Factorio Beginner Guide: How to Survive Your First 10 Hours

Factorio starts you on Nauvis with a stone furnace, a burner drill, and a planet full of bugs that hate noise. The first ten hours decide the shape of everything after. Get the opening right and the factory grows in lines you can actually read. Get it wrong and you spend a weekend ripping out belts while biters chew on your steam plant. The order below keeps plates flowing and keeps the locals bored.

Starting Resources and Initial Base Placement

You need four solid resources close to spawn before anything else matters: iron ore, copper ore, coal, and stone. Iron looks blue-gray, copper runs orange, coal is black, stone is pale. A lake nearby is the fifth requirement, since your first electricity comes from pumping water into boilers. Crude oil and uranium can wait. You won't touch either inside ten hours.

Check the spawn before you commit

If one of those four is missing, or the patches sit a long walk apart, hit Escape and choose Restart. You get a fresh map and lose nothing but the seed. People reroll three or four times hunting a comfortable start, and that's a reasonable way to spend two minutes.

Open the map with M and hover the patches to see what's in them. Richness counts for more than size early on, because a medium patch beside your furnaces beats a huge one three screens out.

Red dots on the map are biter nests. You want a belt of open ground between your base and the nearest one, since your pollution cloud spreads as the factory grows, and nests sitting inside the cloud send raids. Forest helps a little here. Trees soak up part of the drifting cloud before it reaches them.

A detail that trips people up: trees can only shrink the cloud that triggers attacks. The evolution that makes biters grow comes from pollution produced at the machine itself, and nothing absorbs that part. Cleaner-looking surroundings don't slow the bugs down.

Where to put the base

A few rules save a lot of rebuilding:

• Build somewhere with room to spread in at least two directions. Starter bases look tiny on day one and sprawl fast.
• Keep belts, chests, and machines off ore patches you'll want later. Anything placed on ore blocks the drill that would use those tiles, and tearing up a furnace array to mine under it is miserable.
• Put smelting near the iron, with a gap between it and everything else. Furnace lines grow longer than anything else you build this early.
• Face the water. Your power plant goes there eventually, and a long pipe run is a pointless hassle.

Press ALT before placing anything. Detailed view shows the little yellow arrow on each drill (where the ore comes out), recipe icons on machines, and the fluid connections on boilers and steam engines. Turn it on once and leave it on. Pretty much everyone does.

The classic opening is one burner drill feeding one stone furnace on iron, with the drill's output arrow pointed straight into the furnace. Copy that setup for copper, coal, and stone. Four drills, four furnaces, and the automation loop has started. Each drill needs coal dropped in by hand for now, so keep a stack in your pocket and top them up while you scout the area.

Building Your First Power and Mining Setup

The first stretch of the game runs on coal shoved into machines by hand. It's clunky and it doesn't last. Your whole job in this phase is making your own hands unnecessary, as fast as you can manage it.

The burner phase

Two tricks kill most of the hand-feeding. Put two coal drills facing each other on the coal patch, and each one fuels the other from its own output while the surplus piles up for you to grab. And grab it the lazy way: Ctrl plus left click on a machine takes its whole contents without opening the window.

The speeds worth memorizing, straight off the official wiki:

| Machine | Job | Rate | | --- | --- | --- | | Burner mining drill | pulls ore | 0.25 per second (15 a minute) | | Electric mining drill | pulls ore | 0.5 per second (30 a minute) | | Stone furnace | smelts plates | 0.3125 per second (about 19 a minute) | | Steel furnace | smelts plates | 0.625 per second (about 38 a minute) | | Yellow transport belt | carries items | 15 per second, both lanes |

The useful bit is the ratio buried in that table. One electric drill at 0.5 a second keeps 1.6 stone furnaces fed, since each furnace smelts 0.3125 a second. Two drills to three furnaces is close enough and easy to remember. Belt capacity is a non-issue for ages, too: one yellow belt moves 15 items a second, which is the full output of 30 electric drills.

Steam power, and the one ratio that matters

Electricity starts with an offshore pump sitting in a lake, boilers burning coal, and steam engines turning that steam into power. The wiki numbers: a boiler converts 1.8 MW of fuel into steam, and a steam engine consumes 900 kW of steam. One boiler, two engines. That's the whole design.

Build it as a pump feeding a row of boilers, two engines hanging off each one. Water goes into the boiler on a short side, steam comes out of the middle of a long side, and the engine takes steam at the middle of its short side. Getting these connections wrong is the number one reason a first power plant produces nothing, so press ALT and follow the arrows.

If you've read older guides, forget the 1 pump to 20 boilers to 40 engines ratio they quote. That was before the 2.0 fluid rework. An offshore pump now pushes 1200 water a second and a boiler only drinks 6, so a single pump can supply up to 200 boilers. A starter base never gets anywhere near that. One pump, done.

Run a coal belt along the boiler row with inserters feeding each one. Use burner inserters for the fuel slot if you can spare them. A burner inserter feeds itself off the belt, so it keeps shoveling coal during a blackout, while an electric inserter on a dead grid sits there and lets the boiler starve. That one choice has saved more starter bases than any turret ever will.

Going electric on the drills

With power up, swap burner drills for electric ones, iron first. Each swap doubles your ore rate on the same patch, and the electric drill outputs onto a belt instead of into a single furnace, so you can pull the whole patch back to one smelting area.

Keep an eye on the grid while you add machines. Click any power pole to open the electric network info, and check the satisfaction gauge. Below 100% and you need another boiler and engine pair before the factory turns sluggish. Brownouts in Factorio don't shut things off. They just make everything run slow, which is somehow more annoying.

Research Priorities for the Early Game

Science in this game is a physical item. You craft red packs, belt them into labs, and the labs eat them. Hand-craft your first lab, place it, and the research that lets you build red packs opens up right there. Everything else follows from that.

The order that works

1. Automation science pack. Unlocked by crafting your first lab. Red packs are made from iron and copper, and they're the currency for everything below.
2. Automation. Unlocks the assembling machine 1. This is where the game changes: machines build parts while you go do something else.
3. Logistic science pack. Green science. Each green pack costs a transport belt and an inserter, so this tech eats iron like crazy.
4. Steel processing. Steel goes into turrets and later into practically everything. The follow-up steel furnace research doubles your smelting speed, 0.625 plates a second against the stone furnace's 0.3125.
5. Gun turret. Cheap, quick, and your first real defense. Pair it with physical projectile damage research, which raises the ammo damage and the turret damage as separate multiplicative bonuses, so levels there add up faster than they look.

After those five, fill in around whatever actually hurts. Labs sitting idle? More pack production. Assemblers starving? More iron, again. The tech tree rewards fixing bottlenecks far more than it rewards marching down a fixed list.

Keeping the labs fed

Start with two labs. Research speed scales with how many labs you have chewing through packs, and labs are mostly iron, so a third and fourth come cheap once smelting is rolling. Belt your packs in with an inserter rather than carrying stacks by hand, same as everything else.

Two details people learn late. Green packs take about 6 seconds to craft against roughly 5 for red, so green needs more assemblers to keep pace. And a lab running a two-pack technology consumes equal numbers of each pack, so your slowest line sets the pace for every research. Build green capacity a little heavy and you'll stay even.

What to skip for now

Military science, oil processing, advanced electronics. All three are mid-game projects, and starting them early tends to leave you with a half-built refinery and no plates to finish it. Ten hours in, doubling your iron smelting for the third time will carry you further than touching any of those.

Defending Against Early Biter Attacks

Biters attack because pollution reaches their nests, for no other reason. A nest sitting inside your cloud absorbs that pollution and starts mustering groups, and every 1 to 10 minutes one of those groups walks toward whatever produced it. The map view has a pollution overlay you can switch on if you want to watch the cloud creep. Most people just leave distance as a buffer instead.

What shows up, and when

The enemies you face come from a hidden number called the evolution factor, and it only ever goes up. Thresholds from the wiki:

| Evolution | New enemy | Health | Damage | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | From the start | Small biter | 15 | 7 | | 20% | Medium biter | 75 | 15 | | 25% | Small spitter | 10 | 12 acid | | 30% | Medium spitter | 50 | 24 acid | | 50% | Big biter (spitters too) | 375 | 30 | | 90% | Behemoths | 3000 | 90 |

Small biters die easily to your starting pistol. Medium biters carry physical resistance and shrug off basic ammo, which is roughly when everyone wishes they'd researched bullet damage. Past that you want real turrets behind real walls.

Three things push the number up: time passing, pollution produced, and nests you destroy. The wiki gives exact equivalents, and they line up neatly. One spawner killed is worth about 2222 pollution produced. Eight minutes and twenty seconds of game time is worth the same. And a kill early counts for more than a kill late, since each increase gets scaled down as evolution climbs, a spawner at the start of a run adds 0.002 while the same kill at 50% evolution adds a quarter of that. So clearing nests in hour one is the most expensive evolution you can accidentally buy. Take nests when they're in the way or inside your cloud, not for sport.

Where does a normal starter base land? A boiler puts out 30 pollution a minute, an electric drill 10, a stone furnace 2. Four boilers, ten drills, and twenty furnaces produce around 260 a minute before you count assemblers, and the time factor adds roughly 267 more in equivalent terms. Over ten hours that's a bit over 300k total, which sits just past the 278k the wiki lists for 20% evolution. In other words, on default settings your tenth hour is about when medium biters start showing up. Have the turrets built before then.

The turret line

A gun turret has 400 health, 18 tiles of range, fires 10 rounds a second, and needs no electricity. Inserters load magazines onto it from a belt, up to 10 magazines per turret, and firearm magazines hold 10 rounds each. A few turrets burn through ammo shockingly fast, so belt the ammo in rather than hauling stacks by hand.

Layout matters more than turret count. Put a stone wall line in front and the turrets right behind it. Walls have less health than turrets but strong damage resistance, so the bugs spend ages chewing while the guns behind shoot. Biters path around obstacles when there's a clear way through and chew straight through when there isn't, and once they get near any military structure they prioritize it. That last part is why a lone turret scattered deep in your base is worse than a proper perimeter: a perimeter tells the fight where it's allowed to happen.

If this all sounds heavy for a first game, the world generation screen has your back. Peaceful mode stops biters attacking unless you attack first, and the enemy frequency and size sliders go down as far as you like. Nothing wrong with that for run one. The factory doesn't care how you got there.

Common Rookie Mistakes That Wreck Your Base

Hand-crafting as a career

Your character crafts one item at a time from a queue, and the queue is slow. Every hour you spend clicking gears into existence is an hour the assemblers could have handled. The moment Automation finishes, put assembling machines on anything you use constantly: gears, belts, inserters, ammo. Hand-crafting is for the first half hour and the odd panic build.

Building tight

Every new player builds a compact little base and then spends the rest of the run fighting it. Belts get crossed, furnaces get boxed in, and there's no room for the next smelting row. Space in Factorio is free. Leave gaps between production groups big enough to thread a belt through later, and treat your starter base as disposable, because it is. Most players eventually start a second, organized base with grouped production or a main bus, and the old area gets demoted to a place that makes belts.

Not enough iron

The wiki's own quick start guide says it plainly: you'll want twice as many miners on iron as on copper, possibly more. Iron becomes gears, belts, inserters, machines, walls, ammo, and science packs. New bases stall for want of iron far more often than for any other reason. When in doubt, more iron smelting.

Letting the power grid sag

Steam engines don't fail loudly. They just deliver less, machines run slow, inserters crawl, and research limps along at half speed while you wonder why. Click a power pole and check satisfaction whenever you drop a chunk of new machines. Anything under 100% means another boiler and engine pair, so build a spare set ahead of a big expansion.

Clearing nests before you can hold the ground

The math from the defense section, applied: each spawner you kill early is worth about 2222 pollution in evolution terms, and it counts more the earlier you do it. Wiping the three nests nearest your base in hour two buys you medium biters that much sooner. Clear ground when you need the space or the ore, and do it behind an existing turret line.

Placing stuff on ore

Said already, but it wrecks people. Buildings and belts sit on ore tiles until you physically remove them, and the patch you built over in hour two is usually the best one within walking distance. Check what's under your feet before you drop a chest.

No ammo before the first real raid

The first group of medium biters has a gift for arriving the exact day you're elbow-deep in your first refinery. Turrets without magazines are lawn decorations. Automate firearm magazines early, belt them to the wall, and keep a personal stack for the walk home.

Come out of hour ten with electric drills on iron, a boiler row feeding a wall of engines, green science running, and turrets fed by belt, and you're set up better than most first runs ever get. The next wall you'll hit is oil. Deal with that when it shows up.