How to actually play factorio. Its been sitting I my library for eight years. I never got past the early game.

When the DLC released I swore I would only get it if I could actually beat the vanilla game and send the rocket to space. I commited the past two weeks to learning the game and growing the factory. How trains and signals work, how robots work, how to better design and space out production lines. And how to SHELL THOSE FUCKING BUGS BACK TO HELL. Nothing felt as good as when the bug attacks ramped up and I finally snapped and built a tank for the first time. Ooooh sweet sweet vengeance.

Do NOT add quality modules to the mines/electric furnaces feeding your main bus. It is poison for your factory, because you can't just use any quality with any quality.

I've had half a dozen spots in my factory come to a halt because ~10 minutes of higher iron quality plates went onto my normal belt, and then clogged a bunch of assembly machines.

Wube is what every game developers should aim to be.

• Gleba and Space both have infinite resources. Make use of it.
• Bring agricultural towers to Nauvis and start planting trees big style. It will eat up pollution like crazy.
• Underground belts don’t work through empty space and lava. Don’t know why I’m surprised.
• Replace every electric mining drill across the solar system with the big drills. It only depletes 50% of the field it works on, comes with its own productivity bonus, has more mod slots and can put stacks on belts later in the game.

Edit for bonus tip:

• As soon as you unlock foundries, switch to them. No reason to melt iron and copper the old way. The new process uses 50 ore and one caltice and gives 500 liquid iron or copper. So it’s fine to export calcite across the system. You can even cast stuff like pipes, steel etc directly. Even low density structures and concrete without all the intermediate steps. (I forgot to mention it has an in built 50% productivity bonus, which is bonkers)

That even though I have been on a sick leave for a week, I barely got off Nauvis.

But seriously, I didn't expect the game to be that long. And I didn't even get into many new things yet. Mostly just the refined old things. But those are already awesome by themselves.

Otherwise, the fact that cliff explosives come much later now means Nauvis gameplay is suddenly a lot more interesting. Before it was a quick run to robots and cliff explosives, and landfill and then the challenge posed by the terrain was overcome. Now I spent a lot more time working around landscape, which is actually very interesting, and lead to a lot of beautiful spaghetti.

That its incredibly difficult to find time to play with a group of three with different professions

Trying to get quality intermediate resources at scale is a phenomenal waste of time, space, headache, and resources.

In every machine that allows it, use productivity. In every machine that doesn't that isn't your end product, use speed or efficiency. Only do quality on the last step.

Skim off the best quality you can make off the top, send everything else into recyclers with quality modules in them. They will upcycle all of the ingredients you need to be able to send them back through your crafting machines, where they'll get a second upcycle opportunity. The law of large numbers will help guarantee that you'll always have the ingredient balance you need to never back up, as long as you have some buffer storage to smooth out the fluctuations.

This is the conclusion after weeks of trying to design a factory on Fulgora that makes quality everything while wasting little as possible, and finding out that it's just not a competitive strategy against only rolling on the last step. It would maybe work in an ultra late game mega factory that is not space or resource constrained, but until you get access to vast amounts of foundation to build wherever you want on any planet you want, my money says don't bother.

That un-peaceful (violent?) mode is quite boring and tedious.

I normally never play with it, but started the Space Age runthrough with all default settings.

That circuit networks can be useful for things other than just making CPUs and jukeboxes

• A space platform will not request items from a planet unless the request and the supply is enough to fill a rocket. The exception is items requested for building the platform itself.
• You cannot use the same platform to move an item from planet A to planet B while at yhe same time requesting to have this item onboard. For example, on Vulcanus I produce those big mining drills, which I want transported to Nauvis in large numbers. However, big mining drills is also part of the "Production" logistics group that I have set to be picked from Nauvis. The result is that the platform picks up all the drills it wants on Vulcanus but drops none of them down to Nauvis, even though the amount wanted on board is much much smaller. Disabling the production logistics group solved this, so that it doesn't request the same item from Nauvis after dropping it off.
• A big field of land mines is an easy way of defeating the demolisher early on.
• You can throw excess stone in Vulcanus back into the lava sea
• If you're running low on ice/water on Fulgora, you can create a dedicated space platform parked in orbit to produce and drop ice.
• Excess concrete on Fulgora is going to be needed on Aquilo. Br8ng as much as you can pack!