Factorio – How to Avoid Over/Under Building in The Early Game

Tips for Avoiding Over/Under Building

In general, ignore what most people do and look to speed runners if you want to optimize, just keep in mind their stuff probably requires more effort and learning and doesn’t necessarily optimize for fun.

Early game is pretty easy to rush. You should be able to get to bots within 4 hours on default settings if I recall your skill level correctly, but a lot of people get really, really stuck in their ways so I understand why it’s hard to sift through all the bad advice.

For specifics you can adapt the nefrums guide to your needs, but I can also describe what I do generally. First of all, definitely do 90 SPM of red and green. For beginners 30 SPM is more than enough, but if you have already played the game a couple times there’s not really much reason to wait around, and red/green are cheap af. Accomplish this with 10/12 assemblers that you upgrade to blue later.

Second, cover your iron patch ASAP. You should be spitting out 2.5 yellow belts of iron almost immediately. It helps to direct that 0.5 of a belt just toward gears and belts and ammo and personal iron plates before you get started on the big stacks. Build in phases, after your first stack you can do circuit automation and gear automation so that intermediates are going (reduces crafting time massively), then work on the last stack for the extra iron for the mall.

Your first goal that’s sorta simultaneous with the iron patch is the mall. Put gears and circuits on one belt and iron plates on another. You only need the three belty things, three insertery things, mining drills, assembler one and twos, maybe gun turrets/ammo, and the two pipey things for your mall. Basically that can last you until logistic system. You don’t need anything else. Also, make the mall completely separate from the bus and prioritize it. You might want to slap down science first since the mall will eat through resources for 30 minutes while it starts up and it’s nice to be doing research… …during that time.

Next goal is to start building the base how you want to actually build it while you chug through researches. Oh I forgot to mention but integrate red/green perpendicular to the mall close by, this is your jumpstart base and it will last you red/green until and if you decide to megabase. So this is when you’d do a bus (with two lanes of iron not four yet lol). Separate out the important stuff, like dedicate some copper to circuits rather than putting copper on the bus just to take it off for circuits. You can also just extend your mall to grow it organically into a base which is what I normally do. The nice thing is that your iron requirements scale as the mall winds down, so you’re still always using that starter iron. Once you get blue science/bots you will still absolutely need a new patch though, but by then you have bots to put everything down!

So yeah you essentially speedrun oil at that point. Since blue research is more expensive, 45 SPM is aight. You should have powered through and saved a lot of time with your 90 SPM red/green by now anyways. There are a lot of other things to say but already said a lot haha.

Note: I was only able to not over build after I started speedrunning the game. I finished the game in 8 hours (while doing lazy bastard simultaneously) with just 2 belts of iron plates, half a belt of steel, and 2 belts of cooper plates (all normal belts). If I recall correctly, you’re able to achieve 45SPM for red, green, military and blue with that.

For purple and yellow I just had a 5SPM setup, it was enough to complete the game, but if you want 45 SPM for yellow and purple that’s where resource demand grows exponentially. You’re going to need 2 red belts of iron of copper just to make 45SPM purple and yellow + steel.