Chapter 2 ‐ Resources and mining

Previous page: "Chapter 1: Gameplay basics"

Geography of Nauvis

Nauvis is a planet vaguely similar to Earth, but with more land than sea. Days on Nauvis are 7 minutes long, with about 4 minutes of strong sunshine at mid day and around 1 minute of complete darkness at mid night. There are sparse clouds in the sky but it never rains heavily. There are large lakes across the land and some elevation changes involving cliffs, but no mountains or rivers. The land is covered in cliffs, rocks, trees, open areas of all sizes, and some areas with exposed ores or oil pools.

There are desert regions and grassy forest regions as well as dirt areas in between them. The plant life includes grass and various kinds of shrubs and trees. Animals include fish swimming in the lakes, and also enemy creatures, which resemble giant insects and worms. The creatures build groups of circular hives across the land. They busy around their hives and sometimes they remove trees to build more hives, but they usually keep to themselves unless you disturb them. If the planet happens to be peaceful, the creatures will not harm you at all unless you attack them first.

You are able to significantly modify the landscape across the planet by mining the ores, cutting the trees, and removing or covering the other features when you have the tools and resources to do so. Be aware that the creatures may not particularly appreciate this.

Terrain tiles

Individual terrain tiles might be areas of grass, areas of sand/desert, or areas of dirt. Grass and sand are almost never adjacent to each other, and they instead have gradients of various dirt types in between. The most sandy dirt is Dirt 1 and the most grassy dirt is Dirt 7 and values in between are in between. Meanwhile, the most sparse grass is Grass 4 and the most lush grass is Grass 1. This knowledge can help with navigation. For example, if you know you have mostly sand to the east and mostly grass to the west, the current dirt or grass number under you can give you a sense of where you are in between the two regions.

You can also pave over the terrain with tiles of stone bricks or various kinds of concrete. Check Chapter 19 or the link at the bottom of this page for more about this.

Resources on Nauvis

Resources that you can collect include wood from trees, water from lakes, stone and coal and various metal ores from appropriate ore patches, and oil from pools. Also, sunlight can be used to generate power.

Ores

Ores can be found in large patches on the ground. Ore can be mined by hand or using a mining drill, and sometimes these patches are covered by trees. Ore patches can be directly next to one other, but their ore tiles will never mix. Some ores can be smelted in furnaces.

Mining ores

Ores can be mined by hand at ore patches, one piece at a time. You can mine by pressing "X" when standing on an ore patch. Meanwhile, some ores can be collected alternatively from mining large rocks. As a third option, ores can be mined using mining drills, which include the smaller and slower burner mining drills and the larger and faster electric mining drills. While manual mining is necessary at the start of the game, one tends to transition to automated mining at a large scale using mining drills. See Chapter 3 for more about mining drills.

Iron

Iron ore can be smelted in furnaces to get iron plates, which are the key raw material for crafting almost anything. Smelting five iron plates yields one steel plate, and steel is needed for a lot of things too. In Factorio, you can never have enough iron.

Copper

Copper ore can be smelted in furnaces to get copper plates, which are mostly turned into copper wire, used to craft power poles and various circuits.

Coal

Coal can be mined and directly used as a fuel in any burner device like furnaces, boilers, and vehicles. Coal is also used for making plastic and various explosives.

Stone

Stone is used to craft basic furnaces and landfill, while it can also be smelted into stone bricks. The bricks are needed to craft walls, paths, concrete, and some buildings.

Uranium

Uranium is a mid-game resource used for nuclear applications, including energy and weapons. Mining uranium ore requires an electric mining drill that is being fed sulphuric acid via pipes. This ore cannot be smelted but it is processed in centrifuges after chemical science is unlocked.

Oil

Oil is a resource that spawns in patches as well, with each patch having a handful of oil pools. Uniquely, instead of mining drills it requires pumpjacks to extract, and pumpjacks output directly into pipes. While the pumpjacks lose yield over time, they never completely run out.

Oil spawns far away from the starting area by design and it can be transported as a fluid using pipes or trains. It can also be put in barrels to be transported in item form.

Oil processing is unlocked in the mid-game and it is necessary to do chemical science and later science. Oil-derived products include lubricant, solid fuel, sulfur, and plastic.

Water

Lakes of water come in all shapes and sizes on Nauvis. Water can be extracted infinitely from any water tile using an offshore pump, which uniquely requires no fuel or electricity and it outputs vast amounts of water into pipes.

You can’t pass through water bodies, except for shallow water, which does not appear with default settings.

Trees and forests

Trees can be found alone or in groups of varying sizes, defined by the scanner tool as "forests". They absorb the pollution created by machines. They can easily be chopped to give you wood but there is no way to plant or restore trees. Wood can be used directly as a fuel, and it is needed for some basic crafting recipes. Cutting trees leaves behind tree stumps, which fade away in time. In addition to live trees, there can also be fallen trees and dead tree trunks around, which are also sources for wood.

The scanner tool does not detect individual trees but only forests that have more than a handful of trees in them. When you reach a forest, you can walk up to a tree and chop it down by holding "X". Individual trees can be found using Cursor Mode and Area Scanning. Also, you can clear away all trees and tree stumps within 5 tiles of you by activating area mining by pressing "SHIFT + X".

Rocks

Rocks can be found in some areas. They can be mined to give you large amounts of stone at once. Huge rocks also give you good amounts of coal, which can help a lot at the start of the game. You can mine rocks by holding "X". Also, you can clear away all rocks within 5 tiles of you by activating area mining by pressing "SHIFT + X".

Spaceship wreckage pieces

A few spaceship wreckage pieces are scattered around the crash site of the main spaceship wreck. They are safe to approach after the audible burning ends, and mining them (with X) will clear them away. Some larger pieces contain salvageable resources such as iron plates. Many players like to keep the main spaceship wreck as a landmark.

Other surface entities

Apart from natural resources, the surface of the planet also contains cliffs, small foliage that you cannot interact with, and enemy biter bases.

Cliffs

Cliffs can be found around the world, sometime making long ridges. Cliffs have no use apart from being natural barriers that cannot be mined or fallen from. This can be helpful when building defenses but they can get in the way of construction. Cliffs in an area can be removed using cliff explosives, which are unlocked sometime after oil processing.

Area mining and obstacle clearing

Area mining is a unique feature in Factorio Access that mines or collects certain entities within 5 tiles of you so that you do not need to lose time with searching around for them individually. You activate area mining by pressing "SHIFT + X". The result depends on what entity you have in hand or what entity is at the cursor.

• If you are holding the instant mining tool (see the next section), everything that can be mined or collected within 5 tiles will be.
• If you have selected a rail, all the rails and rail signals within 7 tiles will be collected.
• For all other cases, entities deemed as obstacles within 5 tiles will be collected or removed. This includes trees, rocks, items on the ground, and remnants such as tree stumps or scorch marks.
• No form of area mining works on mining more than one piece of ore at a time.

The instant mining tool

The instant mining tool, also known as the "cut paste tool", is for rapidly mining or collecting everything, except for ores. You take the tool into your hand by pressing "CONTROL + X". Everything the cursor touches will be mined instantly, except for ores. You can put the tool away by pressing "Q". This will not place it in your inventory, but it will still be available when needed again.

The purpose of this tool is to speed up the manual deconstruction of a large factory area in case you want to do some major remodeling. Something similar is available in vanilla Factorio when you hold down the mining button and drag the cursor over everything.

See also: Chapter 19 - "Landscaping and Paving Tiles"

Next page: "Chapter 3 - Furnaces, mining drills, and chests"