Tutorial:Quick start guide

Getting Started

Starting your game

So, you've just picked up Factorio, played through the tutorial and now have no clue what to do? Well let's try to ease you into the game a little bit.

To begin you are going to be presented with the main menu. I'm sure you have all run into one of these before (but if not, don't worry!).

We want to select "Play" and "New Game". You will be presented with a nice big menu for customization of your world. You can fiddle with whatever you want to make the world generate how you want to. Somethings make the game easier, while other make it harder. Experiment to your delight!

Once you have decided press generate, and you will get dumped into a new world, awaiting your prowess.

Time to get some resources

So we being our journey with a humble stone furnace and a Burner Mining Drill. What do we do with these? well, we want to find a nice area that has the 4 main resources we need for the start of the game. We want Coal, Copper, Iron and stone that are within a reasonable proximity of each other (we don't want to have to run for ages to go between them). We want to begin by placing our drill on the edge of an iron deposit, facing towards a furnace. You can change the direction of the Drill by pressing R before, or after, you place it. The little yellow arrow indicated the direction it will output to. You want the furnace to be in front of that arrow, so the Drill will automatically input to the furnace. You should get something like this.

Great! but what does the big flashing red symbol mean? This means that there isn't any fuel in them. You can power them with either wood or coal. To collect them, you go towards whichever resource you choose and hold right click. This will give you a small progress bar at the bottom, which when complete will give you some of those resources! You might find that chopping trees and mining ores manually is really slow. If you look at your character, he's just bashing at them with a stick! How about a tool upgrade? Press E which will open up your inventory and the crafting menu. Select the Gears tab up the top for "production", and left click on the pickaxe in there. This will increase your mining speed by a significant amount.

Now that I assume you have a pickaxe and have found some fuel, it's about time we went and made the furnace and drill start working for you. By left clicking on the furnace or drill, it will open an interface for you.

to place your fuel into the machine, simply left click it to pick it up and left click to put it into the fuel slot. If you want to split a stack in half, so your furnace and drill can both get half of your fuel, right click the stack and then place it in the fuel slot. Easy as that! Now both of your machines should be running and automatically making you some iron plates!

You can use this same process for copper ore to get copper plates.

Something that you may not want to do is to always be getting fuel for your machines. Why don't we automate that too? Now we need to craft some extra drills. If you hover over drill in the crafting menu, it tells you what items you need to craft. It also tells you what the RAW resources are that you need to craft it. Unlike other game, 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.

Now that we can make some extra drill and furnaces, we 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 a drill output into another drill which allows you to power it easily with some extra coal left over. We can then have the second drill output into a wooden chest like so.

And then for stone we can have the drill output directly into a chest, very similar to the above image.

Once this is all setup up, you will probably want to make it all go faster. Set up more drills with furnaces for the iron, setup some for copper and maybe put down more coal for extra fuel.