Week 1: Early-Game Foundations
Reading the map, hand-fed smelting and power ratios, and the first automation research — the fundamentals everything later depends on.
27 July 2026
Outline#
- Resource gathering — reading the map before touching it: prioritising big rocks for a lump-sum of ore, and laying out coal chains so early boilers never starve mid-burn.
- Early-game smelting setups — the ore-to-furnace ratio a single mining drill can feed, why furnace rows beat scattered furnaces, and the stone versus steel furnace upgrade decision.
- Research and power — the starting boiler-to-steam-engine ratio, and why Automation is the research priority almost everything else waits on.
- Hand-fed automation and hand-crafting — what’s worth crafting by hand while the factory is still small, and what should wait for a real production line.
- Designing for the future — leaving deliberate empty space and belt capacity now, even though nothing needs it yet. This thread continues directly into Week 2.
Teaching team
- Professor T. Trupen — convenor