up more crafting orders, as long as you have the necessary materials on you, and they'll get carried out one after the other.
:[[File:Recipe.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]
Now that you can afford some extra drill and furnaces, you should automate the acquisition of both coal and stone.
These are easy to set up and work essentially the same as the iron setup.
For Coal, you can have two drills facing each other: they'll run on the coal they get fed by their partner and you can collect the surplus.

Don't forget that you can collect resources from machines without opening their inventories, with CTRL-LMB.
You might also want to activate the detailed view, by pressing the ALT key once. You can deactivate it by pressing ALT again.

[[File:SimpleCoal.PNG|center|thumb]]

And for stone you can have the drill output directly into a chest.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe lay more drills on the coal to cover for the extra coal production.
In the early game, the most used resource is iron, so you'll probably need twice as many miners on iron than copper, if not more. But expect copper to become more and more important the more you mess with electricity and electronics!

=== More automation ===

Great! So now you have four or so furnaces making iron, a couple making copper, some stone production and a good amount of coal production.
But you know what really sucks? Having to run the coal around to all your other machines, right? Well let's automate that too!
Conveyor belts and inserters are the way of the future! The output slots on the drill can also output onto conveyor belts to be transported to your other machines.

[[File:CoalConveyor.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Now that we can take our coal to other places with no effort, we just need a way to input the coal into those machines.
This is where [[Inserters]] step in. In the first few stages of the game, you can use [[Burner inserter|Burner Inserters]] as a cheap way to move items from anything to anything. You can move objects from the ground, chests, machines and put them wherever you want.
Burner Inserters themselves require coal to run though, which makes this a little counter intuitive to have to fuel them instead of the machines you are trying to fuel anyway.
Here is a small example of inserters working. Notice that the flat line is where the inserters will pick up from, and the arrow is where they will place the item. To see this in your game you need to go into the game's menu, then press Options, Graphics and turn on the option "Show inserter arrows when detailed info is on."

[[File:SimpleOreProcessing.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

Okay, so now we know how to automatically mine things and then how to automatically move things from one place to another, and then to place said items into machine or out of machines.

Next up we want to get some [[Electric system|electricity]] so that we can have inserters that run off that instead of fuel.

== Electrical power ==

Electricity. This is where things start to get interesting. We're going to need a single [[Offshore pump|Offshore Pump]], a boiler and two [[Steam engine|Steam Engines]]. These are really simple to set up, they just require thirty-some iron plates per steam engine and 5 stone. The offshore pump goes in the water and needs no power to run. From there, you can either use pipes to transport the water to boilers, or you can run boilers straight from the pump. Water is fed into the boiler through the connection on the short side, as shown in the picture. If the boiler is fuelled, it will output steam in the middle of one of the long sides. The steam output of the boiler then connects to the middle of the short side of the steam engine. Make sure you connect it in the right place or it won't work. You can see where you can connect boilers and steam engines if you turn on the detailed view (press the Alt key). Boilers allow water to flow through, you can place multiple boilers next to each other and all will get water. Similarly, steam engines allow steam to run through, so you can have as many engine as you want connected in a row. Here is a small example.

[[File:SimpleGeneratorSetup.png|center|600px|thumb]]

Now you need to use power poles to carry power to your machines. Place some down so that their coverage area (the blue square) overlaps each steam engine in at least one square. If they are going to connect, the machines that use power will be shown with a blue outline around their edges.

If the steam engine is producing power but nothing is using it, it'll show a yellow flashing icon: right now it's showing because we don't have electric machines yet!

[[File:LonelyTurbine.PNG|center|upright=1|thumb]]

Your power setup can look however you want it to look. A boiler produces exactly as much steam as two steam engines can consume in the same time, so the usual method is to have a line of boilers each connected to two steam engines. The boilers are supplied with coal via inserters that take coal from a transport belt. A pump produces enough water for 20 boilers, so the most often used setup contains 1 offshore pump, 20 boilers and 40 steam engines. The example above is easily expanded into this efficient design. But hey, this game is all about experimentation and for you to be able to find ways to do your own things! So get to it, and show off your own unique designs!

[[File:steamSetupExample.png|center|upright=4|thumb|Here's my personal favorite setup. ]]

Using this power is as simple as creating a machine that runs on electricity and placing a power pole close enough to it that the blue square touches the machine, just like you have to do at the power plant with the engines. Make sure that there is a line of power poles that actually connect to your power plant.

Now that power is explained, we need to increase our resource production.

However, if you want detailed info on your power production/consumption, you can check the [[Power production#What_can_be_seen_from_the_electric_network_info.3F|Detailed Electric Network Info]], opened by clicking on any powerpole.

== Re-thinking our resources and research ==

Next we really want to get onto automation of items, not just the smelting of ores.

Before we can get to that though, we're going to have increase our production of ores. This is where things start becoming a little tricky and there are few things you want to do at once.
We really want to be able to set the factory to make things and let it go. But for that we need some extra utilities which we don't have and need to get through [[research]].

We haven't even touched on that yet! Let's start by cranking up our resource production. Now that we have electricity, we can use [[Mining|Electric Mining Drills]]. These are much better than those scummy Burner ones. They work exactly the same except they are twice as fast and they don't rely on fuel, as you could guess by the names. You can have them to output your raw resources onto belts and get them to a place where you can mass process the ores into plates. Here is a small example of what you could do, but let your imagination and your calculating logic figure out other, maybe even better ways of doing it! You want ore to be split more or less evenly on each side of the belts. This helps with the amount of resources that can be carried to your base of operations on a single belt.

[[File:BasicElectricMiners.PNG|center|upright=1.5|thumb]]

This is once again easily expandable all over an iron deposit. This conveyor belt can then take all of the ore to some sort of processing area. The processing area needs some machines that we currently don't have due to limitations in our research.

Most importantly, we want the [[long handed inserter]]. This inserter is able to reach twice as far as a normal inserter! It is very useful for bringing or placing items to or from conveyor belts that are one extra tile away. So what we need to do is to make some science labs. They don't cost too many resources, but take a little while to make. Craft one or two of them and connect them to power. When you first place one, you are going to get a popup asking you want you want to research. We really want automation right now. This gives us our inserters and the Assembling machine 1, which is going to be very useful in the near future.

You'll notice that the cost for this is 10 Science Pack 1's, or "red potions" or "flasks" as some people like to call them. These are simply another crafted item, which you should craft 10 of now and place them in your labs to begin researching. While you are waiting for your flasks to craft or your research to complete, let's continue building an ore processing center. We want a line of copper, iron and coal to be available for this area. Despite being in the electric era, our furnaces still need coal until a little further down the line.

Below is another sample of how you ''could'' set up your area. There are efficient ways of making them that you might see on the forum, but if you want to learn about what they are and how they work, you can either experiment yourself or search the wiki/forum for some better designs.

[[File:OreProcessingArea.PNG|center|upright=2|thumb]]

As per usual, I leave this area with plenty of room to expand later on when demands become higher. The important parts about this is that you need the red, long handed inserters to be able to reach the coal in the middle to fuel your furnaces. You need seperate belts for your incoming raw materials to be able to be processed, and then another belt outside of them to handle the output after they have been smelted. These materials can then go straight into your base to be made into a myriad of other things. Finally, we have a steady and upgradeable supply of copper and iron plates, and we can get into further automation with the assembling machines so we can automate creation of things like Science Packs, Ammunition and every other item that the player themselves can craft, but without you involved at all!

== Automating that research ==

Ok, so a fair amount has happened. Now, to be able to progress into later parts of the game with better research we are going to want automate the process of making science packs and putting them into the labs. This way we won't have to worry about research any longer.

There are many designs that you can find on the forums, but I'll show you something simple, letting you find what works for you. I would highly recommend that you research Logistics as your next research, and in fact manually craft the science required for this. The logistic research gives you some important things: the [[splitters|splitter]], the [[underground belts|underground belt]] and the [[fast inserter]]. The splitter and underground belts are some of the most important items you'll get at this stage. They do pretty much what their names imply.

So what do science packs require? We need copper plates and iron gears. So far we have only dealt with raw resources, how do we make craftable things? The Assembler answers your prayers! If you place an assembler down and open its interface, it asks you what you would like it to craft. Once you select one, if you put the ingredients in that it requires it will craft the item and you can pull out the finished product. In the case of red science packs, we will need an assembler making iron gears, and an assembler making the actual packs. A nice way of doing this is to have a conveyor belt with 1 side containing the copper plates and the other side taking the gears from another assembler like below.

[[File:RedScienceProduction.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

Now this picture uses a few neat little tricks that I will explain in detail. If you have your plate belts seperate, and you want them running side by side there can be issues with trying to grab one or the other resources from the far belt. Yes, you could use a long inserter, but in some cases you don't want this (e.g. you need a fast inserter to get resources quickly into your assemblers).

The area in red is a good way to get around this. By having a splitter, you can move the far belt from your production in close while also allowing it to continue down the line for later use. For the copper, we use an underground belt to go underneath the area that is now taken by the far line which also allows the copper to continue on. Once again, this is only one possible method of doing things and you are in no way obligated to follow it.

The area in blue is a quick way to allow copper to continue down the main line, while also splitting some off for our red science assemblers. Notice how when it joins the line that the gears are on, they only join the bottom side of the belt. The little extra belt that I added to the left stops the belt from becoming a turn, and therefore makes the items only join the side I want them to. The rest is simple: the gears and copper get pulled into the assemblers, they make the science and then it gets pulled out again on the other side. These flasks can then be transported to some labs to automatically do your research for you, for example like this:

[[File:SmallScience.PNG|center|thumb|upright=3]]

== See also ==

* [http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7765 Newbie Tips?]

Nuclear fuel reprocessing (research)

2020-04-30T19:09:51Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}{{:Infobox:Nuclear fuel reprocessing (research)}}

Unlocks the ability for [[centrifuge]]s to use [[Nuclear fuel reprocessing]] to recycle used up [[uranium fuel cell]]s into [[uranium-238]].

== See also ==
* [[Research]]
* [[Technologies]]

{{TechNav}}

Kovarex enrichment process (research)

2020-04-30T19:09:18Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}{{:Infobox:Kovarex enrichment process (research)}}

Unlocks the ability for [[centrifuge]]s to use the [[Kovarex enrichment process]] to change common [[uranium-238]] into rare [[uranium-235]].

== History ==
{{history|0.15.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Research]]
* [[Technologies]]

{{TechNav}}

Nuclear fuel reprocessing (research)

2020-04-30T19:06:46Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}{{:Infobox:Nuclear fuel reprocessing (research)}}

Unlocks the ability for [[centrifuge]]s to recycle used up [[uranium fuel cell]]s into [[uranium-238]].

== See also ==
* [[Research]]
* [[Technologies]]

{{TechNav}}

Storage chest

2020-04-29T23:08:25Z

Jasper-bear: minor tweak (word order). player don't unlock active provider chests until after getting storage chests, so moving items from the player will be more familiar

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Storage chest}}

The '''storage chest''' is a large advanced storage item that is part of the [[logistic network]]. [[Logistic robot]]s store any items taken out of the [[Player|player's]] logistic trash slots here, as well as items picked up from [[active provider chest]]s. [[Construction robot]]s will use items stored to repair your factory and construct from blueprints. Storage chests can be filtered to only accept one type of item from the logistic network.

=== Notes ===
* Logistic robots will pick up items in the following priority: [[active provider chest]]s > storage chests > [[buffer chest]]s > [[passive provider chest]]s
* Logistic robots will begin to fill storage chests from active provider chests if there are no other tasks available.
* The filter that can be set on the storage chest is respected even if items that are actively being pushed to the network can not be stored anywhere else.
* If a logistic robot carrying an item is unable to deliver its cargo (e.g. if the player moves out of range), it will drop its cargo in a storage chest before moving to other tasks.

[[File:storage_logistic_robots_anim.gif|frame|none|Logistic robots placing items in storage chests.]]

== Gallery ==
[[File:Storage chest gui.png|thumb|none|400px|Storage chest GUI.]]

== History ==
{{history|0.17.0|
* New, animated graphics.}}

{{history|0.16.8|
* Storage chests can be filtered.}}

{{history|0.15.28|
* Warning icon for logistic chests that are not in a reach of roboport.}}

{{history|0.13.0|
* All types of chests can be connected to the circuit network.}}

{{history|0.10.1|
* Changed the priority of resupplying source of logistic robots. Provider has biggest priority, then storage, and the last one is passive provider.}}

{{history|0.8.1|
* Keep the inventory limit of chests when fast rebuilding.}}

{{history|0.8.0|
* Chests inventory size can be limited.}}

{{history|0.7.0|
* Logistic robots try to not mix different items in storage chests if possible.}}

{{history|0.2.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Circuit network]]
* [[Logistic network]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Logistic network}}

Passive provider chest

2020-04-29T23:06:42Z

Jasper-bear: minor tweak (word order). player don't unlock requester chests until after getting passive provider chests, so moving items to the player will be more familiar.

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Passive provider chest}}

The '''passive provider chest''' is a large advanced storage item that is part of the [[logistic network]]. [[Logistic robot]]s will pick up items from this box to move them to the [[player]] or [[requester chest]]s '''only'''. This makes them useful for storing items in a specific location, rather than a centrally located [[storage chest]]. If you want the contained items to later be consolidated in storage chests, then use the [[active provider chest]] instead.

[[Construction robot]]s will pick up items for construction, replacement of destroyed entities and repair packs from passive provider chests.

Passive provider chests have the lowest priority as pick-up points for logistic robots. Logistic robots will not empty passive provider chests if the requested items are available in active provider chests and/or storage chests.

== History ==
{{history|0.17.0|
* New, animated graphics.}}

{{history|0.15.28|
* Warning icon for logistic chests that are not in a reach of roboport.}}

{{history|0.13.0|
* All types of chests can be connected to the circuit network.}}

{{history|0.10.1|
* Changed the priority of resupplying source of logistic robots. Provider has biggest priority, then storage, and the last one is passive provider.}}

{{history|0.9.4|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Circuit network]]
* [[Logistic network]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Logistic network}}

Storage chest

2020-04-29T22:32:09Z

Jasper-bear: added wikilink

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Storage chest}}

The '''storage chest''' is a large advanced storage item that is part of the [[logistic network]]. [[Logistic robot]]s store items picked up from [[active provider chest]]s here, as well as any items taken out of the [[Player|player's]] logistic trash slots. [[Construction robot]]s will use items stored to repair your factory and construct from blueprints. Storage chests can be filtered to only accept one type of item from the logistic network.

=== Notes ===
* Logistic robots will pick up items in the following priority: [[active provider chest]]s > storage chests > [[buffer chest]]s > [[passive provider chest]]s
* Logistic robots will begin to fill storage chests from active provider chests if there are no other tasks available.
* The filter that can be set on the storage chest is respected even if items that are actively being pushed to the network can not be stored anywhere else.
* If a logistic robot carrying an item is unable to deliver its cargo (e.g. if the player moves out of range), it will drop its cargo in a storage chest before moving to other tasks.

[[File:storage_logistic_robots_anim.gif|frame|none|Logistic robots placing items in storage chests.]]

== Gallery ==
[[File:Storage chest gui.png|thumb|none|400px|Storage chest GUI.]]

== History ==
{{history|0.17.0|
* New, animated graphics.}}

{{history|0.16.8|
* Storage chests can be filtered.}}

{{history|0.15.28|
* Warning icon for logistic chests that are not in a reach of roboport.}}

{{history|0.13.0|
* All types of chests can be connected to the circuit network.}}

{{history|0.10.1|
* Changed the priority of resupplying source of logistic robots. Provider has biggest priority, then storage, and the last one is passive provider.}}

{{history|0.8.1|
* Keep the inventory limit of chests when fast rebuilding.}}

{{history|0.8.0|
* Chests inventory size can be limited.}}

{{history|0.7.0|
* Logistic robots try to not mix different items in storage chests if possible.}}

{{history|0.2.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Circuit network]]
* [[Logistic network]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Logistic network}}

Storage chest

2020-04-29T22:28:52Z

Jasper-bear:

{{Languages}}
{{:Infobox:Storage chest}}

The '''storage chest''' is a large advanced storage item that is part of the [[logistic network]]. [[Logistic robot]]s store items picked up from [[active provider chest]]s here, as well as any items taken out of the [[Player|player's]] logistic trash slots. Construction robots will use items stored to repair your factory and construct from blueprints. Storage chests can be filtered to only accept one type of item from the logistic network.

=== Notes ===
* Logistic robots will pick up items in the following priority: [[active provider chest]]s > storage chests > [[buffer chest]]s > [[passive provider chest]]s
* Logistic robots will begin to fill storage chests from active provider chests if there are no other tasks available.
* The filter that can be set on the storage chest is respected even if items that are actively being pushed to the network can not be stored anywhere else.
* If a logistic robot carrying an item is unable to deliver its cargo (e.g. if the player moves out of range), it will drop its cargo in a storage chest before moving to other tasks.

[[File:storage_logistic_robots_anim.gif|frame|none|Logistic robots placing items in storage chests.]]

== Gallery ==
[[File:Storage chest gui.png|thumb|none|400px|Storage chest GUI.]]

== History ==
{{history|0.17.0|
* New, animated graphics.}}

{{history|0.16.8|
* Storage chests can be filtered.}}

{{history|0.15.28|
* Warning icon for logistic chests that are not in a reach of roboport.}}

{{history|0.13.0|
* All types of chests can be connected to the circuit network.}}

{{history|0.10.1|
* Changed the priority of resupplying source of logistic robots. Provider has biggest priority, then storage, and the last one is passive provider.}}

{{history|0.8.1|
* Keep the inventory limit of chests when fast rebuilding.}}

{{history|0.8.0|
* Chests inventory size can be limited.}}

{{history|0.7.0|
* Logistic robots try to not mix different items in storage chests if possible.}}

{{history|0.2.0|
* Introduced}}

== See also ==
* [[Circuit network]]
* [[Logistic network]]

{{LogisticsNav}}
{{C|Logistic network}}

Railway

2020-04-29T20:26:34Z

Jasper-bear: /* No path */ Added clarification to train stop troubleshooting.

{{Languages}}
:''For the research see [[Railway (research)]]''

'''The Railway''' is one of the main transport methods in Factorio. Although the installation of such a network can be complicated, and requires a large amount of resource and space, it is faster and more efficient than [[Belt transport system|belts]] and [[Logistic network|robot logistics]], especially over large distances.

Railway construction, however, is not understood instantly. It takes some time to learn the basics, such as automating transportation. Learning how to manage and maintain upkeep of a larger train network takes time and experience.

== Infrastructure ==

To build a railway, tracks (also called rails) must be built for the train to ride on. Typically, this is done via the [[rail planner]], but can also be done manually. Bear in mind that rails are placed on a two-tile grid, so a rail cannot be moved by only one tile.

=== Minimum manually operated railway ===
As a minimum a manually operated railway has to consist of:
* [[Rail]]s (tracks)
* [[Locomotive]]s

Locomotives can be entered and then manually operated by standing next to them and pressing the {{Key|ENTER}} button.

=== Switches ===
* There is no visual representation of a working switch, however the rails will appear to merge. Using the rail planner, the player must place a [[rail]] overlapping an existing rail to form a switch. Switches are forks in tracks that allow a train to pick between two directional options.
* The crossing of two straight tracks is not usable as switch, as trains have a limited turning radius. They do, however, connect [[Rail signal| signal blocks]] which helps prevent collisions.
* Parallel tracks do not interact with each other. However, switching from one track to the other can require extra resources if they are too close together; the track must turn away from the other parallel track and then turn back to it. This can create complicated networks of signals and, as such, one should generally not build parallel tracks unless they are spaced adequately. (Generally, 2 track widths apart works well)

[[File:fff-140-controlled-gates.gif|thumb|An example of a safe railway crossing.]]
=== Crossing tracks ===

'''Be careful when crossing tracks! Trains are one of the highest damaging entities in the game, and will kill most players instantly on contact.'''

A checklist of proper track crossing etiquette:

# Zoom out, so that you can see a train coming.
# Look left, then right.
# Check for signals nearby: If a [[rail signal]] suddenly jumps from green to red or green to yellow, a train is coming. Do not cross.
# Avoid walking near the tracks, as you do not need to be fully on the tracks to get hit.
# While it is possible to get into/out of a train while it is moving, a miss can cost your life. The sides of the train can still deal damage, as well as the player being able to slip between two rail cars.
# Heavy [[Energy shield|shields]] can be used to reduce the damage taken. In extreme cases, it is possible to stop a train with your body. This will require several shield modules to not be instantly killed, and will drain a large amount of the suit's energy.
# All entities with health will take damage getting hit by a train, so take care not to leave a [[car]] or [[tank]] on the tracks. However, this includes hostile forces!
# Trains far from a [[train stop]] will be traveling at (near) max speed, so take extra precaution when crossing and zoom out further. Trains near a [[train stop]] or signal will slow down to stop, and will be traveling slower. Trains of different configurations will also move slower or faster.

A safe railroad crossing like the example shown in the picture can be built. This works by restricting access to the tracks when an oncoming train has the rails reserved. When the player is on the rails, the signals are reserved by the [[circuit network]], and the train must stop and wait until the player leaves the tracks. When a player is inside the area crossing the tracks, the train gates are closed so the player can't get on the tracks outside the crossing. This is to completely ensure a safe crossing, and is often used on servers.

{{clear}}

== Trains ==
Train components:

{| class="wikitable"
|{{Imagelink|Locomotive}} || {{Imagelink|Cargo wagon}} || {{Imagelink|Fluid wagon}} || {{Imagelink|Artillery wagon}}
|}

[[File:Railway-assemble-train.png|thumb|left|300px|Placing a [[Cargo wagon]] so it is attached to the train.]]

* A train consists of at least one locomotive.
* Trains can have more than one locomotive, and any number of [[wagon]]s.
* Locomotives can be '''manually''' driven forwards or backwards, however, they are generally slower going backwards. The left and right movement keys are used to change direction at switches.
* Trains can only drive forwards automatically. An automatic train can drive forwards and backwards when two locomotives facing different directions are connected to the train.
* A train needs [[fuel]] to drive. Fuel can be added by inserters when the train is in manual mode or parked at a station, not when waiting at a signal or standing on automatic mode.

The locomotives' inventory is only used for [[fuel]]. To transport items or fluids [[cargo wagon]]s and/or [[fluid wagon]]s have to be attached to the train. To attach rolling stock, whether a wagon or a locomotive, the player may either prepare to place one near an existing train, where a green graphic will show the player that the stock will be attached, showing a connection between the train and the new stock. Alternatively, the player may manually connect rolling stock to trains with the rolling stock connect key, if the cargo wagon was placed far away from a train. Rolling stock can likewise be disconnected with the rolling stock disconnect key.

{{clear}}

== Stations ==
[[File:station-example-1.png|thumb|right|256px|A very minimal train station.]]

Train stations are the only place where trains can be loaded or unloaded when they are in automatic mode. Cargo wagons can be filled or emptied by up to twelve adjacent [[inserters]] (six on each side). Inserters can also be used to insert fuel into locomotives. [[Pump]]s are used to transfer fluid into and out of fluid wagons, only three pumps can attach to one fluid wagon at once.

Train stations are usually created by placing a [[train stop]]. Train stops must be on the right hand side of the track. However it is also possible to create a temporary train station by opening a locomotive's GUI and using {{Keybinding|ctrl|lmb}} near a rail on the map. This will create a station without requiring a train stop. The temporary train station has a default wait condition of 5 seconds and is removed from the schedule once the train leaves the station.

{{clear}}

== Signals ==
{| class="wikitable"
| {{Imagelink|Rail signal}} || {{Imagelink|Rail chain signal}}
|}

Rail signals are used to employ multiple trains automatically without the danger of trains crashing into each other. Rail signals split the network into blocks and ensure that only one train can be in every block at any time. Note that driving a train manually ignores all signals; so it is possible for automatic trains to crash into the player if the player ignores red/yellow signals. Always beware of automatic trains and give them the right of way.

The [[Tutorial:Train signals|train signals tutorial]] contains an in-depth explanation of rail signals, blocks and deadlocks.

=== Basic signaling rules ===
* There can only be one train in a block at any time. A train spanning multiple blocks occupies them all.
* A red signal means that the following block is occupied by a train.
* A yellow signal means that a train is approaching and already has the approval to enter the following block.
* [[Rail signal]]s separate a new block and reflect its state: green - free, yellow - reserved, red - occupied
* [[Rail chain signal]]s separate a new block and reflect the state of the next signal(s): see above, blue - at least one of the paths is blocked, but not all
* A train can only pass a signal on the right of the track, or if there is a signal on both sides on the same rail segment. Of course, manual driving overrides this.

== Automated transport ==
[[File:locomotive_gui.png|thumb|300px|The wait condition tab in the locomotive's GUI.]]

Trains set on "Automatic" choose their destination stop and route on departure, and after waiting at a chain signal for five seconds, and when their destination stop disables itself by circuit condition. They choose the shortest route using a [[Railway/Train_path_finding|path finding algorithm]] that will get them to an enabled train stop with the right name, taking penalties for any apparent-at-the-time delays into account. If no such train stop exists they will skip the stop and go on to the next.

This section covers items used to make trains automatically transport items between stations. The player should be familiar with creating a rail system.

First, the player has to setup a rail system with at least two train stops, which are placed in the right-hand side of the expected train arrival direction. By hovering over the train stop with the mouse you see the positions of the vehicles for better setting up the train station (including (un)loading machinery, refueling/repair installations).

When you set up the train schedule (see below) and fuel the train, you can start the train on it's schedule by switching from manual to automatic driving mode.

=== Train schedule ===
The player can set up a list of train stations in the left locomotive's GUI. The train will route to stops in the given order, if it's at the end it will continue with the first. Stations can be added by clicking "Add station" in the GUI. A pop-up appears with a list of all stop names. If one is selected, another button appears which allows select a wait condition from a pop-up list. Furthermore, the map in the right part of the GUI can be used to add stations to the schedule by using {{keybinding|shift|lmb}} on a station or using {{keybinding|ctrl|lmb}} near a rail in the map to create a temporary train station.

Wait conditions are used to tell the train when to leave the station. There are 7 types of wait conditions:
* '''Time passed'''
* '''Inventory full''' – All inventories of the train are full. Does not include fuel inventories.
* '''Inventory empty''' – Same as above, but empty. Does not include fuel inventories.
* '''Item count''' – The train (all cargoes summed) contains a specific amount of a certain item. Does not include fuel inventories.
* '''Circuit condition''' – The train stop is connectable to the [[circuit network]], so the signals can used for wait conditions.
* '''Inactivity''' – No items were added or removed for the specified amount of seconds.
* '''Fluid count''' – The train (all fluid wagons summed) contains a specific amount of a certain fluid.
* '''Passenger present''' - At least one [[player]] is inside any part of the train.
* '''Passenger not present''' - No players are inside any part of the train.

It is also possible to set no wait condition, this causes the train to simply pass by the station without stopping.

Hereafter the word "term" is used to describe ''one'' type of wait condition, and the words "wait condition" are used to describe the whole set of terms (it turns a bit into maths).

If more than one term is added, it is possible to change the connection of those using the logical operators AND and OR. An AND condition will result in true if all terms are true. An OR condition will return true if at least one of the terms is true.

When mixing AND and OR terms, the logic is grouped by the OR terms. When evaluating the wait condition, the first term is evaluated along with all AND terms immediately following up to but excluding the next occurring OR term. If they all evaluate true, the wait condition evaluates true. Otherwise, evaluation continues with that next occurring OR term and all AND terms immediately following it, up to the next OR term. This continues until either an OR group evaluates true and the wait condition is satisfied, or all terms have been checked.

==== Examples ====
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:800px">
Expand for examples
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
Wait until full, up to 30 seconds:

<pre>
Full cargo inventory
OR 30 seconds passed
</pre>

Wait until cargo full, ''or'' circuit condition Oil > 3000:

<pre>
Full cargo inventory
OR Circuit condition - Oil > 3000
</pre>

Wait until empty, ''and'' 30 seconds passed, ''and'' 5 seconds of inactivity:

<pre>
Empty cargo inventory
AND 30 seconds passed
AND 5 seconds of inactivity
</pre>

Wait until iron ore is low, ''or'' copper ore is low ''and'' at least 30 seconds passed:

<pre>
Cargo: Iron ore < 500
AND 30 seconds passed
OR Cargo: Copper ore < 500
AND 30 seconds passed
</pre>

Factorio's wait condition logic is read as disjunctive normal form ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjunctive_normal_form DNF]), and so this last example is processed as (note the parenthesis):

<pre>((Cargo: Iron ore < 500 AND 30 seconds passed) OR (Cargo: Copper ore < 500 AND 30 seconds passed))</pre>

Which is the same as this:

<pre>((Cargo: Iron ore < 500 OR Cargo: Copper ore < 500) AND 30 seconds passed)</pre>

Unfortunately, there is no way to write that shorter form in the current UI.
</div></div>

=== Troubleshooting ===

Below are some things to verify if a rail system or train is not working.

* Is the train fueled? Ensure that the locomotive has [[fuel]] of some kind.
* Misplaced or non-functional switches? Ensure that the train can plan a path through the switches.
* Another train on the same [[Railway#Block|block]]? Make sure the path of the train is unobstructed.
* Train stops placed correctly? Make sure that the yellow arrows when hovering on the stop point towards the end or exit of the stop.
* Is the train allowed to enter signals from the right direction? Are the signals set correctly?
* If a track is supposed to be two-way, the rail signals should be opposite each other. You can verify they match up by hovering the cursor over one. For a matched pair, it will show the other.

==== No path ====
When trains cannot reach the target, a "no path" symbol pops up over the locomotive. Check:
* Can the train reach its current destination by '''only driving forward'''? Build turning slopes or place a locomotive at both ends of a train!
* Are the train stops standing in the right direction? Train stops must be on the right hand side of the track (from the forward-facing locomotive's perspective). If the train is traveling south, the stop must be on the west side of the track.
* If you use rail signals, check that the signals are all allowing traffic in the correct direction.
* Check for interruptions in the train tracks, drive to the station manually to check there are no rail parts missing. Especially near junctions these can be hard to spot if missing.

If you are still having problems, consider:
* Driving the train manually, and as you pass each switch, try switching to automatic. When it works, you will know the rough area of the problem.
[http://imgur.com/a/Nq2Yk A pictorial summary of typical problems].

== Achievements ==
{{Achievement|trans-factorio-express}}

== Connection to [https://www.openttd.org/ OpenTTD] ==
Factorio's railway system offers the same type of advanced railway design as [https://wiki.openttd.org/Signals#Pre-signals≈ block entry pre-signals and block exit pre-signals do in Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe].

== See also ==
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]
* [[Railway/Train_path_finding]]
* [[Locomotive]]
* [[Cargo wagon]]

Railway

2020-04-29T20:24:27Z

Jasper-bear: /* Stations */ clarification of train stop rules

{{Languages}}
:''For the research see [[Railway (research)]]''

'''The Railway''' is one of the main transport methods in Factorio. Although the installation of such a network can be complicated, and requires a large amount of resource and space, it is faster and more efficient than [[Belt transport system|belts]] and [[Logistic network|robot logistics]], especially over large distances.

Railway construction, however, is not understood instantly. It takes some time to learn the basics, such as automating transportation. Learning how to manage and maintain upkeep of a larger train network takes time and experience.

== Infrastructure ==

To build a railway, tracks (also called rails) must be built for the train to ride on. Typically, this is done via the [[rail planner]], but can also be done manually. Bear in mind that rails are placed on a two-tile grid, so a rail cannot be moved by only one tile.

=== Minimum manually operated railway ===
As a minimum a manually operated railway has to consist of:
* [[Rail]]s (tracks)
* [[Locomotive]]s

Locomotives can be entered and then manually operated by standing next to them and pressing the {{Key|ENTER}} button.

=== Switches ===
* There is no visual representation of a working switch, however the rails will appear to merge. Using the rail planner, the player must place a [[rail]] overlapping an existing rail to form a switch. Switches are forks in tracks that allow a train to pick between two directional options.
* The crossing of two straight tracks is not usable as switch, as trains have a limited turning radius. They do, however, connect [[Rail signal| signal blocks]] which helps prevent collisions.
* Parallel tracks do not interact with each other. However, switching from one track to the other can require extra resources if they are too close together; the track must turn away from the other parallel track and then turn back to it. This can create complicated networks of signals and, as such, one should generally not build parallel tracks unless they are spaced adequately. (Generally, 2 track widths apart works well)

[[File:fff-140-controlled-gates.gif|thumb|An example of a safe railway crossing.]]
=== Crossing tracks ===

'''Be careful when crossing tracks! Trains are one of the highest damaging entities in the game, and will kill most players instantly on contact.'''

A checklist of proper track crossing etiquette:

# Zoom out, so that you can see a train coming.
# Look left, then right.
# Check for signals nearby: If a [[rail signal]] suddenly jumps from green to red or green to yellow, a train is coming. Do not cross.
# Avoid walking near the tracks, as you do not need to be fully on the tracks to get hit.
# While it is possible to get into/out of a train while it is moving, a miss can cost your life. The sides of the train can still deal damage, as well as the player being able to slip between two rail cars.
# Heavy [[Energy shield|shields]] can be used to reduce the damage taken. In extreme cases, it is possible to stop a train with your body. This will require several shield modules to not be instantly killed, and will drain a large amount of the suit's energy.
# All entities with health will take damage getting hit by a train, so take care not to leave a [[car]] or [[tank]] on the tracks. However, this includes hostile forces!
# Trains far from a [[train stop]] will be traveling at (near) max speed, so take extra precaution when crossing and zoom out further. Trains near a [[train stop]] or signal will slow down to stop, and will be traveling slower. Trains of different configurations will also move slower or faster.

A safe railroad crossing like the example shown in the picture can be built. This works by restricting access to the tracks when an oncoming train has the rails reserved. When the player is on the rails, the signals are reserved by the [[circuit network]], and the train must stop and wait until the player leaves the tracks. When a player is inside the area crossing the tracks, the train gates are closed so the player can't get on the tracks outside the crossing. This is to completely ensure a safe crossing, and is often used on servers.

{{clear}}

== Trains ==
Train components:

{| class="wikitable"
|{{Imagelink|Locomotive}} || {{Imagelink|Cargo wagon}} || {{Imagelink|Fluid wagon}} || {{Imagelink|Artillery wagon}}
|}

[[File:Railway-assemble-train.png|thumb|left|300px|Placing a [[Cargo wagon]] so it is attached to the train.]]

* A train consists of at least one locomotive.
* Trains can have more than one locomotive, and any number of [[wagon]]s.
* Locomotives can be '''manually''' driven forwards or backwards, however, they are generally slower going backwards. The left and right movement keys are used to change direction at switches.
* Trains can only drive forwards automatically. An automatic train can drive forwards and backwards when two locomotives facing different directions are connected to the train.
* A train needs [[fuel]] to drive. Fuel can be added by inserters when the train is in manual mode or parked at a station, not when waiting at a signal or standing on automatic mode.

The locomotives' inventory is only used for [[fuel]]. To transport items or fluids [[cargo wagon]]s and/or [[fluid wagon]]s have to be attached to the train. To attach rolling stock, whether a wagon or a locomotive, the player may either prepare to place one near an existing train, where a green graphic will show the player that the stock will be attached, showing a connection between the train and the new stock. Alternatively, the player may manually connect rolling stock to trains with the rolling stock connect key, if the cargo wagon was placed far away from a train. Rolling stock can likewise be disconnected with the rolling stock disconnect key.

{{clear}}

== Stations ==
[[File:station-example-1.png|thumb|right|256px|A very minimal train station.]]

Train stations are the only place where trains can be loaded or unloaded when they are in automatic mode. Cargo wagons can be filled or emptied by up to twelve adjacent [[inserters]] (six on each side). Inserters can also be used to insert fuel into locomotives. [[Pump]]s are used to transfer fluid into and out of fluid wagons, only three pumps can attach to one fluid wagon at once.

Train stations are usually created by placing a [[train stop]]. Train stops must be on the right hand side of the track. However it is also possible to create a temporary train station by opening a locomotive's GUI and using {{Keybinding|ctrl|lmb}} near a rail on the map. This will create a station without requiring a train stop. The temporary train station has a default wait condition of 5 seconds and is removed from the schedule once the train leaves the station.

{{clear}}

== Signals ==
{| class="wikitable"
| {{Imagelink|Rail signal}} || {{Imagelink|Rail chain signal}}
|}

Rail signals are used to employ multiple trains automatically without the danger of trains crashing into each other. Rail signals split the network into blocks and ensure that only one train can be in every block at any time. Note that driving a train manually ignores all signals; so it is possible for automatic trains to crash into the player if the player ignores red/yellow signals. Always beware of automatic trains and give them the right of way.

The [[Tutorial:Train signals|train signals tutorial]] contains an in-depth explanation of rail signals, blocks and deadlocks.

=== Basic signaling rules ===
* There can only be one train in a block at any time. A train spanning multiple blocks occupies them all.
* A red signal means that the following block is occupied by a train.
* A yellow signal means that a train is approaching and already has the approval to enter the following block.
* [[Rail signal]]s separate a new block and reflect its state: green - free, yellow - reserved, red - occupied
* [[Rail chain signal]]s separate a new block and reflect the state of the next signal(s): see above, blue - at least one of the paths is blocked, but not all
* A train can only pass a signal on the right of the track, or if there is a signal on both sides on the same rail segment. Of course, manual driving overrides this.

== Automated transport ==
[[File:locomotive_gui.png|thumb|300px|The wait condition tab in the locomotive's GUI.]]

Trains set on "Automatic" choose their destination stop and route on departure, and after waiting at a chain signal for five seconds, and when their destination stop disables itself by circuit condition. They choose the shortest route using a [[Railway/Train_path_finding|path finding algorithm]] that will get them to an enabled train stop with the right name, taking penalties for any apparent-at-the-time delays into account. If no such train stop exists they will skip the stop and go on to the next.

This section covers items used to make trains automatically transport items between stations. The player should be familiar with creating a rail system.

First, the player has to setup a rail system with at least two train stops, which are placed in the right-hand side of the expected train arrival direction. By hovering over the train stop with the mouse you see the positions of the vehicles for better setting up the train station (including (un)loading machinery, refueling/repair installations).

When you set up the train schedule (see below) and fuel the train, you can start the train on it's schedule by switching from manual to automatic driving mode.

=== Train schedule ===
The player can set up a list of train stations in the left locomotive's GUI. The train will route to stops in the given order, if it's at the end it will continue with the first. Stations can be added by clicking "Add station" in the GUI. A pop-up appears with a list of all stop names. If one is selected, another button appears which allows select a wait condition from a pop-up list. Furthermore, the map in the right part of the GUI can be used to add stations to the schedule by using {{keybinding|shift|lmb}} on a station or using {{keybinding|ctrl|lmb}} near a rail in the map to create a temporary train station.

Wait conditions are used to tell the train when to leave the station. There are 7 types of wait conditions:
* '''Time passed'''
* '''Inventory full''' – All inventories of the train are full. Does not include fuel inventories.
* '''Inventory empty''' – Same as above, but empty. Does not include fuel inventories.
* '''Item count''' – The train (all cargoes summed) contains a specific amount of a certain item. Does not include fuel inventories.
* '''Circuit condition''' – The train stop is connectable to the [[circuit network]], so the signals can used for wait conditions.
* '''Inactivity''' – No items were added or removed for the specified amount of seconds.
* '''Fluid count''' – The train (all fluid wagons summed) contains a specific amount of a certain fluid.
* '''Passenger present''' - At least one [[player]] is inside any part of the train.
* '''Passenger not present''' - No players are inside any part of the train.

It is also possible to set no wait condition, this causes the train to simply pass by the station without stopping.

Hereafter the word "term" is used to describe ''one'' type of wait condition, and the words "wait condition" are used to describe the whole set of terms (it turns a bit into maths).

If more than one term is added, it is possible to change the connection of those using the logical operators AND and OR. An AND condition will result in true if all terms are true. An OR condition will return true if at least one of the terms is true.

When mixing AND and OR terms, the logic is grouped by the OR terms. When evaluating the wait condition, the first term is evaluated along with all AND terms immediately following up to but excluding the next occurring OR term. If they all evaluate true, the wait condition evaluates true. Otherwise, evaluation continues with that next occurring OR term and all AND terms immediately following it, up to the next OR term. This continues until either an OR group evaluates true and the wait condition is satisfied, or all terms have been checked.

==== Examples ====
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="width:800px">
Expand for examples
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">
Wait until full, up to 30 seconds:

<pre>
Full cargo inventory
OR 30 seconds passed
</pre>

Wait until cargo full, ''or'' circuit condition Oil > 3000:

<pre>
Full cargo inventory
OR Circuit condition - Oil > 3000
</pre>

Wait until empty, ''and'' 30 seconds passed, ''and'' 5 seconds of inactivity:

<pre>
Empty cargo inventory
AND 30 seconds passed
AND 5 seconds of inactivity
</pre>

Wait until iron ore is low, ''or'' copper ore is low ''and'' at least 30 seconds passed:

<pre>
Cargo: Iron ore < 500
AND 30 seconds passed
OR Cargo: Copper ore < 500
AND 30 seconds passed
</pre>

Factorio's wait condition logic is read as disjunctive normal form ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjunctive_normal_form DNF]), and so this last example is processed as (note the parenthesis):

<pre>((Cargo: Iron ore < 500 AND 30 seconds passed) OR (Cargo: Copper ore < 500 AND 30 seconds passed))</pre>

Which is the same as this:

<pre>((Cargo: Iron ore < 500 OR Cargo: Copper ore < 500) AND 30 seconds passed)</pre>

Unfortunately, there is no way to write that shorter form in the current UI.
</div></div>

=== Troubleshooting ===

Below are some things to verify if a rail system or train is not working.

* Is the train fueled? Ensure that the locomotive has [[fuel]] of some kind.
* Misplaced or non-functional switches? Ensure that the train can plan a path through the switches.
* Another train on the same [[Railway#Block|block]]? Make sure the path of the train is unobstructed.
* Train stops placed correctly? Make sure that the yellow arrows when hovering on the stop point towards the end or exit of the stop.
* Is the train allowed to enter signals from the right direction? Are the signals set correctly?
* If a track is supposed to be two-way, the rail signals should be opposite each other. You can verify they match up by hovering the cursor over one. For a matched pair, it will show the other.

==== No path ====
When trains cannot reach the target, a "no path" symbol pops up over the locomotive. Check:
* Can the train reach its current destination by '''only driving forward'''? Build turning slopes or place a locomotive at both ends of a train!
* Are the train stops standing in the right direction? Train stops must be on the right hand side of the track.
* If you use rail signals, check that the signals are all allowing traffic in the correct direction.
* Check for interruptions in the train tracks, drive to the station manually to check there are no rail parts missing. Especially near junctions these can be hard to spot if missing.

If you are still having problems, consider:
* Driving the train manually, and as you pass each switch, try switching to automatic. When it works, you will know the rough area of the problem.
[http://imgur.com/a/Nq2Yk A pictorial summary of typical problems].

== Achievements ==
{{Achievement|trans-factorio-express}}

== Connection to [https://www.openttd.org/ OpenTTD] ==
Factorio's railway system offers the same type of advanced railway design as [https://wiki.openttd.org/Signals#Pre-signals≈ block entry pre-signals and block exit pre-signals do in Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe].

== See also ==
* [[Tutorial:Train signals]]
* [[Railway/Train_path_finding]]
* [[Locomotive]]
* [[Cargo wagon]]