Hello! I’m new here so apologies for any formatting errors.
I was wondering if there are any good strategy guides for how to progress through the tiers? I find I usually get stuck before unlocking tier 7.
Thanks in advance, and I’m really looking forward to this community growing!
After playing through a few times, my advice is to embrace manifold layouts because they are easy to set up and even easier to expand (especially with blueprints). Pick a recipe to work on, and for each ingredient dedicate a line of producers to it. Do the same for the next ingredient, etc.
The key to this is that if (when) you need to extend your production of the goal recipe, all you need to do is add on to each line proportionally. Thus, you can set this up fairly early and just expand on it as you progress.
Note that you do absolutely end up making many lines of, say, iron plates and other early products; the goal isn’t to have only one line of each item, but rather to dedicate expandable lines to specific individual items (sometimes redundantly).
Also, the early belts do limit you and it certainly makes more sense to use load balancing rather than manifolds at that point, but you also don’t need to wait until the final tier of belts to start using manifolds.
I’ve played the game through about three times now, and here’s the two major things that get me through it:
-
Modularity. I built a lot of things in standard 10x10 blocks I could quickly spam out with the SMART mod, and using that as a basic building block I would build production lines and whole factories. 4 modules of smelters, 4 modules of constructors, 2 modules of assemblers and 2 modules of manufacturers and you’ve gone from raw ore to computers or something. This approach is extensible, you can quickly bang out a production line, get some of it going, then widen it in parallel to increase throughput as demand increases.
-
Step by step. When I stop to think about how my whole world-circling megafactory works, it’s kind of overwhelming. I don’t think I could have sat down and designed it from the top down. But “This factory mines iron and copper on site, gets plastic from the train network, makes circuit boards and computers, and then sends them out the train network” is easier to manage. As you build a step in the process, stop considering the rest of the world, think “this will get ingredients from somewhere and will sent products to somewhere else.”
-
Hey there, I don’t know any guides but if you mention a bit how and where you get stuck, i can try to help about those. Eg. Aluminium is too confusing. I don’t know how to ship oil from 2 kilometres away
It’s usually when in the process of deciding if I’m going to expand the current location and ship things in, or make an outpost for dealing with specific recipes.
I think I might need a better system for planning my factory.I still consider myself a beginner and I stopped playing completely already twice because of the grind. What helps me on the third attempt is to take it easy. No need to rush tiers or stress about some parts I can’t manufacture fast enough yet. There is plenty of other things to do while waiting, like exploring, tyding up the base, decorating etc. Switching between these and factory building has helped me. Some factories I build intuitively, some using a calculator and others from YouTube videos and forums. And from the latter I learned that there is no right way to play the game. Hope this helps looking beyond the grind.
