Factorio: Engineering Addiction

Week 1 — Early-Game Foundations

Before you touch a belt

Read the map first. Rock formations (“big rocks”) aren’t ore — hand-mining one gives free stone, and sometimes coal, in a couple of swings. That’s faster than waiting on a drill for the stone your first furnaces need, and it can hand you enough coal to bootstrap the loop on the next slide.

  • big rocks: free stone, occasional coal, no drill required
  • ore patches (iron, copper, coal) are what you put drills on
  • nothing here needs automation yet

Mining rates

Every drill’s output is fixed by two numbers: its mining speed and the ore’s own mining time. Production rate is mining speed ÷ mining time — a faster drill or a softer ore both raise it.

  • burner mining drill: 0.25 mining speed, 150 kW burned as fuel (not drawn from the grid), 2×2 footprint, 12 pollution/min
  • electric mining drill: 0.5 mining speed — twice the burner drill — 90 kW from the grid, 3×3 footprint with 5×5 resource coverage, 10 pollution/min

Mining rates, continued

  • ore patches are finite: every successful mining action has a 100% chance to remove one unit from the patch, so a patch’s size is also its lifespan, not just its yield
  • hand-mining follows the same shape — (1 + mining speed bonus) × 0.5 ÷ mining time — it’s slower than a drill, but never automation-gated

Mining rates, in practice

A burner mining drill depositing mined ore directly into a wooden chest placed immediately in front of it, with no inserter or belt between them

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Same drop-straight-into-whatever’s-there mechanic the next two slides use — a chest here, a drill’s fuel tank or a furnace next.

Hand-mining, in practice

A progress bar over a rock formation being hand-mined, filling steadily as the player holds down the mining action

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

This bar is the hand-mining formula from last slide made visible — mining speed bonuses (from research or equipment) are what speed it up.

Burner chains

A mining drill deposits its output directly into whatever’s immediately in front of it — a chest, a furnace, or another burner-fuelled entity, including a second burner mining drill.

Put two burner mining drills on a coal patch facing each other, one tile apart: each one’s output lands straight in the other’s fuel tank. Prime both by hand and the loop is self-sustaining — no inserter, no belt, no power pole.

  • fuel stacks climb past what either drill needs — that surplus is your coal stockpile, ctrl-click either drill to collect it
  • don’t add a burner inserter to “skim” the surplus — it pulls from the same fuel stack the drill runs on and can drain it faster than mining refills it, stalling the loop

Burner chains, in practice

Two burner mining drills placed facing each other on a coal patch, one tile apart, each depositing mined coal directly into the other's fuel inventory

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Coal just happens to also be valid fuel for what it’s dropped into — the next slide uses the same drop-into-whatever’s-in-front mechanic for ore.

Direct burner-to-furnace

Same mechanic, aimed at a furnace instead of another drill: place a stone furnace directly in front of a burner mining drill’s output and the drill deposits ore straight into it. No belt, no inserter, no wasted tile.

  • only the one furnace directly in front of the drill’s output gets fed this way — everything else still needs a belt or inserter
  • the drill and the furnace each still burn their own coal — hand-feed both
  • pairs naturally with a burner-chain coal loop nearby: mine the coal by hand from the loop, carry it to the drill and furnace

Direct burner-to-furnace, in practice

A burner mining drill placed directly facing a stone furnace, depositing mined ore straight into the furnace with no inserter between them

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Combine this with the furnace-row idea below once you outgrow one drill, one furnace.

The ore-to-furnace ratio

One mining drill feeds a fixed number of furnaces before the belt runs empty. Furnace rows beat scattered furnaces, because every furnace in a row is in inserter reach of the same ore and coal belts.

  • every furnace holds three internal item stacks: fuel, input (ore) and output (plates). Stone and steel furnaces have all three; the electric furnace has no fuel stack at all, since it draws power instead of burning coal
  • that’s why an electric furnace only needs two belt connections (ore in, plates out) where a burner furnace needs three (ore, coal, plates)

Stone furnace now. Steel furnace once you have the steel to spare — faster smelt time, same footprint.

Furnaces, in practice

The stone furnace GUI showing an ore stack already loaded but the fuel stack empty, the furnace idle for lack of coal rather than lack of ore

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

An idle furnace with visible ore in it almost always means an empty fuel stack, not an empty input — check fuel first.

Boiler and steam power

Actual electricity starts with three parts in a line: an offshore pump, a boiler, and a steam engine.

  • offshore pump draws water, piped into the boiler
  • boiler burns coal to turn that water into steam
  • steam engine converts steam into power for the grid
  • one boiler comfortably keeps two steam engines fed — build in that pair, not one-for-one
  • that ratio scales directly: one offshore pump supplies enough water for 20 boilers and 40 steam engines — the same 1:2 pair, sized up for a whole base instead of a first taste of power

Boiler and steam power, in practice

An offshore pump piped into rows of boilers, each pair of boilers piped into steam engines, all connected to power poles

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Get this running before your first burner chain runs out of patience — it’s what everything from Week 2 onward is built on top of.

Research costs something concrete

A technology’s cost is a fixed count of science packs, consumed once enough lab time has processed them — nothing about early research is free just because no assembler is running yet.

  • Automation costs 10 automation science packs — craftable by hand or by a hand-fed assembler this early — and isn’t affected by the game’s tech-price-multiplier setting the way later techs are
  • Automation unlocks Assembling Machine 1 and the long-handed inserter — the two entities every following week assumes you already have
  • a lab draws 60 kW, occupies a 3×3 footprint, and processes packs at a base speed multiplier of 1 — before any research-speed bonus exists, more labs working the same technology is the only way to go faster

The research-time formula

Research time follows one formula: T = (T0 × P) ÷ (L × S) — per-unit time, times price in packs, divided by labs times lab speed. Every research-speed upgrade later in the game is really just raising L or S in this same equation.

  • only one technology is actively researched per force at a time — queuing several doesn’t parallelise them, it just orders which one starts next
  • the research queue itself has been on by default for new games since version 1.1.92 — queue Automation now and whatever’s next starts the moment the packs are in, with no need to babysit the switch

Research, in practice

The technology screen showing the early-game tech tree, Automation highlighted as an available research alongside its cost in science packs

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Everything on this tree costs a specific number of specific packs — there is no separate, vaguer “research points” currency underneath it.

Labs, in practice

Five labs in a row, each fed automation science packs from a shared belt, all working through the same queued technology at once

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

This is L in the research-time formula made physical — five labs here divide the same research time by five, not by one.

Automation before almost everything else.

Research priority in one sentence. A couple of early logistics or efficiency techs are worth taking first — nothing else is.

Hand-fed, on purpose

Your inventory is a temporary buffer between “gathered” and “used,” not a production line.

  • craft ammo and a handful of assemblers by hand while the base is small
  • everything else waits for a proper line
  • knowing which is which is the actual skill this week teaches

What hand-crafting can’t do

Hand-crafting covers most early recipes, but not all of them — knowing the exceptions now saves a confused trip to the wiki later.

  • ores can only be smelted in a furnace, never crafted by hand
  • any recipe with a fluid ingredient needs a machine — no fluids in a hand-craft, ever
  • engine units specifically must be built in an assembling machine, even though every one of their ingredients is solid
  • left click queues one, right click queues five, shift-click queues as many as your inventory can support — cancelling a queued craft fully refunds whatever was spent on it

Hand-crafting, in practice

The crafting queue interface showing several items queued with progress bars, built up by repeated clicks rather than one command

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Queuing a craft that needs an intermediate you don’t have queues the intermediate first, automatically — the one place a player can chain-craft like this. Assembling machines never do it for you.

Hand-fed assembling machines

An Assembling Machine 1 is available from the start — no research needed. It costs 9 iron plates, 5 iron gear wheels, and 3 electronic circuits to build, and needs electricity to run.

  • crafting speed is 0.5 — slower per item than hand-crafting at speed 1.0
  • no fluid input at this tier — a fluid ingredient waits for Assembling Machine 2
  • the payoff isn’t speed: feed it by hand, then walk away — it keeps working while hand-crafting ties you up for every item
  • worth a steady trickle of anything before belts and inserters exist to automate the feed

Hand-fed assembling machines, in practice

An Assembling Machine 1, the entity used from the start of the game to run a recipe unattended once its ingredients are placed in by hand

Source: Factorio Wiki, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Automating the feed — belts and inserters into this same machine — is where Week 2 begins.

This week’s practical

Goal: research Automation
Using: hand mining, manual smelting, starter power
Not using: belts or assemblers beyond what Automation unlocks

Bring the save you finish this tutorial with to Week 2 — base design starts from wherever you leave it.