What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.

Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they feed.

Early-Game Foundations

Reading the map, hand-fed smelting and power ratios, and the first automation research — the fundamentals everything later depends on.

Week 1 · 27 July 2026

Base Design Philosophy

Furnace stacks and footprint trade-offs, then the named layout styles — spaghetti, bus, bot base, tileable base, train base — and what each buys and costs.

Week 2 · 3 August 2026

Logistics I

Splitters, T-junctions, inserters, underground belts and buffers as the components of belt logistics, building up to balancer theory.

Week 3 · 10 August 2026

Ratios and Bottlenecks

Reading recipes as rate problems, an introduction to fluids and oil refining, and how module and beacon choices change a line's ratios.

Week 4 · 17 August 2026

Transport and Defence

Cars, tanks, trains and terrain tools, then biters, worms and nests, and the firepower and wall placement that manage them.

Week 5 · 24 August 2026

Rail Engineering

Fluid wagons, train fundamentals, deadlock-free intersection design, and automating a rail network end to end.

Week 6 · 31 August 2026

Coordinating at Scale

Why independently-designed subsystems clash, and the role allocation and shared conventions that make a team's factory coherent.

Week 7 · 14 September 2026

Diagnosing the Factory

Brownouts and solar sizing, a real method for finding bottlenecks, and a case study in the everlasting chip shortage.

Week 8 · 21 September 2026

Blueprints at Scale

Construction bots, capturing a working design as a blueprint, and designing blueprint edges so copies tile cleanly.

Week 9 · 28 September 2026

Advanced Optimisation

Circuit-network logic gates, nuclear power layout, and dispatching trains only when the network actually needs them.

Week 10 · 5 October 2026

Megabase Economics

Travel time and TPS as real design costs, expansion versus productivity growth, and speedrunning as a different optimisation target entirely.

Week 11 · 12 October 2026

The Factory Must Grow

What actually costs simulation time at scale, pollution's own TPS cost, and a checklist for what causes a slow base.

Week 12 · 19 October 2026