Beginner's Guide and Tips - Factorio Guide - IGN (2024)

Factorio can be a bit overwhelming for new players. With its long list of customization options and different game modes, it can be tricky to determine what to do first. Below you'll find helpful tips and tricks for beginners to get you started and soon enough you'll be a titan of industry in Factorio.

1. Play the Tutorial
2. Adjust Your Campaign Settings to Your Liking
3. Dismantle Your Spaceship
4. Search For Coal, Iron, and Stone
5. How to Gather Resources
6. How to Craft
7. Item Placement
8. Tips

Play the Tutorial

Factorio has an intuitive tutorial that puts you in various situations and walks you through the basics of the game. It can be time-consuming, but it helps break down the basics like gathering resources, building recipes, and how electricity works.

You can choose the tutorial option from the main menu and go through each of the mini-levels the game has to learn a new skill at your own pace. If you've skipped it already, it's worth revisiting if you ever find yourself stuck at any point in the game.

Adjust Your Campaign Settings to Your Liking

Once you've hit the single-player or multiplayer option in the main menu you'll be prompted to determine the rules of your freshly made world. There's no wrong way to play Factorio so if you want to make resources such as iron and copper more abundant, you should.

You have a plethora of options here to play around with. Just move the sliders to the right to increase the volume or spawn rates. Luckily, the same goes for enemies. If the idea of your base getting attacked is too stressful feel free to turn on peaceful mode.

Peaceful Mode will not remove enemies from the map, but it will stop them from expanding and attacking the base. They will only defend their home if you come to attack.

There are more advanced options to mess around with, but ignore those for now and after you become a pro at Factorio, you can revisit those for a new playthrough.

Dismantle Your Spaceship

Factorio begins with your ship crash-landing on this new planet. Walk up to all of the disparate parts of the crash and hold the right mouse button to dismantle each piece. Not only will this give you more space if the ship is on a resource vein, but you will also get some free Iron plates which will be incredibly useful early on for building some drills.

Search For Coal, Iron, and Stone

The two starting resources you'll want to be on the lookout for are Coal and Iron. Coal will power your machines longer than wood will, letting you spend more time building other pipelines for production without having to micromanage constantly. Iron is one of the leading materials in Factorio – almost everything you need to build will use Iron as a base component in some way.

Depending on the settings you've chosen for your world, it might be hard to find both close together, but it's worth searching around before settling down.

Stone is a resource you will need to build a Stone Furnace, which is instrumental in smelting Iron Ore into Iron plates. These are used for countless recipes. If you find Iron but not coal, you can make use of nearby forests for the wood until you can build conveyor belts to shuttle coal nearby.

How to Gather Resources

Gathering resources early on in Factorio is a bit of a chore. You can't just automate everything from the start. You will need to mine a lot by hand at first. Anytime you see a tree, rock, or resources to mine walk over and hold the right mouse button. This will begin to harvest the resource manually. You do not need a special tool or recipe to do this.

So, if you're strapped for resources early on just hold down the button to mine manually for a bit until you can begin to craft some automation.

How to Craft

To craft recipes in Factorio you will need to hit the E key to open the crafting menu. From here, on the right side you will see recipes you have access to, and on the left side will be your current inventory. Early on you'll mainly be focused on crafting Mining Drills, which can be placed on resources veins such as Iron, Coal, or Copper.

If you hover your mouse over the recipe you're looking to craft, it will tell you the required resources needed to build the item. If you have everything needed, simply click on the recipe and it will begin automatically crafting it. It will then put the item directly into your inventory.

Mining Drills, for instance, will require iron plates, which can only be made by putting Iron Ore into a Furnace. A Furnace can be built with stone, which is another resource vein you'll need to find. Stone Ore is determined by its yellow color on the ground, while Iron is silver, and Coal is black.

Item Placement

When placing an item from your inventory such as a Mining Drill or Furnace all you need to do is hit the E key to open your inventory, click on the item you wish to place, and place it anywhere the item is highlighted green.

If the item is highlighted red this means something is obstructing its path, or it does not meet the requirements to be placed in that location. An Offshore Pump, for example, can only be placed next to a body of water.

Item placement is extremely important to running an efficient factory. However, don't be too precious about where you place your items at first. Part of Factorio is learning what works best for your world, and what works best at first might not work at all as you expand. So, you should always be moving things around to fit your current objective!

Tips

• Use the Alt Key to see what is inside containers, furnaces, and machines at a glance.
• Items can be dragged onto your quick bar at the bottom of the screen.
• The 0 Key will remove whatever you're holding.
• Don't be afraid to scrap a machine with the right-click button if it's in the wrong position.
• Put a chest next to a Mining Drill to collect the resources in bulk.
• Try to stay near water if possible for when you get the ability to use Steam Power.
• Always be producing Iron and Copper. You will never have enough.