Chapter 1 ‐ Gameplay basics

Previous page: "Home"

Note about this chapter

This chapter covers the basics and the details about controls and concepts in the game. You can also use the in-game tutorial by pressing "H" and following the steps. This page is more detailed. The addition of details makes this first chapter exceptionally long. Therefore feel free to skip reading some sections depending on what you want to find out about.

Starting the game

Be sure to have your screen reader running before starting the launcher. The game can be started by running the mod's own launcher.exe file inside the Factorio folder. This will open the custom starting menu. You can create a new savegame or continue an old one. One new game map option is our handpicked preset map known as Compass Valley, about which more info can be found on the respective wiki page. We recommend starting with Compass Valley or Peaceful settings. After selecting a preset, the game will start loading, as indicated by the brief Factorio music.

Loading time can take anywhere between 10 seconds and a few minutes, depending on your computer speed, on whether the game was recently updated, and also on the graphics settings. The game is ready to play when you start hearing ambient sounds, which is usually the starting cut-scene with the sound of fire and explosions. This is your recently crashed spaceship burning, but you are safely outside of it now.

If the mod is set up correctly, the game will now prompt you to press TAB to begin gameplay. You are now ready to run around and start interacting with entities. Continue pressing TAB to verify that you hear a voice saying that you have your pistol equipped. If you do not hear a voice saying anything then the game is set up incorrectly.

Reading the world around you

Factorio uses a top-down view with a fixed camera at a tilted angle. The surface of the planet is mostly flat around you, and so almost everything around can be thought of using only two dimensions. Locations and entities are referenced using compass directions, with the north always being in the "up" direction.

The engineer perceives the world with their attention on one specific point at any given time. This is done using the cursor, which is a representation of their attention. When walking around, the cursor always checks the tile in front of the engineer. However, you can make the cursor move to other points of interest temporarily. For this, you can use Cursor Mode, which moves only the cursor, while the engineer stands in place. Alternatively, you can make the cursor jump directly to nearby or distant entities that were indexed by the engineer's scanner tool.

The world is divided by the navigation system into a grid of square tiles, each about a meter wide. Every tile has coordinates. The zero, zero, point of this grid is the tile you start the game on, just below the crashed spaceship. You can use the grid by pressing K. This will report the cursor's coordinates, which usually is the tile that you are currently facing or the position of the entity just identified by the entity scanner.

Walking around

The engineer can walk around using WASD keys, with W walking to the North. There are different walking modes available. By default, you walk in telestep mode, where the engineer walks one tile per key tap. If you tap a new direction key, the engineer turns around accordingly but does not take a step until you tap it again. As you walk or turn, the cursor always moves over to the tile in front of you and announces what is there. This way you can find entities around you. You can walk over most tiles, such as dirt or grass. Telestep Mode announces the type of terrain on the tile in front of you unless there is something more interesting there to announce, such as an entity.

You can toggle your walking mode by pressing ALT + W. Some players prefer to use smooth walking for most of the time.

The other walking mode is smooth walking. In this mode, the engineer runs around freely while taking audible steps. The cursor continues to stay in front of the engineer at all times but it now it announces only entities and not terrain tiles. Smooth walking allows breaking out of grid alignment, which lets the engineer squeeze through between buildings and step around smaller entities. It also makes it possible to miss small entities that you are running toward.

In addition to walking, the engineer is able to move around by driving or riding vehicles, or using the teleporter tool.

Entities

The surface of the planet is covered in entities. Most of them are natural entities such as trees and rocks, but the engineer can add their own artificial entities such as machines. Most entities are fixed in place such that they can only be picked up as items or destroyed. Moving entities can include fish, vehicles, robots, or enemies (if enabled). Apart from entities, the surface of the planet has various terrain types such as dirt, grass, or sand.

The entity scanner

The engineer's portable scanner tool indexes and reports nearby entities as well as distant entities in charted areas. The scanner always has enough power to work but it does not run continuously. You can run the scanner by pressing END. This will take a moment to scan and index all entities within range and create the scan list for you to browse. You can go up and down the entries on this list by pressing PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN and you can re-check the current entry by pressing HOME. If you do not have the page keys, there are alternate controls that use the UP and DOWN arrow keys. When you read a scan entry, your cursor automatically jumps to the listed position. This allows you to explore around the scanned position in Cursor Mode or to teleport to the position by pressing SHIFT + T.

Every entry in the scan list represents an entity that existed at that specific position at the time of scanning. Therefore moving or destroyed entities will be listed incorrectly.

If there are multiple instances of the same entity, they will be all listed in the same entry in the scan list, so that every time you go up or down the scan list, it will read a new type of entry. When you want to switch between different instances of the same entry, such as finding different forests, use SHIFT + PAGE UP and SHIFT + PAGE DOWN.

Some entities have special rules for being organized in the scan list. For example, resource entities such as ore patches, forests, and water bodies, are always listed as aggregate entities. One instance of an aggregate entity represents an entire area filled with the relevant resource, such as an entire lake or entire ore patch, and the reported position for an aggregate entity is usually the position of the closest edge.

By default, entries in the scan list are sorted by distance to the engineer's position at the time of scanning. If you move after completing a scan, the relative distance of an entry according to your current position will change and remain correct, but the reference position used for sorting the list will not change. You can refresh the reference position by scanning again from your new position or by pressing CONTROL + N to re-sort. You can also sort scan list entries by number instead of distance, by pressing SHIFT + N, meaning that the entities counted the most will be listed first.

The scan list can also be filtered so that it lists only a specific category of entries, such as listing only buildings, or only enemies. You can change the filter category by pressing CONTROL + PAGE UP and CONTROL + PAGE DOWN.

Cursor mode

Normally, the cursor is checking the tile in front of the engineer. However, sometimes it is more useful to move the cursor without moving the engineer. You can do this by switching to Cursor Mode by pressing I. The cursor will begin where it last was, but now pressing WASD moves only it. You can also use the ARROW KEYS for this.

Cursor mode is useful for tasks like exploring how buildings are positioned in an area without having to worry about moving the engineer in between them. The mode also helps when you want to precisely place down a machine in hand, or to interact with entities you cannot directly reach due to having obstacles in the way.

The detached cursor can move as far away as you want, but most cursor-based interactions with entities can only happen within the reaching distance of the engineer, which is about 10 tiles. The cursor can be returned back to the engineer by pressing J or the engineer can be teleported to the cursor position by pressing SHIFT + T. Pressing K will give the cursor coordinates and SHIFT + K will give the relative distance and direction for the cursor position. You can switch out of Cursor Mode by pressing I.

Area scanning with large cursors

In Cursor Mode, the cursor size can be increased by pressing SHIFT + I and decreased by pressing CONTROL + I. When the cursor size is larger than the default of 1, the cursor is used for area scanning. The area scan counts the entities that fall within the cursor area (based on their anchor points) and then lists the entities found, sorted by count. In addition it scans for paved tiles and water tiles.

Finding distant entities by charting areas

The scanner tool is ready for use around your crash site, but it must be configured if you want to find distant entities: The entity scanner can only scan for entities within charted areas, where the scanner has a map model of the terrain so that it can differentiate between entities and terrain structures. An entity in a charted area can be indexed by the scanner from as far as 2500 tiles away, but an entity in an uncharted area could be as near as 100 tiles while it cannot be indexed. Therefore, charting distant areas is a key part of finding distant entities of interest, such as oil pools or ore patches.

At the start of game, you begin with only the first 250 or so tiles charted in every direction. Charting a new area is possible by walking over to it. The scanner is able to chart locations within 100 tiles of the engineer without needing to run the scan actively. Furthermore, the scanners of multiple engineers in the same team can exchange charting information with each other.

Another way to chart distant areas is by using radar buildings. When a radar is set up, it will scan the first 100 tiles in every direction within a few seconds, and then it will begin to slowly chart distant areas. It scans areas of the map using units known as chunks, where one chunk is 32 by 32 tiles. It takes about 30 seconds for the radar to scan a chunk and it skips the chunks that have already been charted. This way, you can let the radar slowly chart areas for you without having to go there yourself. Nevertheless, you can run across one chunk yourself in about 5-10 seconds, depending on the terrain, which is much faster than the 30 seconds it takes for the radar.

If you choose to go exploring yourself, you can use the area scanning feature of Cursor Mode to detect whether an area ahead of you has been charted already. Charted areas will either be described as explored or will report that it contains entities or nothing. Uncharted areas will have no comments reported at all about whether entities can be found.

Teleporting and fast travel

You can teleport to the cursor position by pressing SHIFT + T. This is useful for cases like teleporting to a scan list entry. You cannot teleport while in a vehicle or when a menu is open. If the target location is not somewhere that you can stand, the nearest valid location will be the new target.

You can also teleport to fast travel locations, which are locations that you can select and name as you please.

Press V to open the fast travel menu. Press W and S to navigate the fast travel points list, and press A and D to navigate list options, such as renaming a point, deleting a point, or creating a new point. When creating a new point, the cursor location will be selected and you will be prompted to type in the travel point name and press ENTER to submit it.

It is useful to set up fast travel to areas you want to revisit frequently, such as your power generation area or storage area. Teleporting is a feature unique to Factorio Access, meant as the alternative to vision-based path finding across an area with several obstacles.

Interacting with entities

Manually interacting with an entity almost always requires first finding it with the cursor, by walking up to the entity, or using the scanner tool or Cursor Mode. When the cursor identifies an entity, it is considered to be selected. The name of the entity is read out immediately and some basic information.

For a selected entity, there might be several possible interactions:

• You can check further information about the entity, such its status, by pressing RIGHT BRACKET.
• You can read its written description by pressing Y.
• You can read its coordinates by pressing K.
• In Cursor Mode, you can read the exact part of an entity under the cursor when you press K, such as the southwest corner or the north edge.
• You can check its distance from you by pressing SHIFT + K.
• You can open its menu by pressing LEFT BRACKET.
• You can switch between its different sectors using TAB and SHIFT + TAB.
• You can copy its settings by pressing SHIFT + RIGHT BRACKET.
• You can paste settings onto it by pressing SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET.
• You can shoot at it (not recommended) by pressing C.
• You can try to mine it or pick it up by holding X. Other mining options are available too, check Chapter 2.
• You can collect all relevant items from inside it by pressing CONTROL + LEFT BRACKET.
• You can move items quickly into or out of it with other cursor shortcuts. Most interactions require the engineer to have the entity within reach, which is about 10 tiles.

When mining an entity, it may take a few seconds to pick up the entity and a sound cue is heard during the mining, and also when the mining finishes. This automatically adds the picked up items into your inventory.

Most entity interactions involve opening its menu, which requires the entity to be within reach, about 10 tiles. Menu options are usually related to items.

Items

Everything you do in Factorio is about items. You either need to acquire them, drop them, store them, move them, deploy them, process them, or use them. Entities with inventories, such as chests or machines, can also store or process items. Some machines can move items from place to place, such as transport belts, inserters, and vehicles.

Examples of items include pieces of wood or ore, but also deployable buildings such as drills or inserters. Thanks to video game logic, or perhaps space age technology, even huge buildings can exist in the convenient form of small item entities that can be held in hand, and in your fairly large player inventory. When inside inventory slots, most items can "stack", meaning that several of them can be put into a single item slot before the slot is full. The stack sizes are usually 50 to 200 for small items and 1 to 5 for large items. Stacks can also be partially filled.

Inventory

The engineer has a fairly large inventory that can hold up to thousands of items. It is composed of a grid of slots that is 10 wide and at least 20 high. Any slot can take any item stack, but only one stack at a time. Press E to open the inventory menu, which will immediately select and read the first slot. You can move along slots with WASD. Each slot will announce the name of the item in it, maybe give some details, and then give a count of how many units the item stack has. When you reach the end of an inventory row, the cursor cycles back to the start of the same row. Therefore you need to move the cursor in two directions to cover the whole inventory.

For the selected item slot, you have a few options.

• You can press K to get the row and column number for this slot.
• You can press Y to read the item's description, which begins with its deployed sized, if applicable.
• You can learn about its production statistics by pressing U.
• You can take the item into your hand by pressing LEFT BRACKET. This makes the cursor hold the item.
• You can assign the item to a quickbar slot (explained in a later section) by pressing CONTROL and the appropriate number key.
• If in the inventory menu itself, you can try to equip the item by pressing SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET.
• If in a building menu, you can smart-insert the item stack into the building by pressing SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET.
• More options will be implemented regarding other features.

The game always keeps the player inventory sorted with specific rules. For example, items will start filling in from the first row at the top. When a slot becomes empty, every slot after it shifts back to close the gap. Also, if you have multiple stacks of the same item, they will always be side by side except when the end of one row carries over to the start of the next row. Items are sorted according to their categories, which are further explained in a later section, and within the categories they have a particular order as well, based on a hidden sorting number for each item type.

The inventory menu is also the menu where you can do specific actions such as checking your weapons and armor equipment, or switching to the crafting menu.

Entity inventories

Non-player entities in the game can have inventories too. For example, chests can hold lots of different items of any type, while machines tend to have different inventory types that have slots reserved for items with special functions, like a furnace having one slot each for the input ore, the output smelted item, and the fuel item.

An entity inventory is opened along with its interface by selecting it with the cursor and pressing "LEFT BRACKET". Entity inventories can be navigated using "W" "A" "S" "D". Often times, an entity has multiple inventories, with each representing a different sector of a building. You can cycle between the different sectors of a building, as wells as the player inventory, by pressing "TAB" or "SHIFT + TAB".

Selected items in a building inventory can be picked up to your hand using "LEFT BRACKET". Then you can put them into a selected slot somewhere else by pressing "LEFT BRACKET", or you can move them into your own inventory by pressing "Q". You can also use various smart inserting techniques to quickly and easily interact with entity inventories.

Item transfer shortcuts

1: Smart inserting items between open inventories.

The easiest way to move items between player and entity inventories is via smart inserting. When you select an appropriate item in one inventory, you press "SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET" and the item's stack will automatically move to an applicable slot in the other entity's inventory. For example, you can smart insert coal from your inventory into a furnace fuel slot, or you can smart-insert ammo from a chest directly into your ammo slots. If there are no applicable slots for smart inserting, due to reasons such as the destination slots being full, the selected item stack transfers as much as possible and then it stops.

2: Bulk stack transfer between open inventories.

When you have a building inventory open, pressing "CONTROL + LEFT BRACKET" for a selected item in an inventory will cause an attempt to transfer the entire supply of this item to the other inventory. Non-transferred items will remain in their original inventory. Similarly, pressing "CONTROL + RIGHT BRACKET" will try to transfer half of the entire supply of the selected item.

3: Full inventory transfer between open inventories.

When you have a building inventory open and select an empty slot, pressing "CONTROL + LEFT BRACKET" will cause an attempt to transfer the full contents of the selected inventory into the other inventory. This is useful for easily filling up labs and assembling machines with everything applicable from your own inventory instead of searching for the applicable items individually. Non-transferred items will remain in their original inventory. Similarly, pressing "CONTROL + RIGHT BRACKET" on an empty slot will try to transfer half of the entire supply of every item.

Items in hand

The item in hand is held by the cursor. Usually an item comes to hand by picking it out of an inventory using "LEFT BRACKET", or by using a quickbar shortcut.

You can query the item currently in hand by pressing "SHIFT + Q". You can put it away by pressing "Q" and it is returned to the inventory. If the player inventory menu is open (by itself), you can also press "CONTROL + Q" to put away the item stack in hand and locate it from its inventory slot.

Building or deploying items

If the item in hand is deployable, the cursor will automatically be trying to place it as a deployed entity and thus be showing a preview of the entity. This will make it read out preview information. Note that the graphical previews that appear in preview mode do not match the vanilla cursor preview locations, and so the mod draw its own footprints of the mod placement preview locations.

In cursor mode, the entity preview is always held from the northwest corner. This also true for trying to place the entity while walking, but only when you are facing south or east. If you are facing west, it will hold the north east corner so that the preview extends to the west from you. If you are facing north, it will hold the south west corner so that the preview extends to the north from you.

It is much easier to precisely place entities when in cursor mode, because you can walk out of the way and just let the cursor drop the item. Pressing "K" in cursor mode is helpful because it reads out the relative part of any other entity that the cursor is hovering over. Over empty tiles, it reads the coordinates of the cursor, and states the dimensions of the preview object in hand. You can use this information to align buildings before you place them. Afterward, nudging is an option too for most buildings.

Build lock mode

If you press "CONTROL + B" with an item in hand, it will enable build lock mode, where the game will try to build an entity every time the player or cursor is moved. This is useful for when you want to build repeating structures such as pipes or rails or transport belts. Switching in or out of cursor mode or emptying your hand automatically disables build lock mode, and you can also do so by pressing "CONTROL + B" again.

Build lock mode has some special cases for certain items:

• If you have a rail in hand, build lock mode will constantly try to append rails around you. This will fail about half of the time if you are walking in a straight line but it will still extend the rail as desired.
• If you have a transport belt type in hand and if you are NOT in Cursor mode, changing your direction will automatically change the building direction in hand so that the belt will follow you along. However, the game will fail to build the belt corners automatically, so you will need to go back and add them yourself.
• If you have a small electric pole or a big electric pole in hand, the game will place them down with big gaps as you run so that they connected at maximum allowed distance. This lets you carry power far away easily but there are gaps between the poles.
• If you have a medium electric pole or a substation in hand, the game will place them down with connected coverage so that they produce a continuously powered space behind you as you run. Normally medium electric poles can reach further but it would cause coverage gaps.

Rotating and nudging

Some deployed entities can be rotated, such as mining drills. You can rotate the entity preview of an item held in hand by 90 degrees by pressing R. Similarly, you can rotate an entity on the ground by selecting it with the cursor and pressing R. The reader will announce the current rotation of the entity after every press.

To nudge an entity by one tile, select it with the cursor and then press CONTROL + SHIFT + DIRECTION, where the direction is one of W A S D. Note that nudging bypasses some of the normal building checks and may cause some entities to overlap.

Cursor shortcut 1: The quickbar

Some items such as coal will be needed frequently. You can use the quickbar to make them easy to get in hand. To add an item to the quickbar, select it at the inventory and then press CONTROL + NUMBER for any number from 1 to 9. Now that the quickbar is set, every time you press the respective number key, the item will come to your hand from your inventory if you have any of it. You can press the same number again to put the item away.

Quickbar setup suggestions

Based on the most used items, the following quickbar setups are recommended.

Before you research automation, it is practical to have the following items on the quickbar: 1 coal, 2 burner mining drill, 3 stone furnace, 4 wooden chest, 5 transport belt, 6 burner inserter, 7 small electric pole, 8 pipe, and maybe pipe to ground and automation science pack.

After you research automation, it is practical to have the following items on the quickbar: 1 coal, 2 electric mining drill, 3 stone furnace, 4 assembling machine, 5 inserter, 6 long handed inserter, 7 small electric pole, 8 transport belt, 9 underground belt, 0 splitter

Cursor shortcut 2: Fast item pickups with the cursor

If your hand is empty and the cursor hovers over an entity, you can instantly pick up items from the entity's automatically designated output slots, such as the output slot of a furnace, or all slots of a chest.

You can pick up output all items that you can fit in your inventory by pressing CONTROL + LEFT BRACKET, or up to half of all output items in the entity by pressing CONTROL + RIGHT BRACKET.

Cursor shortcut 3: Fast item loading with the cursor

If you have an item in hand and the cursor hovers over an entity, you can insert one or many of the item into the entity without opening its interface. For this to work, the entity needs to have an available slot for the item in hand, such as a furnace having a slot available for some coal in hand.

You can insert a single item by pressing Z, a full stack of the item by pressing SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET, half a stack of the item by pressing SHIFT + RIGHT BRACKET, or all of the item that can fit in by pressing CONTROL + LEFT BRACKET.

Items that do not fit will stay in your inventory.

Cursor shortcut 4: The smart pipette tool / picker tool

If the cursor is hovering over a machine and you have more of the same machine in your inventory, you can grab in hand the stack in your inventory by pressing "Q".

The picker tool also has a couple unique shortcuts. For example if you select ore on the ground and press "Q" you will automatically get a mining drill in hand from the inventory.

Cursor shortcut 5: Copying and pasting entity settings

When the cursor is over an entity and your hand is empty, copy entity settings with SHIFT + RIGHT BRACKET, and paste the settings on another entity with SHIFT + LEFT BRACKET. The best examples of this feature is copying the recipe from one assembling machine to another, or copying the filter setting from one filter inserter to another. You can hear sound cues when settings are copied and pasted, although the game currently will not explicitly tell you what changes after a paste action.

Crafting

Crafting is the combining items to make new items after some time using a recipe. You can craft items anywhere by simply opening your inventory and pressing TAB to navigate to the crafting menu. The crafting menu shows all the available recipes. You can only craft the recipes you know and you can unlock new recipes via technology research.

You can navigate the crafting menu using W A S D, where W and S switches between the four main item categories, and A and D switches between recipes within a category. When you select a crafting recipe, the reader will give its name and how many of it you can craft with the ingredients in your inventory. Pressing K will tell how many of each ingredient you need for one craft.

You can begin to craft one instance of the recipe by pressing LEFT BRACKET, or five instances by pressing RIGHT BRACKET. If sufficient resources are available, the selected recipe is added to the manual crafting queue. Items reserved for craft instances in the queue are removed from the inventory and the new item is added to the inventory once its crafting is complete.

The crafting queue can be found by pressing TAB again. Recipes in the crafting queue can be canceled before they are completed, if you are fast enough. This can be done by selecting them and pressing LEFT BRACKET, which fully refunds the ingredients. You can also cancel five instances at once by pressing RIGHT BRACKET.

You can continue doing other things while manual crafting continues in the background. Crafting by hand is also set up in a smart way such that if you need intermediate items for a recipe and you don't have them but you have the ingredients for them, every intermediate recipe instance required will automatically be added to your crafting queue for you. For example, you can select to craft a burner mining drill while you have only iron plates. The gear wheels needed are added to the crafting queue automatically.

The main issue with manual crafting is that the engineer can work on only one recipe instance at a time. Therefore automating the crafting process with machines is preferable, after you unlock assembling machines via research. You can run multiple machines in parallel and if you set up enough automation, hand crafting becomes rarely needed. More information about assembling machines and automated crafting is available in Chapter 11.

Another limitation of crafting by hand is that some recipes such as chemical recipes requiring specialized buildings.

Item categories

Items in Factorio are grouped into four main categories. The crafting menu is organized according to these categories and items in chest or player inventories are always ordered according to their categories and their positions within the categories.

The first category is logistics, which features machines that move and store items or fluids or power. The category includes (in this order) chests, transport belts, inserters, electric poles, pipes, railway items, vehicles, and also road paving items such as stone bricks.

The second category is production, featuring machines and buildings that extract resources or craft recipes or generate electric power or research. The category also includes modules at the end, since they influence production.

The third category is intermediate products, featuring (in this order) items such as ores, metal plates, mechanical parts, fuels, and at the end science packs.

The fourth category is combat, and it includes (in this order) weapons, ammo, armor, modular armor equipment, walls, and turrets.

Therefore, for example, if you play in peaceful mode, your inventory usually has chests at the start and science packs at the end.

Machines and buildings

Machines are the entities you build to help you move and make items. To eventually launch a rocket you'll need a lot of them. Most machines can be crafted by hand and be carried in stacks just like other items. Machines can vary in size from 1x1 to 9x9 when placed, with the larger machines often being called buildings, despite them not being enterable. Therefore the guide may use the terms machine and building interchangeably.

Most machines require energy to work, either in the form of burner fuels or in the form of electricity.

At the start of the game, the machine recipes available to you include several burner devices, transport belts, labs, and the machines required for setting up steam power.

Every machine has a number of inventory slots, which are usually filtered to allow only items related to their functions. The slots can store large amounts of items such as a stack each. When picking up a machine with items in it, the items will usually enter your inventory first, but if your inventory becomes full the machine and the remaining items stay where they are or spread across the ground in item form.

Machine statuses

When your hand is empty, you can read the status of an applicable machine that you are facing by pressing RIGHT BRACKET. Every production machine or building works continuously until it runs out of either energy, ingredients, or output space. A machine that is operating without issues, it is in "working" (green) status and also makes an audible sound as it runs. If a machine's output is full or if it has partial power, it has a caution (yellow) status about these issues, but it does not necessarily require attention and is able to keep running. If the machine is missing ingredients or is completely out of energy, it has an error (red) status and may require attention because it ceases operation until the issue is resolved.

Warning menu

Some critical issues with machines generate warning signals, which are separate from machine status reports. Warnings appear as graphical icons that flash on top of the machines. Warnings are generated for buildings that are out of fuel, out of power, or not connected to an electric grid. In addition, turrets without ammo or structures that receive damage also generate warnings.

Press P to open the warnings menu. Press LEFT BRACKET for the selected warning to jump to the building in question.

This entry needs to be expanded!

Technology and progression

The first few hours of Factorio are about getting your bearings in your world and getting used to the Factorio Access controls. You first need to mine and smelt lots of iron and some copper so that you can build everything else. You'll want to set up burner mining drills to minimize the need for manual mining. Next, you face the problem of gathering enough coal to keep everything going, fixing it perhaps by running between chests or by using transport belts and burner inserters to fully automate the process. All crafting at this point is by hand.

Next comes setting up steam power, which is required for your first science lab, where research can be done. One of the first technologies unlocked is automation, which makes assembling machines available so that you can automate crafting. This enables you to build assembly lines that produce at large scales for you.

The big indicator of your progress in Factorio is how far you have advanced through the technology tree, which has several partially-interconnected branches that eventually lead up to unlocking the rocket silo that builds space rockets. Therefore, progress in Factorio is dependent on doing research, and doing research is dependent on keeping your labs supplied with electricity and research equipment. The research equipment is in the form of science packs, which are experiment kits that are crafted using various items. Since subsequent technologies require greater and greater numbers of science packs to research, the engineer needs to build a lot of machines to automate the science pack production, with the ultimate goal being a fully automated factory.

As research continues, almost every new technology unlocked introduces new items or systems that tend to be required for the production of more advanced science packs. Therefore, at heart of Factorio's progression is the engineer alternating between the phase of unlocking new systems and playing around with them, and the phase of putting them to use to create new science packs in order to be able to research even more advanced systems. Meanwhile, the engineer's overall technology level (and progress level) can be referenced using which science pack is currently required by the labs. There are five main science pack types that are unlocked mostly in order, while the military science packs emerges early on in the game as an optional parallel path to follow.

When looking at progress in general terms, while there is limited consensus about this, the early game of Factorio is often said to cover progress from the start up until when you begin oil processing, a little before you start producing the third main science pack. Similarly, the late game is said to begin when you have started the production of all five main science packs, after which there are the last few technologies to research and the construction of the space rocket (which is a separate, final task) looms on the horizon.

Next page: "Chapter 2 - Resources and mining"

"See also: Early Game Milestones"